Reviews

This art-house horror picture has religious, psychological underpinnings which can get maddeningly under the skin. Austria’s Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala direct The Lodge which isn’t as downright spooky as stylishly unnerving. The filmmakers and their adept craft contributors offer a certain amount of foreboding from a setting using wintry environs and a life-size dollhouse […]

A well-timed, rather unobtrusive drama considers a young woman as an underling to an autocratic, wolfish New York-based motion-picture mogul.   The Assistant will have discerning cineastes drawing comparisons to what’s going during the court testimony against a debilitated, as well as disgraced, Harvey Weinstein.  Director Kitty Green uses ambiguity and minimalism (without revealing who […]

Another revision of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale comes by way of Oz Perkins (son of Anthony of the original Psycho and in Psycho II where he inhabited the young Norman Bates). Thus, a New Age horror fantasy in Gretel & Hansel is born that is steeped less in scares and more in foreboding.  Its […]

A straight forward homage to sacrifice and heroism dramatizes the attempt to honor an Air Force Pararescue soldier William Pitsenbarger (known as Pits) lowered into Vietnam’s Xa Cam My jungle in 1966 and died while saving many lives during a bloody ambush. The Last Full Measure stars Sebastian Stan, William Hurt, and Samuel L. Jackson […]

An H. P.  Lovecraft short story gets some vivid, treatment thanks to producers like Elijah Wood, director Richard Stanley, and Nicolas Cage (sounding at times like he did in Peggy Sue Got Married) set in a rural enclave of the Bay State.  Color Out of Space might not be a cult favorite but it will […]