REVIEW: The Sunlit Night [2020]

Maybe it was never really that fragile. The usual rom-com formula is as follows: the lead breaks-up with their significant other, escapes to a far-flung place to pick up the pieces, and finds true love waiting. We’ve seen it countless times and always sigh when the fateful yet unlikely happily-ever-after proves itself to be another co-dependent Hollywood victory where romance trumps independence. So it’s hard to look past a film daring to travel beneath such fairy tale surfaces and get at the heart of what those types of escapes truly…

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REVIEW: Bølgen [The Wave] [2015]

“Can people in the area be warned in time?” I don’t love disaster films. In many cases the genre becomes a venue for explosive visual effects at the detriment of quality acting and resonate emotion. Hollywood loves including scientists for an environmentalist commentary, military personnel for a cold-hearted government angle, and the supposed little guy turned hero saving family. It’s always too much with the heroes always proving to be brawny fireman or first responders with God-complexes complementing their selfless empathy “in the moment”. We never get an actual “little…

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