Have you ever succumbed to a frightening dream or twisted fantasy where your life slowly falls apart before your own eyes? Well what would happen when you mix these feelings of insecurity with a quelling desperation to mend the bridges that you’ve burned along the way? The answer just may come in the form of…
Damsels in Distress is perhaps the most pretentious screenplay ever filmed. I imagine there was a more comprehensible first draft and then writer/director Whit Stillman (“The Last Days of Disco”) pulled the thesaurus off the shelf and went to work. These damsels come across more as ridiculous caricatures than actual flesh and blood characters; nobody…
The title of Lars von Trier’s latest film refers to a rogue planet, significantly dwarfing our Earth and heading for it on an inevitable collision course. von Trier sets the countdown to extinction among a wealthy family holed up in a storybook castle, inhabited largely by two sisters, one a force of depressive nature and…
20th century author and poet, Raymond Carver, is oftentimes recognized for his impact on short story writing. In the 1980s, when the medium first began to falter, short stories had become a tough sell for publications because of their briefness, however, that did not stop the author, who had admitted to being “inclined to brevity…
If you’ve seen “Antichrist” or “Dogville,” you know Lars von Trier is an artistic director who does not shy away from deep, dark, bleak, and generally very unsettling subject matter. The trailer for his latest, Melancholia, doesn’t say either way, but you can get a sense of what may come: Due to a freak planetary…
If you attended the Toronto International Film Festival or the London Film Festival last year you would have caught a viewing of the comedy-drama Everything Must Go. For those of us who didn’t attend either, this fresh trailer provides a glimpse into Nick Halsey’s really crappy situation. In a single day he’s lost his job,…
