Heartstrings are tugged quite relentlessly in Lee Whittaker’s hyperbolically dark and dingy drama Catching Fireflies, but perhaps to touching effect. Whittaker has some very slick tools in his filmmaking arsenal and so he successfully crams a lot of style and technically ambitious tricks into the compact 19 minute running time, while convincingly depicting the hellishly…
Everybody is fine in Every Thing Will Be Fine. This is a title that lives up to its expectations. They’re all fine . . . just fine: Actors, cinematographer, production designer, sound mixer, editor, writer . . . filmmaker. And it would be all relatively okay were this not a Wim Wenders’ movie. It’s been…
Opening night at the Spooky Movie International Horror Film Festival, held annually in Silver Spring, Maryland, is always a treat. This year, the opener was The Final Girls, a thriller/comedy that subverts many horror-film conventions — indeed, the very notion of movies themselves. Teenager Max (Taissa Farmiga, “Anna”) happens to be the daughter of the…
“Life can be tragic, but let’s not snivel” — Gustav Mahler Alix Delaporte’s (“Angel & Tony”) The Last Hammer Blow (Le dernier coup de marteau) is the story of 14-year Victor (Romain Paul, in an outstanding debut performance that earned him the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor at the Venice Film Festival) who…
There are two ways that I noticed Goodnight Mommy was trying to unnerve me. First, there’s the image of a thirty-something-year-old woman whose face is wrapped in bandages, which gives her a striking resemblance to The Joker from “The Dark Knight.” Second, there’s this ominous notion that I need to beware all ten-year-old twin boys…
Living in captivity is not so when captivity is everything you know. No cell can be bigger than the one constituting our environment, and when our whole environment consists of a small room, bigger than an average houseroom but smaller than a bachelor apartment, a shedding that has seen your birth and growth, then the…
Making a movie that feels both realistic and satisfyingly entertaining is not an easy thing to do. In fact, the notion of producing a film that feels entirely true to life is almost antithetical to the cinematic framework. Life is often uncomfortable, random, ambiguous and inconsequential — traits that could understandably be seen as detriments…
