The oddest, and perhaps longest lasting, after-effect of Covid has been the “pandemic pictures.” You know them within five minutes. Remote locations and limited sets. Small casts of characters and no crowd scenes. Lots of people talking on Zoom. They can be comedies, dramas or horror films. They can inventive, or they can be forced. […]
Author: Stephen Whitty
Love in Kilnerry
People in Kilnerry, N.H. are acting a little weird. Challenging priests to boxing matches. Throwing “swingers” parties. Going for nude bicycle rides. There must be something in the water, right? Well, actually, yes. In the new comedy Love in Kilnerry, there really is something in the water, a chemical that does away with people’s inhibitions, […]
Take the Night
Birthday revelry collides with sibling rivalry in Take the Night, a tight little noir about a prank gone wrong, The story revolves around two sets of brothers. The first pair, William and Robert, preside over a multinational import firm. The second, Chad and Todd, are scroungers, looking for an easy and not necessarily legal payday. […]
The Whole Lot
What’s it take to make a movie? What’s it cost? Connor Rickman did The Whole Lot by paring everything down to essentials – three characters, mostly long single takes, a few scenes. Absolutely nothing was wasted, no embellishments allowed. And five days, and just $15,000 later, he had a finished, professionally accomplished film. Except there’s […]
Stalker
A consumer tip for tired viewers scrolling through streaming services late at night, looking for a nasty paranoid thriller and maybe getting confused by similar titles: Watcher is about a young woman in Romania being followed by a creepy neighbor. Stalker is about a young man in Los Angeles being followed by a creepy ride-share […]
Coast
Bored teenagers, fighting with their parents, depending fiercely on each other, driving aimlessly around their California town and wondering what’s next after high school. And convinced, whatever it is, it has to be better than this. American Graffiti, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Lady Bird — it’s not a novel story. But while Coast doesn’t […]
Locked In
What makes for good drama also often makes for low-budget filmmaking. Sticking to a small cast of characters, a single setting and a confined period of time is a great way to keep your costs low. But, as playwrights going back to the ancient Greeks knew, it’s also a way to emphasize conflict, ratchet up […]
For Hannah
Most films would be better if their screenplays had gone through just one more draft. For Hannah probably could have used one fewer. The core of the movie is a gripping little wintry noir. A desperate bank robber is trying to get out of town only to have his car break down. He trudges through […]
What We Do Next
It’s a human impulse to reach out and help. But what happens when that help turns to harm? Are we obligated to then set things right? To do whatever it takes? That’s the question raised in What We Do Next, a talky but intriguing movie from writer/director Stephen Belber. After hearing the anguish of an […]
Facing Nolan
Drama is conflict. So how do you make an exciting documentary about an unconflicted man? That’s the challenge facing Bradley Jackson, the director of Facing Nolan, a non-fiction film about baseball’s living legend, Nolan Ryan. It’s not just that this is an authorized, and therefore presumably censored, autobiography. It’s that, what is there to censor? […]
Beneath the Banyan Tree
East is East, and West is West. But nothing separates people more than generations. That’s something that becomes very clear in Beneath the Banyan Tree, a lovely drama that charts the distances – geographic and emotional – that separate a Chinese grandmother, her daughter, and her grandchildren. The story begins in China where a rebellious […]
One Road to Quartzsite
Want to go off the grid? First plot a course to Quartzsite, Az. A tiny desert town, it only has a few thousand permanent residents. But it has hundreds of thousands of transients – travelers who come in by RV, van or foot and put down the thinnest of roots for a few months, as […]
Maysville
Think they just don’t make ‘em like that anymore? Maysville is proof they do. The Appalachian drama is set in the 1920s, but it might just as well have been filmed then, too. The violence is mostly offscreen. The only vaguely erotic moment comes when the leading lady goes for a midnight swim – in […]
Ghost Light
It is a tale told by several idiots, full of jokes and laughter, signifying nothing … but fun. That’s the basic description of Ghost Light, anyway, a good-humored black comedy featuring a lot of eccentric characters, a few good performers and several premature deaths. Think Knives Out meets the Bard. The idea has a group […]
Clairevoyant
People spend their entire lives looking for purpose, searching for meaning, trying to find some kind of answer. Well, Claire has her own existential question. Isn’t there an app for that? The perky twentysomething is the subject of the new mockumentary Clairevoyant, and the comedy comes from her clueless spiritual quest, which she’s trying to […]
Stay Awake
Filmmakers often turn to stories of addiction because they seem tailor-made for a perfect, three-act structure. Act One: A problem begins. Act Two: The protagonist hits rock bottom. Act Three: The person confronts their problem, conquers it, and begins to struggle back to normalcy. What Stay Awake realizes, though, is that in real life, a […]
Crabs!
Miss the `70s, when every Roger Corman B-movie had gratuitous nudity and pot-smoking teens? Or the `80s, when Troma Entertainment churned out exploitation flicks crammed with crude humor and over-the-top gore? Well, Crabs! brings them back, and serves them up hot – with an extra layer of cheese. Director Pierce McDermott Berolzheimer’s flick is a […]
The Final Sacrifice
Most war films are about famous campaigns, with casts of thousands – or, at least, hundreds – clashing in spectacular battle sequences, valiant armies competing to achieve a clear, if almost impossible, objective. The Final Sacrifice is not like most war films. Its cast is more accurately measured in the dozens – and even those […]
Lust, Life, Love
If you’re tired of searching for “The One,” maybe you should change your approach and be content with “The Many.” That’s the decision Veronica has come to in Lust, Life, Love. Openly bisexual, guiltlessly polyamorous, she spends her nights at organized orgies, and her days blogging about her various adventures. Mr. Right? Ms. Right? All […]
Courageous Warriors: Beauty From the Ashes
The bad news came quickly. It was breast cancer. It was Stage 4. And, the doctors told her, she was not a candidate for radiation, or chemotherapy. So what can you do, the woman asked. “They told me they could keep me ‘comfortable,’” she remembers. That patient survived breast cancer, though, as did all the […]