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 […]
Author: Stephen Whitty
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 […]
Killing the Shepherd
If you want to save a species from extinction, kill it. That’s the counterintuitive, but intriguing, idea behind the documentary Killing the Shepherd. Set in an impoverished section of Africa, it first lays out two real-life, and truly disastrous scenarios about our vanishing wildlife. In the first, there are no rules or regulations on big-game […]
Inheritance, Italian Style
The Parlazzis would like to invite you to a big family dinner. Hope you like resentment. It’s the main course – and getting served up with sides of greed, anger, lust and depression. That’s the set up to the comic melodrama Inheritance, Italian Style which reunites a big, squabbling clan of Sicilians to divvy up […]
American Insurrection
When fascism was on the rise in ’30s Europe, Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel about a dystopian, dictatorial America, sarcastically titled It Can’t Happen Here. In American Insurrection, it already has. That title, a new one, is misleading, although commercial. (The movie was originally called The Volunteers.) Before the film even begins, an election has […]
Vietnam: Fast Forward
What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of Vietnam? The Vietnamese themselves know what it is. “War.” And around the world, especially in the West, the dominant images people have of Vietnam are of bombing raids, smoldering villages and, perhaps, helicopters departing an evacuated U.S. Embassy. The documentary Vietnam: Fast Forward, […]
Single Mother by Choice
So how did you spend the pandemic? Did you launch a new side-hustle? Explore a new hobby? Bake an awful lot of bread? Selina Ringel had a baby, and co-wrote and starred in a movie. And did it all at once. Single Mother by Choice is the appealing, and impressive result. Directed and co-written by […]
Outlier
“I’m only doing this for your own good.” Most of us first hear, and learn to distrust, those words as children. This is for my own good? Eating liver, sitting through Sunday school, going to this crummy sleepaway camp? No thanks. The line can be infuriating coming from a parent. It’s terrifying coming from a […]