The Devil does many things in movies. He rides out, he has a brigade, he hangs out with Miss Jones and Daniel Webster, and he even thumbs a ride. And, apparently, he lives in a farmhouse in rural Brazil in the aptly named The Devil Lives Here. (This would be useful information for the local…
The exotically disturbing character-driven Dutch drama Meat (a.k.a. “Vlees”) is most definitely not your old-fashioned grandmother’s tenderloin steak of a sexual psychological thriller. Filmmakers Victor Nieuwenhuijs and Maartje Seyferth (who also is credited as a co-screenwriter along with consultant scriber Stan Lapinski) literally and figuratively leads the wide-eyed lamb to the slaughter in this twisted,…
In Der Bunker, a young student heads to an isolated home to carry out research in solitude. When he arrives, however, he finds that the lake-view home is actually a bunker. That turns out to be the least weird turn of events in the film, a gleefully oddball drama-comedy that seems to crib from both…
Observance is a difficult film to figure out, the kind that makes you wonder not what its creators are intentionally hiding from its characters and viewers, but what they have not yet figured out themselves. While it has more than its fair share of beautiful shots, dramatic hard cuts, and impressive performances, how unclear the…
The found footage approach to low-budget filmmaking has been around long enough to be used in all sorts of fun and clever ways, each attempt toeing the line between committing to the gimmick and admitting it. We’ve witnessed ghostly activity on home surveillance equipment (“Paranormal Activity”) and a giant monster trashing New York on a…
In a small village in Germany, a wolf lurks in the night, searching for food in neighborhood garbage cans, attacking pets, and generally terrorizing those who live there. Lonely, timid, and quiet Jakob Wolski (Michel Diercks), a local police officer, has taken it upon himself to lure the wolf away from people’s homes by buying…
