By Elias Savada. Love Type D is a light, silly satire that could use a little more development in its wacky plotline. Still, the feature debut from writer-director Sasha Collington does have its moments until it rushes to solve one big scientific riddle with a bit of madcap ho hum in its finish. This British […]
By Elias Savada. World premiering at the DC Independent Film Festival, director-writer Kevin Tran’s feature debut brews up a disconcerting cross-sampling of concerned residents in a middle-class, suburban New York City neighborhood. They want to think they are in Mayberry (where no one locks their doors), but one wonders why they don’t in today’s world. […]
By Elias Savada. Director Flavio Alves’s indie feature The Garden Left Behind is all about dreamers, whether they are transgender people looking for acceptance, or illegal immigrants hoping that armed authorities are more than an arm’s distance away. Alves seriously explores the trials and tribulations of a young Mexican trans woman’s hopes and aspirations in […]
By Elias Savada. The stars are blondly aligned: Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, as three of the many victims of the “real scandal” at Fox News on which Charles Randolph’s screenplay is based. John Lithgow goes on the broadside as Roger Ailes, the ugly sleaze of a human for whom the actor is enveloped […]
By Elias Savada. April Wright likes to get the word out about grand things. As with Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the American Drive-In Movie (available on Amazon Prime and iTunes), her thoughtful 2013 ode to the outdoor moviegoing experience, she has offered up another loving, exhaustive tribute to the large architectural wonders of […]
By Elias Savada. Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, please step aside…at least for 91 minutes…and allow the world to shine a light on a man unknown to most of us, but who wholeheartedly deserves our attention and admiration. He’s not your big name science guy and probably doesn’t contemplate the vast interstellar universe, but […]
By Elias Savada. I wonder if lawyer jokes were invented for Roy M. Cohn, the notorious attorney at the center of this perfectly timed documentary about the man who spent decades causing mayhem in the legal profession and creating turmoil for many who crossed his path during the last half of the 20th century. I also […]
By Elias Savada. H.G. Wells, move over. In the century-and-a-quarter since his science fiction novella popularized the notion of time travel, the theme of moving back and forth through a temporal vortex, fourth dimensional rupture, or other weird-sounding description has fascinated us. Whether long term and short visits to the past and/or future, the movies […]
By Elias Savada. There’s a swarth of idiocy running through this so-called dark comedy, but for the most part it fails at being what I had hoped for: funny. Plenty of drollness, though that falls flat, too. Director Daniel Schienert (half of the team known as the Daniels, who made the eccentric 2016 critic favorite […]
By Elias Savada. No, Linda Ronstadt is not dead. While Parkinson’s Disease has sadly removed her from the public and concert stage for over a decade, the joy of her music is heartwarmingly captured in this greatest-hits-and-more salute from award-winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. The extraordinarily talented artist, now retired in San Francisco, […]
