Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3.75 cats
Director: Justin Weinstei | Tyler Measom
Jason says: “James ‘The Amazing’ Randi has been best-known his efforts on debunking psychics, faith healers and other frauds for so long that many associate him with that alone. Even remembering that it was his qualifications as a magician that
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Anthony Burns
Kyle says: “HOME SWEET HELL is a mildly diverting dark comedy about marriage, murder and mayhem. Mona and Don Champagne (Katherine Heigl and Patrick Wilson) is seemingly the perfect modern married couple on paper. That turns out to be only
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: David Cross
Kyle says: “Two thirds of the running time of HITS has passed when Katelyn (Meredith Hagner) declares, ‘This is insanity!’ and leaves home with her father’s shotgun. HITS is a comedy about cultural chaos, its title having dozens of different
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Ricky Kennedy
Jason says: “Mock documentaries are inherently gimmick movies; it is a rare one that does not crash hard up against the form’s limitations, and when that happens, it doesn’t matter whether the disappointment comes from the filmmaker having to cheat
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: Lee Suk-hoon
Jason says: “The biggest problem with HIMALAYA (titled THE HIMALAYAS for its North American release) is that it comes right on the heels of EVEREST. The latter is not a particularly great movie but had the resources of a major
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 1 cat
Director: Ross Shuman | Tom Gianas
Jason says: “There’s a running gag in HELL AND BACK, arguably the funniest thing in the movie, where a demon voiced by John Farley subjects souls to various mildly annoying situations (stopped escalators, a Pizza Hut/Taco Bell that has no
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.25 cats
Director: Kim Seong-hun
Jason says: “’Chekhov’s _____’ is an extremely easy joke to make when watching and reviewing thrillers and the like, and like most trope-related comments, folks often say that in terms of ‘don’t do this’ as opposed to ‘make sure you
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.25 cats
Director: Aleksey German
Jason says: “HARD TO BE A GOD may deserve your ten bucks just for the sheer level of will and effort it took to get made, with decades of working on the script, six years of filming, and another seven
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Corin Hardy
Jason says: “By way of exposition, there’s a bit on the radio early on mentioning that an upcoming deal would make Ireland the only developed country without a national forest, and that just sounds like a bad idea: Anyone who
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Daniel Garcia | Rania Attieh
Jason says: “Movies like H., with its deliberately un-evocative title, unexplained strange events, and ostentatiously non-standard structure, can bring out my least favorite reaction to a movie – the urge to shout that the emperor has no clothes and the
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2 cats
Director: Pierre Morel
Kyle says: “The most interesting feature of the indispensable Internet Movie Database has become ‘Plot Keywords’, a virtual ‘CliffsNotes’ of movie plots so spot on that in most cases, you can read the list and skip the movie. Which increasingly
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Peng Da-mo | Yan Fei
Jason says: “As near as I can tell, no character is played by multiple actors in GOODBYE MR. LOSER despite the bulk of the movie showing these middle-aged characters back in high school, and the fact that the filmmakers figure
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Rating: 3.8 cats
Director: Andrew Niccol
Jason says: “Writer/director Andrew Niccol has never been a guy who had a problem with letting the audience know exactly what he is getting at with his movies, and that’s certainly the case when he sets his movies in the
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Ifa Isfansyah
Jason says: “I talked to folks who passed on THE GOLDEN CANE WARRIOR because the martial arts looked unimpressive in the trailer, which I suspect may be kind of unfair; they were probably cut to ribbons, and even if I
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Alex Gibney
Kyle says: “Many fans of the definitive turn of the century pop culture phenomenon SOUTH PARK point easily to one classic episode against which all else is measured: ‘Trapped in the Closet’ from November 2005. Stan is suspected of being
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3.9
Director: Han Yan
Jason says: “The ‘cancer comedy’ is a minefield as genres go; cancer’s no laughing matter but it’s not a difficult path from tragedy to absurdity to jokes, at least for some. That’s the path Xiong Dun took when she was
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Céline Sciamma
Chris says: “Obviously not a distaff take on Richard Linklater’s BOYHOOD — the French title is BANDE DE FILLES, which translates as ‘Group of Girls.’ Marieme (Karidja Touré), a timid sixteen-year-old living in mostly black, housing project-heavy Parisian suburb, drops
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Ronit Elkabetz | Shlomi Elkabetz
Starring: Eli Gornstein | Menashe Noy | Ronit Elkabetz | Sasson Gabai | Simon Abkarian
Michael says: “If the colloquial definition of insanity is ‘doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,’ then surely Vivane Amsalem is feeling pretty insane by the end of GETT: THE TRIAL OF VIVIANE AMSALEM. She’s probably
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Yu Ha
Jason says: “GANGNAM 1970 (or GANGNAM BLUES, the name under which it’s traveling the festival circuit) is the sort of movie where I tend to spend the first ten or fifteen minutes frantically trying to remember the seemingly dozens of
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 5 cats
Director: Karim Aïnouz
Kyle says: “FUTURO BEACH is in danger of being swallowed into the niche sinkhole of gay cinema, and being dismissed for a strict, even boring tri-partite formal structure, bookended by men on motorcycles. That would be a lamentable fate for
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