Some films are content to give you a slice of life. Northwood Pie gives you the whole greasy pizza. Set in relentlessly normal Irvine, Calif., it’s the amiable, slightly stoned story of a gang of low-achieving friends who spend their days avoiding work at the local pizzeria and cutting class at the nearby community college. […]
Author: Stephen Whitty
Shooting Heroin
When you see what most “faith-based” films turn out like, it’s a sin. Modestly budgeted indies made for church-going audiences, their aims are small and their methods predictable. They star a publicly devout actor. They have a central tragedy, which makes the hero question his faith. And then he finds it again, and all is […]
Unprescribed
They left America to wage a war. They came home to find another one. America’s battlefield medicine has come a long way since the last generation of warriors. But the irony is that the men and women who now survive traumatic injuries often survive with emotional trauma, too. And when it comes to treating those […]
Toss It
The romantic comedy Toss It starts with someone flipping a coin – but ultimately it’s the audience that’s the loser. The lead actress is unappealingly cold. The script is overly talky. And the director seems unsure of how to help the star, or the screenwriter, solve their problems. Of course, the fact that the director […]
Burning Dog
Video games are not movies, but a lot of movie makers haven’t gotten the message. Every so often, directors still try to turn at-home entertainment into an in-theater event. Problem is, they’re different things meant for different audiences. Film fans love movies that tell them a story. Gamers like to tell the story themselves. Burning […]
Chameleon
Almost anyone is capable of anything, and in noir, they’re always capable of much worse. More of a mood than a genre, film noir is filled with sadistic husbands, femme fatales and poor jerks who always get left holding the bag. There are no happy endings. Sometimes there’s barely an ending at all. The tight, […]
Champs
It’s the only sport that matters. Feverish fans of hockey, football, baseball and basketball can argue all they want, of course. But boxing is fundamentally different. Two warriors enter a ring. One walks out victorious. The other may not walk out at all. It’s stakes like that which give the sport its savage excitement, a […]
Holy Lands
Holy Lands isn’t a bad movie. It’s four mediocre movies mixed together. There’s the fish-out-of-water film. There’s the cranky-old-performer/Oscar-bait film. There’s the dysfunctional family film. There’s the lightly literary art film. Except in this case, the total is less than the sum of its parts. Directed and written by Amanda Sthers, adapting her own novel […]
The Outsider
When we first meet the hero of The Outsider, a Chinese railroad worker in the Old West, he’s relaxing in a cozy little tent on the prairie. His wife is beside him, and their home is decorated with tiny, folded paper cranes. And if you’re wondering how he got such a nice place, or managed […]