David Ayer’s END OF WATCH brings a new wrinkle to the “found-footage” genre by using it in a cop movie. LAPD Officer Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) wires a camera to his uniform, and constantly photographs what’s going on while he’s on the beat, supposedly to generate footage for a documentary he wants to put […]
THE WAY, WAY BACK: Watch It At Home – Modestly Engaging Coming-Of-Age Tale THE WAY, WAY BACK is one of the last real indie hopes for a original breakout hit this summer (it was a big buy out of Sundance, a $10M purchase by Fox Searchlight, the studio behind the Sundance smash Little Miss […]
Kate Barker-Froyland’s directing debut SONG ONE is so wispy and insubstantial that the bytes making up its digital images seem barely capable of adhering to a screen. Clearly influenced by John Carney’s mini-musical Once, it makes Carney’s film look like an Andrew Lloyd-Webber spectacle by comparison. Barker-Froyland also wrote the minimal script, which almost exhausts its resources […]
Marc Abraham, for his second film as director (prior to that, he was a veteran producer), has chosen his second consecutive mid-20th-century biography, following 2008’s Flash of Genius with I SAW THE LIGHT, which premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival and will open in theatres in November. The life of country music star […]
KODACHROME (no distrib): AKA that page of the indie movie playbook marked “Dysfunctional Family Road Trip To Redemption.” Jonathan Tropper (This Is Where I Leave You) wrote the script, and it has his novels’ mix of damaged-man soap and rom-com. This one features a dying dad (Ed Harris), who has the kind of incurable […]
PETERLOO (Amazon – November 9): Not so much a movie as an illustrated historical recitation. Mike Leigh’s film concerns the brutal 1819 government militia attack on civilians listening to a public address at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, England, which came to be known as “Peterloo” because the bloodshed was likened to the then-recent […]
HORSE GIRL (Netflix – February 7): Every one of the four films Jeff Baena has directed had its premiere at Sundance, with Horse Girl following Life After Beth, Joshy and The Little Hours. It’s an impressive accomplishment for a filmmaker who hasn’t made a particular commercial or critical breakout hit. Horse Girl may have […]
NANNY (no distrib): Think Netflix’s Maid, but as a (sort of) horror movie. Aisha (Anna Diop) is an undocumented Senegalese immigrant in New York who works as a nanny for the daughter of a well-off couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector), in order to earn money she can send to her young […]