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“The Hero’s Journey” is one of Joseph Campbell’s most famous publications and pioneering concepts, an exploration into the foundations for all mythological storytelling. In his new film “Finding Joe,” Director Patrick Takaya Solomon manages to lazily and ineffectively explore the idea of the archetypal hero. Solomon presents the concept as
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The leaves on a tree shake and shiver in the opening shot of “Take Shelter.” A man stands in his driveway and watches as storm clouds foam in the sky and the rain yields globs of brown oil. And then he wakes up. This will be the first, and tamest,
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What a lovely way to spend a “Weekend” in London, with two beautiful men getting drunk off each other’s lust and never stopping to think that their attraction is wrong. So many “gay” movies — now a pejorative, thanks to what’s streaming on Netflix — insist on the marginality and
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“The Ides of March” is a thorough examination of the blemishes on the face of politics that lie beneath hastily applied stage makeup. It is a film that reveals the flaws of the American political system, presents a portrait of shattered ideals and refuses to take a black or white
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The dream house in “Dream House” is hardly a dream house. It’s actually pretty mediocre. A two-story cottage tucked in the sleepy snow of New England suburbs, filled with secret histories and haunted antechambers — it’s the stuff of Thomas Kinkade’s nightmares. But Will (Daniel Craig) and Libby (Rachel Weisz)
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“Tucker and Dale vs. Evil” is as much about genre as it isn’t. In this hillbilly horror show, director Eli Craig pays respect to knowledgeable midnight moviegoers while also grinding their expectations into a bloody pulp. Comic actors Alan Tudyk (who we all remember as the naked guy on acid
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Selling a movie about having cancer in your mid-20s is a tough thing to do. Sugar-coating one of the most depressing of subjects is a daunting task for any writer/director, but writer Will Reiser and director Jonathan Levine have taken a crack at it. But perhaps they used a little
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“You are the underground,” declared the emcee of the 2011 Oakland Underground Film Festival to a small audience of film lovers, performers and a few canine friends intimately huddled in an East Oakland warehouse. In its third year, the festival has become not only a place to celebrate offbeat cinema,
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Shells fly, walls crumble and bodies fall in the first 25 minutes of “City of Life and Death,” Lu Chuan’s monumental account of the Japanese occupation of Nanjing in 1937. Shot in stately chiaroscuro, the sequence recalls the scope of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”: Chaos reigns as a once-proud national capital
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In the first shot of “Restless,” Enoch is drawing his own chalk outline, tracing his body on the pavement. We learn all we need to know about this painfully hip, fun-hating guy right here. Enoch is obsessed with death, and himself. Played by newcomer Henry Hopper, he is a young
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