Day: April 15, 2015
Film Review: ‘My Mother’
April 15, 2015Image Courtesy of 01 Distribution After the papal crisis of “We Have a Pope” and the political crisis of “The Caiman,” Nanni Moretti returns to more personal crises with “My Mother,” a classic Moretti tale in which a director (played by the helmer’s recent muse Margherita Buy) approaches meltdown. Though the sexes are switched, and […]
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Film Review: ‘The Squeeze’
April 15, 2015Match-play golf mixes with evil gamblers and the Christian ethics of Middle America in “The Squeeze,” a heavy-handed morality play supported by beautifully shot footage on the links and well-cast con men. But the narrative by debuting writer-director Terry Jastrow — who also produces along with wife Anne Archer — is so handicapped by prosaic […]
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Film Review: ‘Little Boy’
April 15, 2015God helps those who help not only themselves, but also the less fortunate in their midst — or so goes the tidy moral logic of “Little Boy,” a cloying and callous WWII-era parable about how faith can move mountains, overcome prejudice, and even rob death of its sting. Making an ambitious follow-up to his Toronto audience […]
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Film Review: ‘Child 44’
April 15, 2015Part serial-killer thriller, part old-school anti-Soviet propaganda, “Child 44” plays like a curious relic of an earlier Cold War mindset, when Western audiences took comfort that they were living on the right side of the Iron Curtain, and relied on movies to remind them as much. Here, the central character is an obedient MGB agent […]
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Film Review: ‘The Sisterhood of Night’
April 15, 2015Image Courtesy of Freestyle Releasing A secret society of teenage girls stirs up waves of panic and paranoia in “The Sisterhood of Night,” an alternately sensitive and heavy-handed small-town drama that turns the Salem witchcraft trials into a tenuous metaphor for the intense pressures brought to bear on today’s female youth. A self-styled “Crucible” for […]
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