Rushlights is a twisted tale of lies and deceit, with a host of characters that get more shady by the minute. This is, of course, the extreme fun in watching Rushlights‘ story play out on screen. The twists keep coming, the momentum never slows down, and the near-pulpiness of the movie only helps matters. […]
Film Festival
NBFF Film Review: A Touching Story Of Love, Loss, And Hope With ‘In Lieu Of Flowers’
Director William Savage creates a touching story of love, loss, and mourning with his first feature-length film In Lieu Of Flowers. Premiering at the 2013 Newport Beach Film Festival, audiences are sure to applaud the heartfelt sentiment found in the film. As well as the never faltering feeling of hope for life after heartbreak that […]
Film Rave (Or Rant?): Pablo Berger’s ‘Blancanieves’
After ten years of working on Blancanieves, writer-director Pablo Berger must have had mixed feelings about the appearance of The Artist last year. That film’s runaway success was undeniably a useful ice-breaker, however, for they are similar beasts, modern silent films made (largely) according to the conventions and constraints of the 1920s. Berger even gives […]
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: Barbara (Dir. Christian Petzold Germany 2012)
Barbara’s elliptical beginning delivers the eponymous heroine, a doctor, to a provincial hospital in a seaside town. She is just released from some unspecified incarceration, and still under surveillance from the implacable secret police. Only gradually do we realize that this is East Germany in the early 80s, and only gradually do we warm to […]
AFI FEST 2012 Film Review: Laurence Anyways (Dir. Xavier Dolan Canada/France 2012)
Xavier Dolan stretches out with his third feature, not just in budget and length, but in matching his emotionally high-pitched material with an equally bravura style, and in tackling a subject less frequently seen on screen even than the tortured mother-son relationship of his début éclatant, I Killed My Mother [2009], or the MMF love […]