In Aleppo, Syria, air strikes are a daily occurrence. The city relies on a volunteer group called the White Helmets who act as first responders on the ground after these attacks.
The Netflix original documentary short film The White Helmets follows members of this organization. Through a mix of Continue reading The White Helmets (2016) Short Film Review
Ah, the plight of the documentary short subject! One theater in my state decided to air these five nominees, and they only chose one showtime: 11:15 am on Saturday and Sunday.
Let’s just say I couldn’t make it.
Luckily a few of these films are available on online platforms. Extremis and The White Helmets are available on Netflix. Joe’s Violin is available through the New Yorker here. With a handful of the five under my belt, let’s try and figure this category out.
Continue reading Academy Awards Predictions 2017 – Best Documentary Short Film
Extremis, a documentary short film from Netflix, is the story of a hospital ICU. As much as the film paces and moves like a medical drama, it is distinctly and heart-wrenchingly real.
The film opens on a patient, breathing tube affixed, trying desperately just to communicate. The patient can’t write, nor make discernible letters in the air, and can barely point at letters on a sheet of paper. All the while the doctor is trying Continue reading Extremis (2016) Short Film Review
“How long can you live with memories?”
This is one of the first lines of Joe’s Violin, coming from the eponymous Joseph Feingold. It is an expression of his carefree attitude about donating one of his most prized possessions: a violin. What Joe’s Violin aims to do, however, is supplant that throwaway notion with the creation of new memories.
Joe’s story is one of Holocaust tragedy. At the age of 17, in eastern Poland, Feingold was taken by the Russians and put into a Siberian labor camp. Of the few things he had after his time in the camp his violin becomes, in retrospect, a Continue reading Joe’s Violin (2016) Short Film Review
Oscar weekend sees the wide release of three new films. Two of these three, as far as I am concerned, have received zero marketing. These would be the films Rock Dog (um…) and Collide (…what?). The third film, also the widest new release of the weekend, is Jordan Peele’s much anticipated and well-reviewed Get Out. The horror film stars Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams and is likely to make a splash this weekend.
Returning to the fight are LEGO Batman, Fifty Shades Darker, and The Great Wall. The LEGO Batman Movie, having won the box office in its first two weekends, is likely to remain somewhere in the top three, although anything could happen.
The Academy Awards are this Sunday, and as such it is fitting to take a look at one of the more overlooked categories: Best Animated Short Film. While the favorite to win is clearly Piper, although the short film categories always have a chance to hold an upset, it still is warranted to put a spotlight on all five films.
Borrowed Time is perhaps the Continue reading 2017 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts Breakdown Review
A woman named Elise (Jane Birkin) who lives by the train tracks with her pet bird, an irresponsible youth in a sports car, and a series of correspondences with an unseen train engineer are the backdrop of Switzerland’s La Femme et le TGV.
The film strikes a great tone of Continue reading La Femme et le TGV (2016) Short Film Review
An Algerian-born man (Hassam Ghancy) applies for French citizenship. At least, that’s what he thinks he’s there for. Instead, he becomes party to prejudiced politics and interrogation.
Ennemis Interieurs is a series of elongated conversation scenes between the man and the government official (Najib Oudghiri). They are scenes largely told in Continue reading Ennemis Interieurs (2016) Short Film Review
A Salvation Army volunteer (Malene Beltoft Olsen) struggling with an alcoholic mother (Vibeke Hastrup) and a homeless refugee (Prince Appiah) dealing with racism and an impoverished family in Ghana come together in Silent Nights, a short film whose title is a play on the somewhat irrelevant time of year in which the film takes place.
The film is a bitter examination of the underbelly with a sliver of a silver lining of heartfelt humanism. The doomed romance of the film is introduced as Continue reading Silent Nights (2016) Short Film Review
The first note I wrote down about A Cure for Wellness, which I wrote after the film’s opening scene, was as follows:
“Is A Cure For Wellness a masterfully shot slog?”
This notion came out of how the trailer clips and first scene of the film is shot and that I knew how long the film was going to be (this was, I should mention, my second film of the day). So my assumption going in was that this film was going to be a struggle between patience and style.
Is the film a well-shot slog? Well…yeah.
Rising white collar man (Dane DeHaan), referred to throughout the film only by his surname of Lockhart, takes hold of that next rung of the corporate ladder, and as a result is thrown into a legally questionable Continue reading A Cure for Wellness (2017) Movie Review
CineFiles Movie Reviews 