REVIEW: Rules Don’t Apply [2016]

“You’re an exception” Eighteen years after Bulworth and fifteen after Town & Country (his last time directing and acting for a feature film respectively), Warren Beatty returns to the big screen with a fictionalized biography of Howard Hughes forty years in the making. It’s a passion project and vanity project: two endeavors worthy of an auspicious return to the spotlight even if the latter isn’t always the best decision for retaining a renowned legacy. Will Rules Don’t Apply taint peoples’ image of him? No. It’s not going to mark any…

Read More

REVIEW: Careful What You Wish For [2016]

“This guy looks like he’d hit a child” The real mystery is how Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum‘s Careful What You Wish For got itself a theatrical release in the first place—no matter how limited. I’m not surprised Starz Digital is handling distribution, though, since it feels exactly like a late night pay cable ticket sanitized to an R-rating for lustful eroticism rather than actual chemistry, nudity, or plausibility. Sometimes thrillers of the “youthful stalker hits the sexual jackpot” variety can at least be entertaining in an ironic way, but that’s unfortunately…

Read More

REVIEW: Repo! The Genetic Opera [2008]

“All debts are paid at the opera tonight” Blood, gore, goth, and … opera? If Darren Lynn Bousman is behind the camera, yes, they meld together into a passion project for all to experience. He can thank the success of the Saw franchise, which he directed three installments, for allowing him to get the financing and support to put Repo! The Genetic Opera into theatres, (even if it didn’t come to my hometown). The middle third of a planned trilogy of rock-horror, the film takes place in a future where…

Read More