News Vendor: “I’m leaving.” Gordon: “Why?” News Vendor: “I found out I’m Jewish.” Gordon: “But you fought in the war.” News Vendor: “Tell it to the person that threw a rock at my window.” Gordon: “This is Budapest.” Budapest Noir, directed by Éva Gárdos (“American Rhapsody”) transports us to the Budapest of 1936. Zsigmond Gordon…
One of the main aims of a whodunnit mystery movie is to ensure that the audience doesn’t guess who done it, so by that metric, London Fields misses its mark entirely. It’s the rare movie that plays its cards so early that anyone paying even a sliver of attention during the first two minutes can…
There are many levels to Erik Kristopher Myers’ deeply satisfying horror film Butterfly Kisses, which is more an exploration of authorship and authenticity than it is a straightforward found footage flick. To be honest, the horror element is probably its weakest — bluntly effective jump scares are all we get. But then, visceral thrills are…
The Nun, the fifth film in “The Conjuring” Universe, is a hugely flawed and underwhelming horror film that’s both plodding and formulaic. While the film, Corin Hardy’s sophomore directorial effort following 2015’s “The Hallow,” boasts convincing performances from scream queen Taissa Farmiga (“The Final Girls”) and Demián Bichir (“Alien: Covenant”), it fails to leverage its…
Chris Weitz, director of “American Pie” and co-writer on last year’s “The Mountain Between Us,” delivers a watchable and important effort in Operation Finale, depicting the capture and extradition of Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann. It’s a well-intentioned take on one of the ugliest personalities of the 20th century. Yet, its middling characterization and preference for…
Lives online, lives offline. Activities that only happen because web cameras connect us to an anonymous multitude. What happens online may stay online, or overlap with the “real world.” What happens when a person is one thing on the Internet and another in the outside world? The questions around such alternative lives are pressing concerns…
Though the story has been told before (again recently in the New York Post of June 24th), seeing how three young lives were damaged in the name of scientific research turns the story from an interesting read into a visceral and ultimately heartbreaking experience. Tim Wardle’s (“One Killer Punch”) investigative documentary Three Identical Strangers traces…
