Frank is a man of many walls. He’s been building them for as long as he can remember, but it was only during his early teens that he actually got his first one made by his dad for a costume party that never was. Frank wears a big papier-mâché head over his mask — a…
She enters in a swan boat to a meager audience barely populating the struggling studio wherein her talk show is being recorded and aired for the first time. Her is she. She is me. Me is Alice Klieg. Alice is a Californian divorcee in her early 40’s who has been fighting against mental illness for…
The unimaginable horror of school shootings has been the subject of several searing cinematic works to date, so anytime a filmmaker steps into the terrifying fray, it seems imperative that they’re aware of what others have done before them. Tim McCann’s White Rabbit appears to begin rather naively in that respect. As the young director…
Realizing that she can no longer play the roles she played when she was twenty, the now forty-year-old European actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche, “Godzilla”) faces the consequences of the passage of time. Nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2014, Olivier Assayas’ (“Something in the Air”) Clouds of Sils Maria explores the life…
It is not hard to figure out where St. Vincent, the latest Bill Murray vehicle for comic grouchiness, is headed, but director Theodore Melfi makes you want to jump aboard and go along for the ride anyway. Murray isn’t exactly cuddly but, you know, every saint has some sinner-like traits. Murray, as Vincent, the next-door…
Suicide is no laughing matter. Neither is A Long Way Down, a movie that uses it as a jumping off point to bring together four people whose individual plights are supposed to draw sympathy and whose differences when combined are supposed to create laughable conflict. Of course, it’s not a comedy in the strictest sense,…
Although Expecting is advertised as a comedy drama, it’s undeniably much more of a drama, with the occasional laugh thrown in. This format is not necessarily problematic within itself, but when it comes packaged in such a joyful poster, it invariably comes as a bit of a curve ball to suddenly be faced with so…
