// Category Archive for: Movie Reviews

TADFF 2013 Movie Review: The Battery

By Less Lee Moore

What would happen if the only other person remaining after the apocalypse was your annoying co-worker who always had his headphones on? What if the only other person smelled terrible? It may sound comical, but these are the hard questions you have to ask yourself when watching The Battery. Despite taking place after an apocalypse (of the Z-word variety), there are definitely funny moments, but on the whole, The Battery is a brutal movie. Things get fucked up and people die.

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Movie Review: Hellaware

By Less Lee Moore

One of the greatest things about Kids in the Hall was the show’s ability to convert the utterly banal into comedy. It requires far more skill to underplay a scene and still get laughs, as the audience imagines a waggling finger pointing at the object of the joke. Hellaware, from writer/director Michael M. Bilandic, achieves this so well it leaves the viewer breathless, both from amusement and admiration. At 75 minutes, Hellaware is expertly paced, wringing the most out of every detail in every scene and each seemingly throwaway secondary character.

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Movie Review: Electric Man

By Less Lee Moore

Electric Man, a Scottish comedy out on VOD today, explores the world of comic book fans with one eye on comedy and another on the caper film. If that sounds like a strange combination to you, you’d be right, but the clever writing, genuinely funny dialogue, and endearing cast of the film make it work.

Electric Man deals with a rare first edition of the titular comic and how its value comes to signify different things to very different people. Jason (Jazz) and Wolf, owners of Deadhead Comics, are at the center of a cast of characters including a surly bald man who may or may not be a murderer; a mysterious, leggy redhead with glasses; and a comic collector who believes he’s Electric Man himself.

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DVD Review: The English Teacher

By Less Lee Moore

Withing the first ten minutes of The English Teacher, I thought, “This is a good, light-hearted comedy.” It’s the tale of Linda Sinclair (Julianne Moore), a high school English teacher who decides to help her former student, a failed playwright suffering from a crisis of confidence, produce his play with the help of the high school’s drama teacher Carl (Nathan Lane).

The film immediately sets up Linda’s character as a single, middle-aged woman—plain but pretty—who watches A Room With A View at home while eating organic food, and its clever voice over narration won me over. Then things got weird. I don’t mean David Lynch weird, but The English Teacher was definitely not the movie I thought it was going to be.

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DVD Review: V/H/S/2

By Jeffery X Martin

Here’s a fun experiment to try! Sit ten people around a campfire on a moonless night and start telling scary stories. Everyone takes a turn. What you’ll find quickly enough is that not everything scares everybody. One person may be frightened by ghost stories. Another may be terrified of demonic possession tales. One never knows.

That’s the joy—and the potential for failure—found within any horror anthology film. They’re all scattershot. Even the most ambitious of them (I’m thinking The ABCs of Death) have sections that miss the mark completely (although “D is for Dogfight” was a harrowing piece of storytelling).

2012’s V/H/S was the most consistently enjoyable of the new wave of anthologies, gathering together a conclave of great directors, such as Ti West and Adam Wingard, and letting them do what they do best: scare the shit of people. There are some genuinely unsettling moments in the film (that final sequence, directed by Radio Silence, still haunts my thoughts).

This year’s sequel, V/H/S/2, is better in every regard. The framing device is tighter, the stories are better and the scares are more frequent and more intense.

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DVD Review: Gimme The Loot

By Chelsea Spear

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
—Anton Chekhov, 1904

Chekhov would probably find Gimme The Loot a frustrating venture. If he stuck it out through the final reel, unfazed by the colorful vernacular of working-class Brooklyn youths and their attempts at petty crime, he would probably gnash his teeth at writer/director Adam Leon’s failure at resolving many of the enticing leads promised in the film’s opening scenes. At a closer glance, however, the set-ups Leon has created for his protagonists serve as excuses to tail some teenagers through the New York boroughs and take a closer look at graffiti culture.

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Instantly The Worst: Ulli Lommel’s Black Dahlia

By LabSplice

One of the inevitable outcomes of Video on Demand services is that they tend to monopolize our conversations about film. Many people—and I do not exclude myself from this—would rather seek out a new title on Netflix Instant or Amazon Prime than spend the extra money to rent something not available through those channels. This creates something of a cinematic echo chamber, where a smaller selection of titles is given preferential treatment. We want to share experiences and recommend films to others so we focus on a platform that we know many people have in common.

Still, even accounting for the smaller sample size, there are still many interesting conversations to be had about the catalogue of Netflix films. Thousands of films across all genres and nationalities currently vie for our attention, waiting in the cloud for us to press a single button and bring them down to our devices. There are films that can educate, films that can move, and even titles by some of the greatest and most talented filmmakers of each generation. And thanks to the data algorithms and crowdsourcing efforts of Netflix, each title is provided with a handy numerical score to give us a quick snapshot of its quality.

And one of them has to be ranked last.

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Blu-Ray Review: Two Men In Manhattan

By Less Lee Moore

There’s a quote from Quentin Tarantino on the Blu-Ray case for Two Men in Manhattan: “Jean-Pierre Melville is to the crime film what Sergio Leone is to the western.” Those who’ve not yet heard of the French filmmaker might expect his films to be as brash and blood-soaked as Tarantino’s. Although Melville’s milieu was far more restrained, it’s no less exciting to watch.

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DVD Review: Simon Killer

By Less Lee Moore

How long has it been since you’ve come across the term “”mise-en-scène” (film students excepted). If most of the film reviews you read come from websites and blogs, it’s probably been a while. Although mise-en-scène, which “refers to everything that appears before the camera and its arrangement—composition, sets, props, actors, costumes, sounds, and lighting” is applicable to every film, it’s the gestalt of these individual aspects that differentiate a regular movie from the work of an artist in full command of the medium. Simon Killer belongs, wholeheartedly, in the latter category.

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TIFF 2013 Review: iNumber Number

By Less Lee Moore

iNumber Number is a thoroughly enjoyable heist film from writer/director Donovan Marsh. There’s not a bit of flab to be found in its taut 96 minutes, all of which crackle with tension.

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