“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” — John Keats While it is generally agreed that imagination plays a prominent role in artistic creation, it is apparent to all but some academics and literary biographers with a particular agenda, that art cannot exist…
For a film with a tantalizing title like Velvet Buzzsaw, it sure is disappointing. What a shame. The talented cast, with the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal (“Stronger”), Rene Russo (“Thor:The Dark World”), Toni Collette (“Hereditary”) and a criminally underutilized John Malkovich (“Warm Bodies”), try their best to salvage the poorly thought-out narrative. However, it is…
Reinert Kiil is the Norwegian director responsible for the sort-of-okay slasher “Christmas Blood” (“Juleblod”). If that film was a brooding modernization of “Silent Night, Deadly Night” then The House (“Huset”) must be his re-imagining of “The Conjuring.” On the surface it’s an interesting new twist on the familiar, demon-possessed madhouse setup. Two Nazi soldiers are…
Much like the immediate outlook of its unlucky characters, the details are stark in Arctic. In Joe Penna’s pulls-no-punches survivalist drama, the seemingly skyscraper-sized “SOS” carved out in deep snow; the remains of a grounded, battered plane that looks like it’s flown through hell and back; and the pop of red of a winter coat…
In Stray, an orphaned young woman struggles to discover the reasons behind her mother’s death, aided by an indefatigable detective with child-care issues of her own. The plot is also tinged with a bit of the supernatural, which typically would raise this movie a few cuts above your standard police procedural. Instead, the film left…
In comparison, the western world’s absurd fascination with social media, online celebrity/fandom, and socioeconomic gain in virtual reality seems to take a noticeable backseat to the immense obsession that is China’s ultra-live streaming epidemic. Filmmaker Hao Wu’s tellingly spry and insightful documentary People’s Republic of Desire is an involving expose of this technological addiction gone…
Piggybacking on the commercial (if not critical) success of other overstuffed vignette-driven holiday-centric movies such as “Love, Actually,” “Valentine’s Day,” and “New Year’s Eve,” Berlin, I Love You is the fourth installment in the “Cities of Love” franchise. This iteration, like those lovingly set in Paris, New York and Rio previously, follows way too many…
