“You don’t have to go looking for love when it’s where you come from” — Werner Erhard Isabelle (Juliette Binoche, “Ghost in the Shell”), a divorced fiftyish artist, is attractive, urbane, and highly intelligent but her relationships seem to have a built-in mechanism for self destruction. The men in Isabelle’s life offer her little except…
Slice-of-life drama is rarely cut so narrowly as it is in Kelly Fyffe-Marshall’s quietly devastating short Haven, about a mother (Tika Simone) and daughter (D’Evina Chatrie) wiling away the hours until a dark secret is suddenly unearthed. This isn’t even a slice; it’s a sliver. The short clocks in at approximately four minutes in total…
The problems with Rave Party Massacre begin — but certainly do not end — with its title. For a film that purports to portray a “massacre,” the body count by the time the credits roll is alarmingly small. What makes this titular inconsistency especially strange is the fact that the film actually does deliver on…
With a CRACK! that delivers aural and narrative impact, Red Sparrow lays out its cards early on. This CRACK! occurs during a ballet and highlights a key tension of such a performance — any mistake can be disastrous. In this case, the incident involving the CRACK! does prove devastating and foreshadows the ruin to come….
The word allure is defined as the quality of being powerfully and mysteriously attractive or fascinating. In the film Allure, formerly titled “A Worthy Companion,” Laura (Evan Rachel Wood, “The Ides of March”) fascinatingly conveys both power and mystery. We first glimpse her inviting a random man into her home and into her bed. With…
And with that, the war on Valentine’s Day is over. It took two films, but finally Christian (Jamie Dornan, “Anthropoid”) shows off the smarts they said made him capable of running a company: Using just one ring rather than many cables to bind his love, Anastasia (Dakota Johnson, “How to Be Single”). Fifty Shades Freed…
In Monogamish, director Tao Ruspoli (“Being in the World”) explores the benefits and constraints of the union of marriage while grappling with his own public divorce. The film — part documentary, part self-help journey — opens with Ruspoli penning a letter to relationship and sex columnist Dan Savage. The camera captures Ruspoli as he hand…
