Excerpt: Strong, understated performances, vivid stylistics, and a frenetic enthusiasm elevate a plot that, on a nuts and bolts level, could have been a fairly standard outlaw-on-the-verge-of-retirement story. Akilla’s Escape doesn’t rewrite the formula, but uses the framework to deliver a slick crime tale with a unique point of view and enough intriguing thematic concerns to make it worth checking out.
Excerpt: Those looking for narrative threads to be tied up neatly won’t find that here as “Censor” spins into literal nightmare territory in its climax, leaving us in a state as suspended as its heroine’s fractured reality.
Excerpt: [Burstyn’s] best scenes with a Bee are with Loretta Devine’s Sally, whose uproarious bit on ‘underboob sweat’ is the film’s funniest. But these elements are like a life raft on the Titanic.
Excerpt: The strength of the film is with its leads, the award winning veteran and screen newcomer connecting so believably from such opposing romantic ideologies we come away from the film with hope for humanity.
Excerpt: This economical German fantasy-romance pales in the shadow of more successful genre combinations, relying on muggy romance and hazy mythology to charge an otherwise straight and narrow tale of love at first sight.
Excerpt: While not every aspect of Romero’s amusement park allegory for society works as well as others, the 52 minute film succeeds in its mission with flying colors.
Excerpt: The good folks over at Shudder are giving audiences everywhere a chance to finally watch The Amusement Park, Romero’s haunting depiction of the horrors and humiliations that befall the elderly when society deems them excess to requirements. And while The Amusement Park might not feature as much graphic violence and gore as some of Romero’s other movies, that doesn’t make it any less terrifying.
Excerpt: When you think you’re going to get a straightforward educational video but you hire George Romero for the project and wind up instead with a hellish nightmare. That’s exactly how The Amusement Park came into existence.
Excerpt: The mismatch between message and messenger is precisely what makes ‘The Amusement Park’ fresh and fascinating. Making its point efficiently in under an hour, anyone with an interest in George Romero, experimental horror, or obscure cinematic oddities will want to put this ambitious little curiosity on their bucket list.
Excerpt: Caligula is not erotic but gaudy, vulgar, trashy, awful, pointless. Like many if not all pornographic films Caligula has a lot of sex but no plot to speak of.
Excerpt: …Kwan’s bold approach is something like analyzing a film in real time, his intertwining of feature scenes, interviews with actors and filmmakers from both his own film and those of Ling-yu’s plus clips from what remains of her work enriching the experience.
Excerpt: Although it starts out trying to be CASABLANCA, it turns into a film six feet wide and a quarter of an inch deep, and seems as episodic as an “Indiana Jones” film.
Excerpt: The film focuses on the decade or so during the 1940s and 1950s in which two events changed the course of Tove Jansson’s life and career forever: her passionate affair with theater director Vivica Bandler and the success of the Moomins at the (temporary) expense of her more “serious” paintings. Thanks to Bergroth’s empathetic direction and a magical lead performance from Alma Pöysti, Jansson’s ongoing struggle to find personal and professional fulfillment pulls you in tightly and refuses to let you go.
Excerpt: a turgid exercise in predictability and hooey that fails even the internal logic test, but is tricked out with some nifty tracking shots and first-rate cinematography.
Excerpt: Surprisingly, director Michael Chaves…actually keeps things interesting up through Johnson’s crime only to allow the movie to nosedive once it enters territory even the Warrens would claim is fictional.
Excerpt: It may not be on par with the two previous installments of this series, but it’s still an engaging and fun horror film that is carried wonderfully by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga.
Excerpt: ‘The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It’ is an underwhelming sequel that pales in comparison to its impressively haunting predecessors. It has its moments and tries out some new tricks but feels like a downgrade on too many fronts to ignore.
Excerpt: My five favorite movie musicals span almost 70 years and include three MGM offerings. That’s no surprise because MGM made so many glorious musicals.
Excerpt: What makes Lessovitz’s film so great isn’t that she allows these truths into what could have just been a sweet, inclusive romance, but that she lets their impact be felt.
