Movie Reviews

This movie is truly an odd bird. I believe the weaknesses outnumber the strengths, a flawed gem that's more flaw than gem, but I can't say it has absolutely nothing at all going for it.

Three people get trapped in a high-rise holiday flat, and as the food and water run out they begin to lose their minds. Eventually it comes to appear they may be victims of something larger than a simple mishap.

It's well-made and well-acted by indie film standards. Also, it had some nice production touches... some of the camerawork, the way they handle the apartment, was reminiscent of how the hotel sets were used in "The Shining", but not in a deliberately derivative way, just in seeming to have picked up some nice moves from it.

But the narrative is pretty weak and disjointed, and the first probably two thirds of the movie are…

What starts out as a really excellent pitch-black comedy about a production of "Julius Caesar" gone murderously wrong loses the thread about halfway through.

For the first half it was incredibly well made and cruising to be a particular favorite, but about halfway through the tight plotting suddenly gets very, very flabby, and instead of exploring the consequences of a murder they fall back on the "comedy" of the bodies piling up as many more happen.

It's a true shame. The production is excellent, whole thing is surprisingly strong, and even the acting holds up all the way through, with the exception of the appearance halfway through as Malcolm McDowell, playing his usual role of Malcolm-McDowell-in-costume-as-someone-else. The actors seemed incredibly true-to-life, based solely my meager experience with theater actors. I'm guessing this really is aimed as a satire at people who've been involved in the theater, but it was…

Sometimes I stumble onto a treat.

A company invents VR technology to allow rich people to experience life from the viewpoint of someone more disadvantages. To say more about the plot would require spoilers.

This indie sci-fi is filmed in black and white, which seemed pretentious at first, but made sense as the movie rolled on, because, it's sci-fi, yes—but mostly it's actually film noir, and while nobody would accuse it of being one of the greats, it's a pretty well-done one for a little indie flick. As the story gets more involved the choice to film in black and white as an homage to vintage film noir makes sense.

It started out seeming pretentious and not very effective, not to mention not particularly well-acted, but only got better as it went along, building, happily, to a very effective ending noir ending. Though it takes a while…

Truly strange—this is a very talky, amateurish, artsy and extremely pretentious zero-budget indie flick with little plot, dislikeable characters and not much acting to speak of... and yet, somehow, it works. It's like the exception that proves the rule.

A young couple goes on vacation at a cottage she grew up vacationing at, only to be visited by a pretentious masked figure who is either some sort of forest spirit or her childhood imaginary friend. She spends the rest of the movie walking through the woods talking with him, to her boyfriend's growing annoyance.

It's hard to explain why it works. It's very much like a fable, there almost nothing to it, and somehow manages to weave the pretentious elements into something of an engaging tapestry. I don't know. It's weird. It should be an awful, awful movie. Virtually every identifiable element of it, looked at on its own, is…