Well intentioned, but narratively and stylistically limp, writer-director Matt Ruskin’s crime drama Boston Strangler brings no new ideas of its own to the overcrowded true crime inspired genre.
Alessandro Nivola
The lazy, predictable, and uninspired espionage thriller The Red Sea Diving Resort gets off to a start so horrifically flat and laughably laboured that most savvy moviegoers (meaning anyone who knows how a story should be told, framed, or executed) would probably shut it off within the first ten minutes. It never fully recovers.
I’m not quite sure what to make of the oddball, bloody, deadpan black comedy The Art of Self-Defense, but I’m positive that it’s the kind of film that’s going to stick with me for a long time.
Disobedience, the English language debut for Oscar winning Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio, is a restrained, exceptionally acted, and nuanced character study, but also a slight step back for him in terms of difficulty and effectiveness.
New this week, Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx star in the action-thriller, Law Abiding Citizen; and in the biopic Coco Avant Chanel, Audrey Tautou portrays one of fashion’s most important women.
Two films concerning the life and times of legendary French fashion designer Coco Chanel are being released this year. While one focuses on her mid-career affair with composer Igor Stravinsky, Coco Avant Chanel, however, centres on her early struggle, fighting tooth and nail to make a life for herself independently in a time when a woman’s security came either from marriage or prostitution.