Midway through The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, in the midst of a breakdown (breakthrough?), surrounded by his typewriter and empty bottles and strewn about pages, signifiers of talent devolving into madness, the successful yet troubled novelist at its center self-consciously admits to having recently written only “first lines and first pages. No middle. No end.”…
The Strangers: Prey at Night opens in the late afternoon with two parents preparing the minivan for a trip to take their daughter to boarding school. As Mike (Martin Henderson, “Everest”) loads suitcases into the back, Cindy (Christina Hendricks, “The Neon Demon”) knocks softly on the door frame and tells her daughter, Kinsey (Bailee Madison,…
I enjoyed writer/director Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits well enough at first. Yet as my chronological distance from the project increases, so too do my annoyances with its gender power dynamics. The film follows six very specific Brooklynites whose lives are vaguely intertwined and then thrown into further disarray when a young, beautiful Australian disrupts…
Directed by Shaul Schwarz (“Aida’s Secrets”) and Christina Clusiau, Trophy is a riveting but often difficult to watch documentary which examines the issue of trophy hunting and species preservation from the point of view of hunters, breeders, farmers, and wildlife conservationists. The subject became a leading news story in June 2015 when Minnesota dentist Walter…
Jigsaw starts as a man runs from police to the roof of an abandoned warehouse where he finds a detonator marked by an X behind a beam. In the standoff that follows, he shouts that five people are going to die if Detective Halloran (Callum Keith Rennie, “Fifty Shades Freed”) isn’t brought to the scene…
It is fitting that there are two competing readings of François Ozon’s Double Lover. The film dually presents as a highly stylized, seductively sleek French psychosexual thriller and this “I Know Who Killed Me”-esque overtly overly symbolic camp. Not wanting to assign one dominance over the other or perhaps unable to distinguish between apparent equals,…
Despite being a relatively well-made, exceedingly well-acted film, Submission has a litany of significant and fundamental flaws that simply cannot be ignored. Written and directed by Richard Levine, the film is based on Francine Prose’s novel Blue Angel, and tells the tale of Ted Swenson (Stanley Tucci, “Transformers: Age of Extinction”), an author and creative…
