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Showing film results: From 121 to 131


New Release Review - "Scrap"
by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2024-12-26

Midway through Scrap, writer/director Vivian Kerr's feature expansion of her 2018 short of the same name, the film's anti-heroine Beth (played by the director) drags her long-suffering brother Ben (Anthony Rapp) back to the ice rink they frequented as kids. As Ben stumbles and falls, Beth glides gracefully across the ice, closing her eyes and savouring the moment. We suspect Beth has dual motivations for bringing her brother to the rink: she wants to recapture their childhood connection, but she also wants to see him flounder while she succeeds, as in every other aspect of their lives Beth is a trainwreck while Ben has it all, at least in his sister's eyes, with a successful career as a fantasy novelist.




 

New Release Review - "The Man In The White Van"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2024-12-22

1970s-set thriller The Man in the White Van purports to be inspired by real-life events. Some reviews have suggested it draws on the crimes of serial killer Billy Mansfield, though the villain's identity remains ambiguous throughout the film (likely to leave things open for a possible sequel). I suspect if director Warren Skeels were honest, he would admit to his primary influence being John Carpenter's Halloween. Like that classic, Skeel's narrative feature debut takes place in the final days of October and is centred on a virginal teenage girl being stalked by an antagonist who seems to have randomly chosen her as his target (let's not forget the sister/brother stuff didn't pop up until Halloween II). As the title implies, the villain here spends most of his screen time unseen behind the wheel of a white van, and the stalking scenes recall the early segments of Halloween in which Michael Myers pursues Laurie Strode while commandeering a stolen station wagon. The van becomes something of a villain itself, like the eponymous Plymouth Fury of Carpenter's Christine, the truck from Spielberg's Duel, or the car from, well, The Car. Were it not for a series of flashbacks, we might wonder if there really is a human driver behind that foggy windscreen.



First Look Review - "Chateau"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2024-12-13

Horror movies and thrillers haven't been kind to influencers. They're almost exclusively portrayed as shallow narcissists, and for the audience half the fun lies in seeing them get their comeuppance. Initially it seems that's all writer/director Luke Genton has in store for us with his found footage chiller Chateau. From the off the film's influencer protagonist is set up as a borderline sociopath, but we soon come to realise she's simply running away from a past she wants to escape. Rather than gleefully waiting for her to get what's coming, we grow to like James (Cathy Marks) enough for us to root for her to make it to the end of her ordeal.



Teaneck International Film Festival presents 2025 Indie Lens Pop-Up Series

(TEANECK, NJ) -- INDEPENDENT LENS announced the launch of the new season of Indie Lens Pop-Up, the long-running screening series that brings people together for community-driven conversations around its thought-provoking documentaries. The event series will feature both in-person and virtual screenings in more than 100 cities across the U.S.



First Look Review - "The Girl With The Needle"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2024-12-10

Writer/director Magnus von Horn follows The Here After and Sweat with another intense character study in period drama The Girl with the Needle. This one is loosely inspired by the real life Danish serial killer Dagmar Overbye, but von Horn's true inspiration seems to come from the melodramas of the silent era and perhaps from Richard Fleischer's 10 Rillington Place, with which it shares several thematic elements. Like the recent films Woman of the Hour, The Man in the White Van and He Went That Way, it's a movie about a serial killer that is centred not on the killer but on someone unfortunate enough to find themselves in their orbit.





New Release Review - "Conclave"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2024-12-06

You know that leftover bit you stumble across when you've just finished assembling a piece of flat pack furniture? Some little plastic doohickey that looks like it should be important, but which doesn't seem to play any vital role in the shelving unit you just put together. Conclave, director Edward Berger and writer Peter Straughan's adaptation of Robert Harris's 2016 novel, is the leftover doohickey of 2024 cinema. It looks like an important film, with its elegant visuals and impressive cast, but it doesn't seem to have any function. It's neither serious nor soapy. It's a Murder She Wrote episode without a murder. It's 12 Angry Men without the debates and arguments. It's a movie about Catholicism that plays like it was made by Presbyterians. I don't know why it exists. It's by no means the worst film of 2024, but it might be the most pointless.



New Release Review - "On Becoming A Guinea Fowl"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2024-12-04

As a children's show within writer/director Rungano Nyoni's second feature informs us, the guinea fowl is a bird known for its ability to ward off predators by gathering in groups and using its squawk to alert other birds to approaching threats. The film's protagonist, Shula (Susan Chardy), a middle class Zambian woman, can't get the childhood memory of that show out of her head. When we meet her first she's driving home from a costume party, decked out in a homemade guinea fowl costume. As Nyoni's film unspools, Shula's reasons for admiring the selflessness of the guinea fowl will become painfully clear. By a strange coincidence it's the second movie to arrive in recent weeks, following Andrea Arnold's Bird, in which a bird is employed as a metaphor for a protector against abuse.



New Release Review - "The Fix"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2024-11-28

If you've seen Luc Besson's Lucy you've essentially seen a slicker (albeit worse) version of stunt performer turned writer/director Kelsey Egan's The Fix. Like Besson's film, The Fix is centred on a young heroine who accidentally consumes an experimental drug that gives her instant superpowers. The main difference here is that The Fix's protagonist also undergoes extreme physical changes to her body, which puts the film in the realm of movies like Ken Russell's Altered States, but both movies have pretty much the same narrative of a young woman being pursued by the villainous developers of the drug she unwittingly consumed.



New Release Review - "Rita"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2024-11-27

With his previous feature, 2019's La Llorona, Guatemalan writer/director Jayro Bustamente employed the titular Latin-American folk legend to examine a dark chapter in his country's history - the "Silent Holocaust", a decades long genocide of the nation's Mayan people. With Rita he similarly employs dark fantasy elements to highlight a shameful event in Guatemala's more recent past.



New Release Review - "Gladiator II"

by Eric Hillis, TheMovieWaffler.com
published 2024-11-21

They say Rome wasn't built in a day, but it might have been if Ridley Scott was in charge of that project. The octogenarian shows no signs of halting his career and continues to knock out the sort of epic movies most filmmakers spend multiple years slaving over. It's remarkable that a film as big as Gladiator II is arriving a mere year after Scott's similarly large scale Napoleon. That said, this sequel feels like a product that has been rushed to market rather than one that has had a full 24 years to nail down its story.


 

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