Generally, part of the charm of international cinema is that it’s specifically and obviously not Hollywood cinema. So when something like the Norwegian disaster drama The Wave tries so desperately and artlessly to ape similarly themed Hollywood blockbusters, there’s a sense of overwhelmingly suffocating futility that plagues the project. Of course, if The Wave actually…
Ok, so this means not to be a partisan review, OK? Yes, it means to broach its subject from a reasonable, logical standpoint. Yes, it in no way wills to oversee the bear gut and occasional sentimentality of the film it sets to look at. Yes, it wants to talk about current issues while taking…
First-time director Paul Dalio’s Touched with Fire, originally titled “Mania Days,” is an honest attempt to provide insight into the illness commonly known as bipolar disorder. The film depicts how two young poets are compelled to battle parents, doctors, and the cultural consensus to maintain their relationship which is considered dangerous by the community because…
In a trailer commentary video that can be viewed on IMDb, Robert Eggers, writer and director of The Witch, explains that what he set out to accomplish with his debut film was to transport twenty-first century viewers back to the seventeenth, to a time when “the real world and the fairy tale world were the…
I, for one, never thought there could ever be a more sarcastic super hero than Spider-Man, but boy, was I mistaken. Tim Miller, in his directorial debut (although he was creative supervisor on “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”) finally finishes up, Deadpool, a concept nearly eight years in the can. Deadpool, a character created by…
Some romantic comedies can be conventional in nature and not really want to invest in anything substantive beyond the familiar follow-the-dots formula of lightweight lunacy. In director Christian Ditter’s romantic romp How to be Single the gloves come off and are thrown in an entirely different direction. Sure, one can applaud Ditter for not hanging any…
Love has an incredible ability to warm and soothe the soul (fireplaces can do that, too!) and it’s interesting to find stories of unexpected romances set in different times and spaces. It can present the illusion of freshness for a tale as old as fuzzy cucumber slices underneath a car seat. But the illusion is…
