It is clear from the opening scene that The Burying Party, directed by newcomer Richard Weston, is undeniably ambitious — an important narrative about poet Wilfred Owen’s final months during World War I. Its execution, however, is poor. Weston’s independent film runs just an hour long, though the minutes that comprise it feel more laborious…
A reasonable question many people may raise regarding Sobibor, a feature film about the Holocaust in general, and about a particular concentration camp, in particular, is what can it add to our understanding of the nature of the “final solution” by those that perpetrated it, and those that fell victim to it? It’s true that…
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” — Albert Einstein As a boy growing up in Washington Heights, Manhattan, I spent many weekends walking the streets of New York, particularly the Bronx which I walked almost…
Fighting With My Family is a film of weird elements: The city of Norwich, England; wrestling, with all its “fixed but not fake” performances, alternative names and larger than life personalities; a very human and indeed true story of both pursuing and losing out on a dream. Based on the story of Saraya Knight aka…
1974. Amityville, Long Island. The DeFeo family lives in a house called “High Hopes,” although their situation is looking pretty hopeless. Twenty-somethings “Butch” (John Robinson, “Transformers”) and Dawn (Chelsea Ricketts, “More Than Enough”) live under the shadow of an abusive patriarch, Ronnie (Paul Ben-Victor, “Get Hard”), who’s apparently embroiled with some Mafia types. As the…
It feels as if Michael Caine (“Going in Style”) has been making movies like King of Thieves for decades, movies in which is character is so, so old and so, so tired of it all. You’d be tired as well, if you had to work on movies like this. One last score, one last big…
The documentary genre has experienced a bit of a resurgence in 2018 and capitalizing on that, Netflix is swooping in at the start of the year with another original deep-dive of their own, this one concentrated on the events leading up to, making up and resulting from 2017’s Fyre Festival fiasco. And like the organizers…
