The comedy Small Apartments and the magical realist comedy-drama Chicken With Plums, out now on DVD, walk the line between narrative coherency and surrealism, even though both are grounded in the real world.
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Reviews
The ABCs of Death is a compilation of short films from 26 different directors, each assigned a letter of the alphabet. They were each given free reign to to choose any word they wanted beginning with that letter, and tasked with making a short film about death.
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True/False 2013: Leviathan is the most metal documentary you will ever watch about commercial fishing. Winter Go Away! is an impressive array of journalism and good filmmaking.
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Thursday is True/False Film Fest’s official opening, but Friday is when Columbia, Missouri’s surprising gem of a festival really gets the party kicked into high gear.
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Cyril is an 11-year-old boy who refuses to believe that his father has just up and left him, even going so far as selling his sole possession — the bicycle his father gave him. An active camera darts around, projecting Cyril’s kinetic energy and his unwillingness to be contained, until he’s exactly where he wants to be.
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Even though it yawns a bit when the last act begins to look too much like a traditional action movie, ‘John Dies at the End’ is a whole lot of B-movie fun.
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Since Hoult and Tomlinson don’t generate much heat and the story has zero surprises, there’s not any reason to stay invested in this dull fairy tale re-imagining. The film suffers from timing, I suppose, being the most recent in this lame fairy-tale update trend, which seems to exist only to let Hollywood’s VFX artists loose on properties that are immediately familiar to a global audience.
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Kill For Me devolves into a series of twists, each more inexplicable and illogical than the last, as Hailey’s true motives become harder to discern as she goes to extreme lengths to blackmail her roommate and lover into helping Hailey seduce and kill her abusive father
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‘Snitch’ is a character study that’s short on action and a treatise whose true purpose is to lecture the audience on the the evils of mandatory minimum sentencing for drug-related crimes.
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John McClane returns for a tired adventure in Mother Russia.
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Ivan’s Childhood was Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky’s first feature-length film. A poetic journey through the life of a young child scarred by war, the film has only grown in stature since its 1962 release, with filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Krzysztof Kieślowski naming it as a prime influences on their work.
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Eric Melin on the KCTV5 It’s Your Morning show talking with Alexis del Cid about Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects and Michael Haneke’s multiple-Oscar nominee Amour.
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The credit for the warm undertones beneath the anguish should go to Haneke’s extraordinary actors, whose own life experience is on display here. It is key to the movie’s success that the upperclass Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) have a rich past together, especially since only glimpses of it are actually referred to in Haneke’s efficient, clear-eyed screenplay. It is this economy of theme paired with the subtle richness of character that make Amour so powerful.
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‘Identity Thief’ is a feckless, frustrating comedy with a dozen variations on the same fat joke.
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In the end Side Effects isn’t a magnum opus. It doesn’t stand in the same class as Traffic or Out Of Sight, but it does speak to Soderbergh’s talents that the film not only works, but is an overall solid thriller.
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