“Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young, nor weary of the search for it when he has grown old. For, no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.” — Epicurus Filled with dream and fantasy sequences in the tradition of the great Italian director…
Cinema as a mode of fabricated observation can be fascinating because, unless instructed to do so, the camera doesn’t judge. This is the key to entering Patrick Vollrath’s powerful domestic drama Everything Will Be Okay, which chronicles a divorced father’s initially fun day out with his daughter during which life-altering decisions are made. The movie…
“What’s in a name?” asked Romeo in the whirling voice of William Shakespeare to a Juliet whose smell was as sweet as roses. Difficult to say what’s in it. Doubtless it is essential, whether to what the thing is, to what it turns out to be or just as our means to refer to it….
Heartstrings are tugged quite relentlessly in Lee Whittaker’s hyperbolically dark and dingy drama Catching Fireflies, but perhaps to touching effect. Whittaker has some very slick tools in his filmmaking arsenal and so he successfully crams a lot of style and technically ambitious tricks into the compact 19 minute running time, while convincingly depicting the hellishly…
Making a movie that feels both realistic and satisfyingly entertaining is not an easy thing to do. In fact, the notion of producing a film that feels entirely true to life is almost antithetical to the cinematic framework. Life is often uncomfortable, random, ambiguous and inconsequential — traits that could understandably be seen as detriments…
San Andreas stars Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson (although ‘The Rock’ is no longer a necessary addition to his name to know who he is) as admirable Search and Rescue helicopter pilot Ray Gaines. He’s the kind of person you want to have around when a pickle jar can’t be opened or when the largest magnitude…
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is famed film director Isao Takahata’s first movie in 15 years. A labor of love that’s been eight years in the making, it draws inspiration from the 10th century tale “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter,” one of Japan’s oldest surviving narratives about a girl who magically comes to…
