Look around the poker table, veteran gamblers like to warn. If you can’t spot the sucker – it’s you. There’s a lot to look at in the mostly intriguing con-man documentary and clearly someone’s being taken for a ride. But who is it? The mysterious Russian on the run who says he has millions of […]
Author: Stephen Whitty
Trust
It’s hard to gain. It’s easy to lose. It’s almost impossible to get back. Trust. That’s the title, and topic, of a twisty new marital drama featuring Brooke and Owen, an attractive, successful, having-it-all Manhattan couple. He’s a local TV anchor on the rise. She’s just opened her own art gallery, and signed a hot […]
Effigy: Poison and the City
Frau Gottfried is killing people with kindness. Literally. The pretty German lady is always there when someone – a spouse, a relative, a neighbor – takes ill. She typically devotes days, even weeks to tenderly nursing them, even moving into their homes to see after their meals. It’s terrible all her patients end up dying. […]
Too Late
Violet’s boss is horrible. He’s inhuman. He uses people. Eats them up, and then throws them away like garbage. He’s a monster, she tells her friends. “You mean, a metaphorical monster,” they say. Oh, if only. Show business is full of fiends, but the truth is, Bob Devore is a real one. A man-eating one. […]
Bad Cupid
Love is blind – which is why, sometimes, you need someone to step in and save you from walking into traffic. That’s the idea behind Bad Cupid, an amiably offbeat comedy about a slacker named Dave. A loser who can’t believe he lost, he’s still obsessed with the girl who dumped him a year ago. […]
P.E.N.S. – Poetic Energy Needed in Society
Academia is not the street. Forget whatever you learned in college about Tennyson or Longfellow. Modern urban poetry is fast, unfussy, forceful. You don’t give readings, you compete in “slams.” You don’t recite your verses, you “spit” them. And if the audience sits there silently – then you know you’ve lost. If you’re really connecting, […]
In Action
Sean Kenealy and Eric Silvera wanted to make an action movie in the worst way, and they did. No money for a cast of thousands? How about a cast of two. Low-budget? Closer to no budget, with the results of the team’s $20,000 Kickstarter campaign stretched to cover everything, from dubious on-screen talent to some […]
Touch
She is a woman without a country, married to a man with a past. And their troubled marriage – and her desperate, dangerous search for something more – will lead her down a risky path and into a deadly affair in Touch. Stripped to its essentials –erotic-thriller style and neo-noir fatalism — the movie sounds […]
Here Alone
Pre-pandemic, Here Alone looked like a smart, spare horror film. Post-pandemic, it suddenly looks like a lot more. The low-budgeted post-apocalyptic thriller debuted at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature. Other festival screenings and a very limited release followed, but for some reason word didn’t get […]
Paint
Writers need to be read. Musicians need to be heard. But after three years of painting, Dan, Kelsey and Quinn haven’t hung a picture on anybody’s walls but their own. Are you still a painter if nobody sees your paintings? Is selling out worse than not selling at all? Paint asks those questions, and lets […]
Parallel Minds
Most movies struggle to come up with one good idea. The sci-fi thriller Parallel Minds has a handful. There’s one about a high-tech contact lens that lets you see your own memories. There’s another about a First Nations woman with psychic powers, and a half-remembered past. There’s a third about an artificial intelligence that’s become […]
Donna: Stronger Than Pretty
When Donna and Nick got married, they pledged to be together forever, for richer or poorer, for better or worse. Except it gets worse pretty quickly. Unfortunately, so does their movie. And unlike Donna, audiences are unlikely to stick around, hoping it’s going to get better again. Donna: Stronger Than Pretty is a portrait of […]
Wander
You’d better pray Arthur Breznik is crazy. Because otherwise, we’re in real trouble. An ex-detective with post-traumatic stress, Arthur’s currently living way off the grid and battling bad dreams and horrific hallucinations. He’s also convinced there’s a government conspiracy to kidnap people and implant them with tracking devices. But, you know, just because he’s a […]
The Sounding
What do you call it when you keep trying to fix something even when it isn’t broken? In The Sounding, you call it psychiatry. A strikingly unique debut from director and star Catherine Eaton, it’s the moving story of Olivia, a 30-something woman who doesn’t speak. She can, of course. There’s been no physical injury, […]
Northwood Pie
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. […]
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, […]