“Sometimes, rules are meant to be, well not necessarily broken, but certainly bent — and definitely reinterpreted; don’t you think?,” says Baloo to a bee-stung Mowgli as the man-cub angrily makes his way to the man-village where, as his sage mentor Bagheera has indicated, he must go back to if he wants to avoid a…
The increasing number of recent films featuring stories of Christian faith or history (“God’s Not Dead 2,” “Miracles from Heaven,” “Risen,” just to name a few) hearken back to the days when Biblical films ruled the motion picture landscape. From 1953’s “The Robe” to 1956’s “The Ten Commandments” and “Friendly Persuasion” to the grand-daddy of…
Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote that hell is other people. Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s 1975 novel takes this premise to its (il)logical conclusion, as, in an ironic twist on the title, High-Rise depicts a steady descent into class war-induced delirium, as social and financial divisions steadily turn the eponymous building…
Parents are beings anonymously bestowed with the responsibility of protecting their children from their own fears. Fear is thus transmitted and embedded into the habits and reflexes that follow all kids till, and if, they grow to parent their own offspring . . . and on and on it goes. That’s all part and parcel…
Every now and then, Hollywood suffers from fatigue — the hot new thing that catches everyone’s attention and is insanely popular gets reproduced over and over and over until it’s everywhere, and everyone loves it even more . . . until they don’t. Then, there are the last few gasps of a trend until it…
First-time director Paul Dalio’s Touched with Fire, originally titled “Mania Days,” is an honest attempt to provide insight into the illness commonly known as bipolar disorder. The film depicts how two young poets are compelled to battle parents, doctors, and the cultural consensus to maintain their relationship which is considered dangerous by the community because…
Some romantic comedies can be conventional in nature and not really want to invest in anything substantive beyond the familiar follow-the-dots formula of lightweight lunacy. In director Christian Ditter’s romantic romp How to be Single the gloves come off and are thrown in an entirely different direction. Sure, one can applaud Ditter for not hanging any…
