It’s always good to see an indie success story and Bryce McGuire’s is the latest. After delivering the pretty creepy short “Night Swim” in 2014, McGuire was able to develop it in to a feature film and, ironically, mid-way through it I found myself thinking “This would work better as a short.” I wasn’t trying for sarcasm, it’s just that “Night Swim” presents only a seed of a potentially scary horror film that never actually feels fully fleshed out or extensively realized. Its penchant for ambiguity is its big downfall as it’s a victim to so many of the typical haunted house tropes, banal fake outs, and clumsy ghost scares, without ever trying to re-invent the wheel.
Tag Archives: Drama
A Thousand and One (2023)
In as much as it is a film about a mother and her son, “A Thousand and One” is also a movie about the rising tide of gentrification in New York City. This adds a layer of absolute tension between Inez and her son Terry because as they’ve hidden out for years within their city, now it’s grown and pushed them out so much that they’ve officially run out of places to set up their lives in. So much of the movies around New York in the modern age have been about the looming specter of gentrification and we witness it in real time, the idea of the old New York becomes more and more just a relic of a bygone era.
Dress Code (2022)
I had a lot of respect for Joseph Pupello’s desire to deliver a gangster picture that’s less about gangsters and more about our personal lives. It’s rough around the edges, and the screenplay by Peter Panagos isn’t entirely cohesive, but they do manage to concoct an interesting storyline for a central character who is being pulled in all kinds of obligations. The one big goal in his a life involving mobsters, and assassinations, and a pregnant wife is to live as the person he really wants to be, and that makes his struggle pretty turbulent.
The Allnighter (2022)
I’ll admit, I didn’t think I would like Aimee Graham’s arthouse drama, mainly because the premise is kind of bizarre. It begins as this kind of weird night out with two random people, then devolves in to a car theft and odd detours, and then transforms in to this pretty hypnotizing drama about two kindred spirits. Despite the narrative that feels like it goes literally everywhere, “The Allnighter” is thankfully not hindered by this one caveat. Truth be told, “The Allnighter” is altogether pretty stellar, and it’s a film that kept me hooked right through the very end.
Our Top Ten Films of 2023
It’s been a crazy year for the movies, and it’s been a crazy year for Hollywood. There was Barbenheimer, the massive SAG-AFTRA/WGA strike, the continued streaming wars, the decline in the popularity of superhero movies, the end of the DCEU, the phasing out of physical media in major chain stores, and twenty five years after “Family Matters” ended, Steve Urkel got his own animated movie.
What a long, strange trip it’s been.
Here are Our Top Ten Movies of 2023.
Please to remember this is our opinion, and only our opinion, not gospel. But we encourage you to let us know your top ten movies of the year or what other nineties icon you think will get an animated movie next.
Our Five Choice Indie Features of 2023
It’s been an interesting year and we’ve manage to cover a few of the usual film festivals and found some favorites along the way. We were thankfully able to compensate for last year by really digging our heels in to the indie movies and festivals, and we’ve combed over some really talented directors, and writers.
These are five of the best indie feature films that we saw in 2023.
Our Five Choice Indie Shorts of 2023
It’s been an interesting year and we’ve manage to cover a few of the usual film festivals and found some favorites along the way. We were thankfully able to compensate for last year by really digging our heels in to the indie movies and festivals, and we’ve combed over some really talented directors, and writers.
These are five of the best short films we saw in 2023.