After helming the disastrously unfunny “Dirty Grandpa,” director Dan Mazer returns with a more quiet and small-scale comedy than his tenure in shocking and gross-out humor. Mazer is mostly known for his Academy Award-winning “Borat” screenplay, and his collaborations with Sacha Baron Cohen are the funniest things he’s ever done. In The Exchange, he and…
The mission brief to Ghosts of War is simple: Five American soldiers must defend a chateau in 1944 Normandy, that, as luck would have it, is apparently haunted. Sadly, however, this trope-laden plot is the only pillar of stability in an incomprehensible mess of a film, which burns like a ragged bullet-wound to the stomach….
“And you will look with open eyes, And see the world clear, And when your crying is dried up, Then you will feel your heart, And know a new and deeper love” — Alexi Murdoch There are no men in Céline Sciamma’s (“Girlhood”) Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en…
Waiting for Anya, directed by Ben Cookson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Toby Torlesse, is a film that falls within a popular World War II sub-genre that focuses on a local conflict between German occupiers and French non-combatants, typically set away from the civilian centers that suffered crushing horror, destruction, and death. Based on a…
Interestingly, it is the audience who seems to be the ones getting hustled in director Chris Addison’s forgettable feminine con-artist comedy, The Hustle. In it, Oscar winner Anne Hathaway (“Les Misérables”) and funny fireball Rebel Wilson (“Isn’t It Romantic”) are paired as a couple of cute scammers looking to manipulate the finances out of clueless…
For a film ostensibly about people in the throes of existential crises, the characters in Under the Eiffel Tower still make a show of enjoying life’s simple pleasures. But not even classic romantic comedy clichés, the beautiful French landscape, market day montages, plates of good food, glasses of better wine, parties al fresco, acoustic guitar…
Waiting For You, the directorial debut of Charles Garrad, screened at the Norwich Film Festival in November 2018, followed by a Q&A with the director. Based on an original idea by Garrad and co-writer Hugh Stoddard, Waiting For You tells the story of a young man investigating the life of his father after the death…
