The effects of bullying and the pressures to achieve popularity in a high school setting are put under a harsh and unforgiving microscope in director Jonatan Etzler’s dark short Get Ready With Me. Opening with mopey teacher Lukas (Shanti Roney, “Applause”) asking his students to show their video projects to the class, the movie immediately…
Dismissed, in a nutshell, is every teacher’s nightmare made flesh: A psychopathic student seeking revenge because he was given a poor grade (in this case a B+). Sidenote: I wish I could inspire such soaring ambition in my own students. In trying to sell this nightmare, the teacher becomes incredibly stupid. He does asinine things…
There is no doubt that Eric Stoltz’s latest teen feature film Class Rank won’t exactly mirror the classic formula of “Some Kind of Wonderful” — Stoltz’s breakout role back in 1987 — although it borrows the classic scenario that has the leads asking, “Are we just friends? Or could we be more than just friends?”…
Miao Wang’s Maineland is a seemingly straight-forward documentary feature profiling Chinese students — members of the enormous wave of “parachute students” — competing to study abroad in the United States. Filmed over three years in both China and the U.S., the film follows two affluent and cosmopolitan teenagers as they settle into boarding school in…
Despite being a relatively well-made, exceedingly well-acted film, Submission has a litany of significant and fundamental flaws that simply cannot be ignored. Written and directed by Richard Levine, the film is based on Francine Prose’s novel Blue Angel, and tells the tale of Ted Swenson (Stanley Tucci, “Transformers: Age of Extinction”), an author and creative…
For her fun fictionalized memoir of sorts, Greta Gerwig has painted a coming-of-age tale almost entirely in shades of grey. Lady Bird is the writer/director’s gentle, through passionately prickly look at the haze that lies just beyond adolescence, with Saoirse Ronan (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”) playing Christine, the also titular protagonist who must navigate the…
To describe what breed of horror movie Somebody’s Darling is would be a spoiler in itself. Suffice to say, it’s small-scale, slow-burning, strange and sometimes surreal. It’s also very good. The setting is Williamsburg University, in 2006. History student Sarah (Jessa Settle, “Accidentally Engaged”) and her bitchy buddies arrive at a frat party and find…
