Category Archives: Film

Retrospective screenings are always a dicey proposition for a film festival. With your audience always hungry for the latest and the greatest bringing in old titles can be a sure fire way to bleed money at the box office. If your audience isn’t already familiar with the title they’ll generally pass it up for some Read more...

Walter Hill’s 1984 “Streets of Fire” is probably the only other film, besides John Carpenter’s “Big Trouble in Little China”, that I have a hard time convincing third parties that it’s really not as bad as they think it is. Unlike the screwball comedy elements of “Little China”, there is none of the humor or Read more...

Alexandra “Xan” Cassavetes’ involving Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession documents the all-consuming movie love of former Los Angeles-area pay-cable outlet Z Channel’s programmer Jerry Harvey, who, with little warning, killed his wife, then himself. The picture stops just short of overtly connecting the mania of a life lived through celluloid heroes with the demons that drove him Read more...

Why does an inflatable sex doll come to life and proceed on a journey of discovery looking to explore the human condition? It just does, apparently. Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Air Doll is quietly unapologetic about its status as a winsome piece of magical realism long on wide-eyed charm and short on exposition. Based on the manga of the Read more...

Imagining yourself as Indiana Jones in the thick of adventure wasn’t difficult to accomplish during the 1980s. He was a fixture of screen heroism and pre-teen cool; a surrogate father for adolescent boys with unfathomable imaginations. However, what would happen if the adoration, that pure impulse of cinematic love, turned into extensive homespun flattery? What Read more...

How about in for a nickel bag? Or a few ounces? That seems more appropriate for “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.” However you put it, you need to know this going in: Nicholas Cage is so gleefully over-the-top as the troubled cop of the title that you will either be repulsed or fascinated Read more...

More about the idea of sex than the act of it, The Girlfriend Experience suits Steven Soderbergh’s career-long detachment regarding all things sensual. The writer/director whose indie star first rose with sex, lies and videotape, in which people got off by talking about carnal pursuits, takes a similar low-budget and no-touch approach 20 years later. He’s curious about Read more...

I know we’ve already had a review from the very capable keyboard of James Dennis, but I can’t help wanting to chime in on this package.  He summarized the plot quite nicely, so I think I’ll borrow that, rather than attempting my own: When Countess Federica Donati (Isa Miranda) is bumped off in the film’s Read more...

(Entertainment Weekly) – A dead 14-year-old girl named Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), murdered on her way home from school in 1973, tells her story from heaven in “The Lovely Bones.” In doing so, Susie follows the narrative path set for her in the striking 2002 novel by Alice Sebold on which this much-awaited adaptation by Peter Read more...

Strip away the French and Arabic subtitles, the French-prison setting and the Muslim-messianic title, and A Prophet, opening Friday at The Enzian, would still be the grittiest prison thriller in years. Add those ingredients, and its familiar plot of “prisoner learns the ropes and comes to rule his roost” becomes a parable for life, crime and racism in modern Read more...