The end of the world is a lonely proposition in Lluís Quílez’s grim 30-minute short Graffiti, about a single survivor in a post-apocalyptic city who wanders around the shell of an empty apartment complex with his dog in search of food, people, anything. Edgar (Oriol Pla, “Year of Grace”) doesn’t have a lot to live…
Passengers, the newest Sony Pictures (Village Roadshow) release, directed by Morten Tyldum (“The Imitation Game”), is a visually stunning outer space adventure with a very good cast (Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Andy Garcia and Laurence Fishburne) that fails to lift off due to an earth-bound, cliché-ridden script. That last item can be blamed…
The devastating, sharp The Anatomy of Monsters is the kind of movie that lures one into thinking it’s yet another exploitative woman-in-peril movie only to pivot into a seedy, multilayered labyrinth. Aside from an ineffectual first ten minutes, the movie is a solid — if somewhat claustrophobic — thriller. The film begins with Andrew (Jesse…
I’m thinking of a movie. It stars a man and a woman struggling against the elements to survive a vast, empty, lonesome, and perilous environment on their journey home. Oh, and it’s directed by someone with the last name of Cuarón. Anyone care to take a guess? If you guessed “Gravity,” you’d be correct. But…
In a scene near the end of Downhill, a scowly, bald-headed ruffian mutters, “What a waste” just before blowing someone’s head off. The statement could also serve as an unfortunate slogan for the movie itself: An interesting premise and a gorgeous setting undermined by spotty writing and hysterical overacting. It’s almost bad enough to someday…
ClownTown is definitely not a movie for all you coulrophobics out there. It is, after all, a movie about killer clowns, and they’re not even from outer space this time. There’s no humor to be found here either, because they’re, well, killer clowns. It’s intended to be a scary, scary film, and it largely succeeds….
Gorgeous colors and graceful poetic images mark The Red Turtle (La tortue rouge), a wordless 80-minute animated film co-produced by the famed Japanese Studio Ghibli and Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit. Made in France, the dialogue-free film was produced by Takahata Isao and co-written by French director Pascale Ferran whose 2014 film “Bird People”…
