Tag: Private

Nicholas Connor’s Cotton Wool covers the universal hardships of being a child, a teenager, or a mother and specifically, having to be an adult at all of those stages. Connor bases his film as both a portrayal and a tribute to the 22,000 aged under nine and 243,000 aged under nineteen carers in England and… Continue reading Cotton Wool: In Fierce Defense Of People’s Value

Nathaniel Upshaw’s comedy Dead Ringer is a bottle film, designed to be all the more tense and claustrophobic through its unchanging visuals: the camera never shifts position, maintaining its low angle, two-shot framing throughout. The cast consists of an ageing mobster (Time Winters) and his rookie thug (Justin Avila), huddled over the trunk of a… Continue reading Dead Ringer: Fresh Spin On Crime Comedy

Raphael Dirani’s intent with Hello, My Sweet Boy is moving: to portray the heartbreak of a 30-something man coming out to his aged mother, sick with dementia.  Darrel’s parents live alone in a big house, stumbling around with fast passing thoughts and memories that refuse to stick. Yet, for all that this is painful, the film… Continue reading Hello, My Sweet Boy: Bittersweet Greetings Of Dementia

When you first watch Call The Shot, it may be easy to pick who the suicidal man is. The film does not explicitly say, but surely, the morose man in his wrinkled work clothes must be the one? It is a small surprise perhaps, but a surprise nonetheless, that director Dean Parker turns this first… Continue reading Call The Shot: Beguiling Mastery Over Story, People And The Audience

The thing about OJ Reyes’s That Thing I Had That One Time (TTIHTOT) is that it tries, really tries, to get at something insightful through its story of unplanned pregnancy, but gross, drawn-out shots of puke floating in a toilet, terrifyingly resembling faeces, with the protagonist’s face hovering over it takes the audience and shoots… Continue reading That Thing I Had That One Time: Navigating Adulting Complications

Paul Robinson’s A Vital Sign tackles a controversial subject, that of a religious suicide pact among a group of five. Spoiler: they go through with it. Robinson’s treatment uses a conventional narrative that succeeds in maintaining tension but what remains ambiguous is the stance of the film itself.  The film observes these characters from the… Continue reading A Vital Sign: Confused Examination Of Religious Suicide

Neither of the leads in Farbod Khoshtinat’s Two Little Boys is someone you can root for. The screenplay creates characters that are so deeply flawed and so far gone in their pursuit, they elicit only pity.  The titular two little boys are high schoolers Josh and Tyler, the bullied and the bully. In the introduction,… Continue reading Two Little Boys: Brutal Demonstration Of The Effects Of Homophobia

Eric J. Liddle’s second short Sunshine Periphery is in the same surrealist vein as his first, Mister Swolo. What distinguishes his second is the sheer magnitude it tackles, exploring a bewildering and as Liddle describes, fevered dream of a man at a crossroads in his life. Two things stick out about Sunshine Periphery from the… Continue reading Sunshine Periphery: Treating Introspection With Surrealism

Alain Deslongchamps’s Le Choix De Sofia (English: Sofia’s Choice, interesting choice of title) runs a double narrative, wildly different from each other on the surface: a marketing specialist fatigued by her commitment to the job, and the worldwide devastations of climate change. Yet the metaphorical comparison that Deslongchamps draws (rather skilfully) is a sensible one.… Continue reading Le Choix De Sofia: On The Two-Fold Effects Of Capitalism

Bryan Enk’s Push Up is named, on the surface, on one endearing moment between a couple: one drunkenly asks the other to do pushups and he complies, enthusiastic and affectionate. On the surface, nothing much happens in the film or to its two characters, Matt and Maggie. And yet this is a moving film, brimming… Continue reading Push Up: On Love Within Hate, And Vice Versa