REVIEW: Zeroville [2019]

Your head precedes you. An autistic architecture student at a seminary in Pennsylvania watches his first ever film (A Place in the Sun) and has an experience akin to hearing the voice of God. This new world is opened to Jerome “Vikar” Isaac and he decides he needs to be a part of it. So he travels to Hollywood with the model of a church he constructed under his arm, arriving in this wonderland of magic twenty years too late. The Hollywood of 1970 simply isn’t the same one that…

Read More

REVIEW: Miller’s Crossing [1990]

I’ll think about it. The mob is a business like any other. Leadership must be strong and decisive, employees must be loyal to a fault, and every once in a while you have to cut someone you like loose in order to not anger someone you might like less but definitely need more. Despite everything we learn as kids that ends up being useless, the concept of “choosing the lesser of two evils” will forever prove as useful as breathing and yet we have trouble reconciling such dilemmas due to…

Read More

REVIEW: Dumb and Dumber [1994]

“You sold my dead bird to a blind kid?” It’s the film that brought us the high concept, gross-out comedy sensibilities of Peter and Bobby Farrelly and it has some of the most memorable laughs of the 90s. The filmmaking brothers would go on to create a mixed bag of obnoxious, offensive, and hit or miss work that steadily grew tiresome while revealing they were for all intents and purposes one-trick ponies. Just because the trick wasn’t able to sustain the public’s love, however, doesn’t mean it wasn’t riotous at…

Read More

BNFF10 REVIEW: Hot Tamale [2006]

“You better know so Wonderbread” Between the serious faces portrayed on the poster and the heist gone wrong plot synopsis, I had no idea Hot Tamale was going to be as much of a comedy as it is. Beginning with the bizarre death of lead Harlan Woodriff’s father, the kooky family is huddled around the frozen corpse while the son stays in the background wondering if he’d ended up in the wrong family. It all has an air of drama—besides the inclusion of actors Harland Williams and Beth Grant—as we…

Read More

BNFF10 PREVIEW: The 4th Annual Buffalo Niagara Film Festival

Year four is here for the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival taking place at both Dipson’s Market Arcade Centre downtown and the Riviera Theatre in North Tonawanda. I’ve attended the past two entries and have been impressed by the quality of films and improvements made. 2009 saw the world premiere of Steve Coogan and Hillary Duff’s What Goes Up, a sub-par movie with only lackluster guests in attendance, but a cool event to be a part of anyway. To date, 2008’s The Cake Eaters and last year’s Boppin’ at the Glue…

Read More