Movie Reviews

In Brief: The Twin Rivers Media Festival kicks off with the North Carolina premier of Scammerhead, winner of the Best Narrative Feature award at the 2015 Trenton Film Festival and Best Feature at the 2015 Berkeley Video & Film Festival along with receiving multiple other nominations and awards on the festival circuit. Indie writer-director Dan Zukovic (The Last Big Thing)…

In Brief: Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette (1986) — adapted by Berri and longtime Roman Polanski collaborator Gérard Brach from Marcel Pagnol’s novel (itself drawn from Pagnol’s 1953 film Manon of the Spring) — is really only half a film, since it is meant to be followed by Berri’s Manon of the Spring. Worry not, however, because the Hendersonville Film…

In Brief: In honor of Black History Month, the AFS presents a film from two icons of the Harlem Renaissance and early African-American cinema, Paul Robeson and Oscar Micheaux. Body and Soul (1925) was written, directed, produced and distributed by Micheaux and represents the screen debut of Robeson, who would go on to become a renowned…

The Story: Jackie Kennedy struggles to cope with her husband's death and maintain her composure under intensive public scrutiny in the weeks following JFK's assassination. The Lowdown: A moving emotional portrait that sheds new light on the internal landscape of an iconic American figure and the turmoil surrounding a pivotal moment in American history, earning Natalie Portman a…

The Story: This year's nominees in consideration for the Best Animated Short Academy Award. The Lowdown: While some are better than others (as usual), this year's batch of animated Oscar nominees is worth a look for anyone interested in short-form animation.

The Story: This year's collection of Academy Award nominees for Best Live-Action Short. The Lowdown: Three great films, one that's very good, and an absolute dog that should never have seen the light of day.

The Story: A boy raised on Mars escapes to Earth to track down his father. The Lowdown: A cornball teen romance mired in hokey, sentimental hogwash.

The Story: The demonic-girl-crawls-out-of-a-well video is back to kill more unsuspecting viewers, but this time she has the internet on her side. Also, her biological dad is revealed to have been a creep. Go figure. The Lowdown: An unnecessary sequel to a franchise I'd long considered dead, Rings contributes nothing of value to the mythos and somehow manages…

In Brief: I canceled The Sadist in November to make way for a bit of post-election counter-programming, although in retrospect, this might have been almost as appropriate as what I screened instead. We're finally getting back around to this creepy thriller about a madman with his finger on the trigger and a penchant for pushing people…

In Brief: Despite the controversy surrounding director Lasse Hallström's most recent film (A Dog's Purpose) and my personal disdain for the practices employed on set, I still have a soft-spot in my heart for My Life as a Dog (1985). The director's first mainstream success outside of Europe — unless you count ABBA: The Movie — My Life as…

In Brief: Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew (1967) wasn’t the first time this Shakespeare play was served up with a famous married couple in the lead roles. No, that honor goes to Sam Taylor’s 1929 version starring Hollywood royalty of that era, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. (And whether or not the main…

In Brief: In honor of my least favorite holiday (you'll notice I didn't devote a month's worth of programming to this one), the AFS will be screening Leo McCarey's classic romantic comedy, Love Affair, this Valentine's Day. With a script that vacillates between pithy humor and tear-jerking melodrama from Donald Ogden Stewart (The Philadelphia Story) and Delmer Daves…

The Story: The general history of the natural world, from the end of the last ice age to the present anthropocene, plays out through the biodiversity of a forest ecosystem. The Lowdown: A stunning visual spectacle with no shortage of purpose, this nature doc does more than simply record its subject — it draws the audience into the story.

The Story: Zombie slaying savant Alice returns to tie up loose ends by retrieving an antidote to the virus that has wiped out most of humanity. Like a lost set of car keys, it's been hidden in the same place the whole mess started fifteen years ago (she probably should have looked there first). The Lowdown: More of…

The Story: A gold prospector driven by a dream and a desire for approval gets embroiled in a scandal over a mine that might not be what it seems. The Lowdown: Based loosely on a true story but focused on a fictional character and set 15 years earlier than the events that inspired it, Gold is an amalgamation…

The Story: A dog journeys through successive reincarnate lifetimes before being reunited with his original owner. The Lowdown: An emotionally manipulative exercise in heartstring tugging that would have been reprehensible enough even without the recently revealed evidence of alleged animal cruelty on set.

In Brief: Most frequently referenced as the screen debut of a young Brooke Shields, writer-director Alfred Sole's 1976 religiously-themed proto-slasher Alice, Sweet Alice has justifiably built a cult following on the basis of its other merits — namely, a uniquely giallo-esque aesthetic heavily indebted to Hitchcock, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now. The film's heavily atmospheric sense of unrelenting…

In Brief: As a mere boy, I bumped into Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle on television — and didn’t like it. Many years later, I saw part of his Traffic — and didn’t like it. With that, I wrote off Tati’s work as something just not for me. And it was with that in mind that I faced seeing M. Hulot’s Holiday (from…

In Brief: In honor of Black History Month, the Hendersonville Film Society will be revisiting 42: The Jackie Robinson Story. When the film premiered in 2013, it seemed like a missed opportunity to do justice to an important story about a great man — and having recently rewatched Alfred E. Green's 1950 take on the tale starring Robinson…

In Brief: With all due respect to George Cukor’s 1954 version — and a somewhat grim nod to Frank Pierson’s rock-star variant from 1976 — William A. Wellman’s original 1937 A Star Is Born is the essential Hollywood cautionary tale. It may owe something to Cukor’s 1932 film What Price Hollywood?, but it’s really its own animal. Changing the…

The Story: Famed Chilean poet and leftist politician Pablo Neruda flees the country, pursued by a relentless police inspector. The Lowdown: A fantastical take on a venerable historic figure, director Pablo Larraín and screenwriter Guillermo Calderón impart an unexpected sense of black humor to a significant subject.