“The catastrophic death of a star brings new life to the universe. In order for us to live, a star must die. We are all stardust.” These are the opening lines in Carol Morley’s film Out of Blue, drawing me in like one those documentaries you might see at a science museum or observatory. Images…
In Stray, an orphaned young woman struggles to discover the reasons behind her mother’s death, aided by an indefatigable detective with child-care issues of her own. The plot is also tinged with a bit of the supernatural, which typically would raise this movie a few cuts above your standard police procedural. Instead, the film left…
It feels as if Michael Caine (“Going in Style”) has been making movies like King of Thieves for decades, movies in which is character is so, so old and so, so tired of it all. You’d be tired as well, if you had to work on movies like this. One last score, one last big…
Awakened in the night, young Sophie (Mackenzie Imsand) clutches her teddy bear and peers into the darkness of her room. She hears scary sounds and slips out of bed to investigate. She tiptoes closer to her parents’ bedroom, hearing shrieks and sounds of a struggle. When she reaches for the door handle, her mother suddenly…
Meredith Danluck’s State Like Sleep is one of those films that, despite disguising itself as a slow-burning mystery, reveals its thesis within the first 30 seconds. During a televised press interview, Belgian actor Stefan Delvoe (Michiel Huisman, “The Ottoman Lieutenant”) elaborates on the greater significance of being an actor, a filmmaker, and a person, “We…
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…
A spooky seaman’s tale, The Isle screened at Norwich Film Festival in 2018 with an introduction from co-writer and director Matthew Butler-Hart. Butler-Hart describes the film as influenced by slow-burn horror of the 1970s, and he also spoke about the inspiration for the story — Eilean Shona, an island off the coast of Scotland that…
