The drama of three young Cubans taking the not-inconsequential step of escaping their country to the (possibly) welcoming arms of the United States is traced in startling detail in UNA NOCHE. Filming on-location, director Lucy Mulloy makes her feature film debut by capturing a compellingly credible portrayal of life in modern-day Havana — the struggle …
Category Archive: Feature Post
Apr
23
Tribeca 2012 Diary: REPLICAS’ Jeremy Power Regimbal & Josh Close
Cherish what you’ve got, ‘cuz it’s likely others sure as hell do. In REPLICAS, an upscale family (Selma Blair, Josh Close — who also wrote the screenplay — and Quinn Lord) take a trip to their vacation home in order to recover from a recent tragedy, and receive a visit from a set of excessively …
Apr
22
Tribeca 2012 Diary: THE PLAYROOM Director Julia Dyer
The kids are telling tales out of school, and so are their parents. Set one restless night in the mid-seventies, THE PLAYROOM juxtaposes a quartet of siblings spinning a strange, heartbreaking tale of freedom in their attic sanctuary with the darker dynamics of a small, “neighborly” get-together between adults in the living room below. Capturing …
Apr
19
Tribeca 2012 Diary: BABYGIRL’s Macdara Vallely
Yes, the Tribeca Film Festival brings the world to New York, but who knew the process could be so literal? In BABYGIRL, the very Irish director Macdara Vallely tells a very New York tale about Lena (Yanis Ynoa), a Nuyorican teen, who finds herself in the middle of a romantic triangle when her mother’s lover …
Apr
18
The Indie on Demand Movie Review: HIT SO HARD
Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll! Never gets tired, does it? Well, maybe if you’re actually in the middle of it, it may get to wear a bit, yeah. Which brings us to the subject of this week’s episode of our weekly radio show, The Indie on Demand Movie Review. The documentary HIT SO HARD …
Apr
16
Cinefantastique Spotlight: THE CABIN IN THE WOODS
Joss Whedon has just been the busy, busy little bee lately, hasn’t he? He was one of the producers of the Morgan Spurlock documentary COMIC-CON EPISODE IV: A FAN’S HOPE last week; he’s the director of eagerly awaited THE AVENGERS, coming up in May; and this past weekend he produced and helped co-write THE CABIN …
Apr
12
The Indie on Demand Movie Review: KINYARWANDA
We’re back with the newest episode of my independent film review radio series, THE INDIE ON DEMAND MOVIE REVIEW. This time, we’re looking at KINYARWANDA, a new drama in which director Alrick Brown uses a fractured timeline and mutable genres to portray how the Rwandan genocide of 1994 looked to those trapped in its madness, …
Apr
08
Cinefantastique Spotlight: BURN, WITCH, BURN
Tricky situation this week: Two genre releases, but one, while good, is getting a very limited release to start; the other, while making it to more venues, doesn’t quite merit the attention. So we’re dipping into our 50th Anniversary archives to bring out a goody from 1962: BURN, WITCH, BURN (a.k.a. NIGHT OF THE EAGLE). …
Apr
06
Morgan Spurlock on COMIC-CON EPISODE IV: A FAN’S HOPE
For some, it is Valhalla; for others, it is a seething, roiling, chaotic pit of humanity. For many, I suspect, it’s a phenomenon just slightly more indecipherable than Naked Lunch. It is San Diego Comic-Con, and documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, with the help of Stan Lee, Joss Whedon, and aintitcool’s Harry Knowles, has endeavored to …
Apr
01
Cinefantastique Spotlight: WRATH OF THE TITANS
In the curious ecology that is Hollywood, a film that’s best known as a poster child for what not to do when converting 2D to 3D and for a declarative that become something of a pop-culture punchline has to, of course, have a sequel. In WRATH OF THE TITANS, there’s no Kraken-releasing, but that doesn’t …
