Frank & Lola is a pleasant surprise at the end of the year as Oscar season looms ominously in the distance. If adverse to the dreck that usually goes up for the awards, Matthew Ross’s debut is an enjoyable and dark alternative.
Tokens on a coffee table. Tokens on a different one. Tokens on the wall and on the shelves next to the bookcase of an old TV with VHS included. Tokens of a family life that has spanned for years, for decades, for the better part of one century. Portrayals of a timeline that starts and…
If cinematic quirkiness exists on a spectrum that ranges from charming to obnoxiously grating, then surely try-hard rom-com 3rd Street Blackout is pushing towards the latter end. Every character in the movie speaks and acts as though they know they’re in a quirky indie flick, but there’s no meta subtext at work as a result….
A good mystery movie doesn’t necessarily need a great mystery to work, but it certainly helps. So a bad mystery movie with a bland, boring mystery must be pretty damned from the start. That’s where Frank the Bastard finds itself, since despite having a mysterious title and a mysterious premise (a young woman confronts her…
Vampires ain’t cool no more. They used to be so and, as happens to everything trendy, they kind of got old. Then came the whole teenage-sexy-cheesy “Twilight” saga (with every twitched creature it spawned, monstrosities such as “Vampire Academy”) and sucked the genre dry. Vampires thus lost any bit of credibility they had left, and…
