Search for 2017

You may have seen a trailer for The Current War a couple of years ago – that’s because, in its original incarnation, it was expected to reach theaters during the 2017 Oscar Season. One of the planned year-end releases of the now-defunct Th...

The difficulty with making a thriller based on actual events is that aspects of the film are often at cross-purposes. There’s a little of this going on in Eduardo Mendoza’s 2017 feature, The Last Hour, but, on balance, the historical elemen...

Time Trap is a superficially entertaining science-fiction action/adventure film that might have worked better had it focused more on the “science fiction” elements and less on the halfhearted “action/adventure” ones. Movies about time ...

Narratively, The Song of Sway Lake doesn’t have much going for it but when it comes to capturing the tone of a specific locale, the approach of director Ari Gold is without peer. If you’ve ever spent a summer vacation at a private lakeside...

Based on the real-life story of writer/director Angie Wang, MDMA takes viewers back to the mid-1980s (1985 and 1986, specifically) and immerses them in the life and experiences of an 18-year old Jersey girl struggling to find her way in a prest...

Despite embracing the tropes one associates with the Western, Michael Matthews’ Five Fingers of Marseilles transpires in an atypical locale: post-Colonial South Africa. Matthews reaffirms what Sergio Leone identified – the Western doesn’...

Watching The Wife, I was reminded of how movies used to be. Back in the 1990s, something like this would have been common: an engaging story anchored by two powerful performances. Glenn Close is as good as she has ever been (although I would p...

Spoilers Ahoy! It is almost impossible to discuss Boarding School in any reasonable detail without revealing a significant plot point. You have been warned. As horror movies go, Boarding School is worth seeing simply because it’s differ...

Aspects of The Swan beguile and engage while others verge on the pretentious (like quoting Tarkovsky). As a slice-of-life/coming-of-age tale, The Swan hits many of the right notes but as an attempt to be something more, it paradoxically becom...

A Swingers Weekend, writer/director Jon E. Cohen’s spouse-swapping tale, starts out with a strong sit-com vibe before taking an abrupt turn during the third act into Lifetime TV movie territory. For a movie that wants to explore truths about...