OPHELIA (no distrib):  Claire McCarthy’s film, written by Semi Chellas from Lisa Klein’s novel, dampens the fun of its own concept.  The idea is to re-tell Hamlet through the eyes of Shakespeare’s ill-fated Ophelia (Daisy Ridley) in a somewhat feminist way, and unlike other Bard marginalia like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead […]

  HUSTLERS (STX – September 13):  Lorena Scafaria becomes the latest filmmaker failing to ascend Martin Scorsese Mountain.  Her Hustlers wants to be Goodfellas in its marrow, not only in its based-on-a-true-story tale of New York criminals who ride high and then go down, but in its structure of interspersing dispassionate after-the-fact narration with the […]

  MOTHERING SUNDAY (Sony Classics – Nov 19):  Eva Husson’s film, adapted by Alice Birch from a Graham Swift novel, has many of the rote trappings of prestige costume drama.  We’re back in the English countryside, during the interim between World Wars.  Class distinctions are very much at the center of things, as manor-born Paul […]

  EMPIRE OF LIGHT (Searchlight/Disney – December 9):  Sam Mendes takes the first solo screenwriting credit of his long career on Empire of Light, a personal film inspired by his youth and his mother.  The story is centered around the seaside Empire movie theater, a once-grand palace that by the early 1980s has seen better […]

  EXHIBITING FORGIVENESS (no distrib):  The noted painter Titus Kaphar has made an impressive shift into scripted feature films.  Although Exhibiting Forgiveness isn’t strictly speaking autobiographical, Kaphar’s protagonist Tarrell (Andre Holland) is a successful painter whose canvases resemble the filmmaker’s.  Tarrell travels with his wife (Andra Day, playing a recording star) and young son to […]

> If you were going to describe the films of Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The House of Mirth) in one word, that word would not be “dynamic.”  Or “kinetic.”  Or, well, “exciting.”  Davies directs stately tableaux, impressive and sometimes moving, but rooted in nostalgia and regret. Which is why […]

  V/H/S, which screened as part of Sundance’s Park City At Midnight series, is a gimmick piled upon a gimmick. First is the horror anthology itself, familiar from the Twilight Zone movie and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery TV show, among many others.  In this case, half a dozen unrelated short films, each from a different […]

  Few movies are as wholeheartedly dedicated to meta-ness as Martin McDonagh’s SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS.  The title of the movie is also the title of the script its main character Marty (Colin Farrell)–which, I believe, is short for “Martin”–is trying to write.  It’s also a tally that the movie keeps track of as the story moves […]