Slice-of-life drama is rarely cut so narrowly as it is in Kelly Fyffe-Marshall’s quietly devastating short Haven, about a mother (Tika Simone) and daughter (D’Evina Chatrie) wiling away the hours until a dark secret is suddenly unearthed. This isn’t even a slice; it’s a sliver. The short clocks in at approximately four minutes in total…
“Scribbled, shot and cut by Giorgio Serafini,” read the titles at the end of The Executioners, as Tim Polecat’s jaunty song “Another Word for Hate” bounces on the soundtrack, as if what we just saw was all a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun. But there’s nothing fun about Serafini’s hateful home invasion horror movie. Four twenty-something…
Each time that screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman team up, they create a singular female character that walks onscreen feeling fully formed and armed with lots to say. First it was Ellen Page’s precocious pregnant teen in “Juno,” then it was Charlize Theron’s perpetually perturbed author Mavis Gary in “Young Adult,” and now…
Writer/director/co-producer Deon Taylor (“Meet the Blacks”) oversees Traffik, a disposable mystery-suspense project with all the anticipation and edginess of sitting in traffic on the inner loop of I-495 West outside Washington D.C. His pseudo-tense thriller incorporates all the clichéd conventions imaginable: Pretty people in peril, normally smart people doing dumb things, remote romantic getaway shot…
There is no doubt that Eric Stoltz’s latest teen feature film Class Rank won’t exactly mirror the classic formula of “Some Kind of Wonderful” — Stoltz’s breakout role back in 1987 — although it borrows the classic scenario that has the leads asking, “Are we just friends? Or could we be more than just friends?”…
Many filmgoers became aware of the infamous power grab of Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, a radical leftist group whose legacy included the direct killing (via execution) or indirect (via universal forced labor and food shortages), of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Cambodians in the 1970s (the subject of the film “The…
Ignoring Thomas Wolfe’s observation that “You can’t go home again,” brothers Justin (Justin Benson, “Dementia”) and Aaron Smith (Aaron Moorhead, “Contracted: Phase II”), as an expression of completion, return to a California cult from which they had escaped ten years ago. Written and directed by Benson and Moorhead, The Endless is a low-budget psychological drama…
