Stanger With My Face International Film Festival is a festival that concentrates on female-make film, with a definite penchant to horror and life explorations. Each edition brings current films and issues as well as older films and a bunch of shorts to their audience while also pushing them to think about some of the issues women face in life as well as in moviemaking.
Category Archives: Movie Reviews
24×36: A Movie About Movie Posters (2016)
Back in the eighties and nineties, I spent much of my youth in and out of video stores. During the weekends when there was a guarantee there’d be nothing on television we’d trek to the video store in our neighborhood and I always drifted to the horror section. One of the highlights of going through the horror section was perusing through the boxes and gaping in disbelief at all the amazing and often creative box art. Back then artists had to sell a movie with one striking image, and they often did it very well. The box art was only a small result of the art of movie posters, and how once upon a time movie posters were a symbol of a movie that were used to sell their respective cinematic properties, and create lasting memories.
Dearest Sister (2016) [Stranger With My Face International Film Festival 2017]
A young woman leaves home to go work for her cousin the city as this one is gradually going blind. As the cousin’s sight leaves her, she get a gift of being able to see and communicate with the dead. Her newly arrived cousin has difficulty adapting and may not be going about things the best way.
Life’s a Beach: 10 Movie Collection (DVD)
Whether we like it or not, summer is right around the corner, and Mill Creek Entertainment is helping movie lover ring in the season with a marathon of ten great beach and summer movies. Well, great is a broad term, as most of these movies are goofy eighties nonsense and action schlock you can enjoy with some beers and nachos. At fifteen hours, this collection is compiled in to three DVD’s and packs in some new titles along with Mill Creek’s more prominent comedy titles.
Violet (2017)
A teen witnesses a murder and must come to terms with what he saw. Through his interactions with friends and family, he attempts to but can’t seem to find the way.
Violet was written and directed by Bas Devos, for whom this is a first feature according to IMDB. This film is interesting in terms of how it develops around the lead that saw the murder. It’s a simple story with strong emotional impact in terms of a teen dealing with grief, survivor guilt, and other hard feelings to handle at such at any age, especially as a teen. The film explores this with mostly following the lead’s daily life and what he sees while trying to work through this. The story has good, interesting elements but what really shine are the lead, its actor, and the visuals.
Batman & Bill (2017)
For a long time, debates have raged in the art world about what can be considered creating a property and who can be credited as a true creator of a creative property. For decades, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko were feuding over who were the rightful mind behind Spider-Man, as Lee insisted Spider-Man was his idea, while Ditko insisted he conceptualized Spider-Man, thus making him the creator. What “Batman & Bill” seeks to do is boldly putting an end to the debate that’s been raging in the comic book medium for almost a century. Directors Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce simultaneously tells the tragic and often heartbreaking story of Bill Finger, the long uncredited creator of Batman, and how a man named Bob Kane stole everything Finger ever had from the credit, and the massive profits, right down to the very essence of his self-respect.
Hardware Wars (1978)
With only one movie under its belt in the series, and little resources, Ernie Fosselius’s “Hardware Wars” is a solid fan film for “Star Wars” and the first ever made. Fosselius doesn’t try to make a movie so much as a mock movie trailer that runs down the events of the first film with humorous results. It’s filled with literally nothing but satire about the original movie, even skirting copyrights by altering everything enough to avoid legal trouble.