indie
West End
The mob drama may be played out, but that doesn’t stop writer/director Joe Basile from taking a crack at the all too familiar genre. West End takes place in New Jersey, a fact the film repeatedly likes to mention throughout. Vic Trevi (Neal Bledsoe) returns home after his father Victor (Eric Roberts), a mobster out Read More
Premature
If comedic Hollywood has anything to say about it, sex, and its pursuit, is pretty much all the average teenager has going on in life. What’s unfortunate for all those producing films for the teen comedy genre is that vulgarity envelope pushing seems to be par for the course (10 points for two idioms back-to-back). Whereas teen comedies Read More
Cinemanovels
In the world of Cinemanovels, the name John Laurentian stands next to famous directors like Bergman and Antonioni. When the film opens the fictional Quebecois filmmaker is dead, and his estranged daughter Grace (Lauren Lee Smith) is handling his affairs. After hearing about plans to program a retrospective of her father’s work, Grace unexpectedly volunteers Read More
Boyhood
With last year’s Before Midnight being clearly one of the best of 2013 (at least in our opinion), it would seem Richard Linklater, whose films can be somewhat hit or miss (Me and Orson Welles was a bit more on the miss side), is reaching some kind of maturation. Like a fine wine. It would Read More
Forev
A lighthearted romantic comedy with few surprises, Forev is the sort of film that does little more than induce a smile. The film opens with Sophie (Noël Wells of recent SNL fame) drunkenly stumbling into her neighbor Pete’s (Matt Mider) apartment with a man she’s just picked up. In this moment, we see more of her Read More
Whitey: United States of America Vs. James J. Bulger
The opening to Joe Berlinger’s latest documentary is the format’s biggest staple: the talking head. Stephen Rakes, a mom-and-pop liquor storeowner and one of James Bulger’s extortion victims, recalls the night Bulger instilled the fear of death into him. Berlinger’s camera feels restless even when it’s stationary and, with spot on close-ups and editing, the Read More
Borgman
The unpredictable mechanics of evil have rarely been as captivating as they are in Alex Van Warmerdam’s Borgman. Premiering last year at Cannes, our very own Dustin Jansick saw it during his coverage of the festival (read his initial thoughts here) and was, unsurprisingly, compelled by its strangeness. Having finally seen public release earlier this Read More
Bad Words
Perhaps in an effort to shake his typical “good guy” role, Jason Bateman plays a foul-mouthed asshole in his directorial debut Bad Words. Most comedies can get by with a weak storyline as long as there’s enough laugh-out-loud moments. Unfortunately, Bad Words is neither clever nor funny. While it tries very hard to be funny, Read More
Me and You
Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci hadn’t made a film in about a decade before his latest movie Me and You screened out of competition at 2012 Cannes Film Festival; however, the new film is far more contained than the sweeping and at times controversial filmography of Bertolucci’s past. Me and You, or Io e te in Read More
