THE FILM

In a day and age when so many filmmakers lean on camp to pay tribute to the monster movies of old, "Monster Beach Party A-Go-Go" plays surprisingly straight. A valentine to the creature features of the 1960s, the film has an unexpectedly low-key presence, content to tinker with a few traditions and tug at some goofy genre habits, but refuses to squeal, accepting the challenge of recreating beach party horror with refreshing semi-seriousness.

Theodora (Claire Robinson), Carol (Mary Kraft), and Jody (Cynthia Evans) make up The Violas, an all-girl garage band touring the Southeast beach circuit as they work toward stardom. When their car breaks down in a rural town, the ladies are forced to spend the night, desperate to make their way to a crucial Florida gig. However, a stalled car is the least of their worries when local cops and scientist John (Jonathan Green) ...Read the entire review

REVIEW

Oh, I had such high hopes for this 2008 genre mashup. For starters there's a lead role for Tiffany Shepis, a true B queen if there ever was one, an always enjoyable firecracker presence even when a film of hers is somehow less than memorable. As a rule I would follow Shepis anywhere cinematically (and elsewhere), and the notion of her as one-half of the infamous bankrobbing duo doing battle with Dracula seemed like a giddy dream come true. Then there's the grand promise of the title itself, a high-concept matchup that conjures up all sorts of staggering possibilities of the high-camp B-movie glory variety.

All of that implied awesomeness unfortunately falls a little short in the delivery department, as writer/director Timothy Friend seems to forget to bring everyone together until the rushed third act, and up until that point the film is sadly rather uneventful. While ther...Read the entire review

"Kings of the Evening" is a heartfelt story about a group of African-Americans trying to make their way in the South during the great depression. Inspired by actual events, the film manages to bring to life a story filled not only with harsh realities, but also glimpses of hope during even the harshest times. The film opens with Homer Hobbs (Tyson Beckford) working on the chain gang after stealing worn-out tires that no one would buy. He's released and makes his way to a nearby town where he meets Benny Potter (Reginald T. Dorsey), who offers to help find him a place to stay, as well as prospects for work in exchange for a commission. In need of a place to stay, Homer agrees and they make their way to Gracie's boarding house.

It's at Gracie's (Lynn Whitfield) where everyone comes together to live and act as a family of sorts. Also at Gracie's is Clarence (Glynn Turman), who hasn't paid rent...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Written by Brad Tiemann and directed by Michael W. Watkins, Circle should have been a considerably more interesting film than it turns out to be. The film tells the story of a killer named James Bennett (Sila Weir Mitchell) who is arrested for a few grisly murders only to escape shortly thereafter from the hospital he was locked up in. A pair of cops, Richard and Kathy (Peter Onorati and Kinsey Packard), are sent out to bring him back in before he kills again, hoping to figure out if there's any sort of method to his madness at all. As they start putting together the pieces of the puzzle, they start to figure out that not only do Bennett's bizarre ritualistic murders have ties to ancient Greek mythology and complex mathematical formulas, but that there may be someone else involved in the killings too.

Meanwhile, a bunch of students studying the Bennett case decide t...Read the entire review

The Movie
The more I watch documentaries focusing on how religion has in some way negatively impacted the lives of many gay people, the more I realize how lucky I've been. While I always faced fear of rejection while growing up--a near-paralyzing evil that had a hold on me until my mid-20s-- I never once felt ashamed of the person I was, even if it took me what seemed like forever to tell everyone. I went to church as a child, but never really felt its power like many others did. But I never felt fearful while I was there, and my anxiety about coming out to my family was based more on my own paranoia than anything the...Read the entire review

The Product:
It must have something to do with all this "health care" talk. Whatever the case, we have been inundated recently with films where medical needs - and the ability/inability to pay for their experimental, new age spiffy scientific breakthroughs - become the basis for a surreal sci-fi cautionary tale. In the installment plan category, we've had both Repo: The Genetic Opera and the new Jude Law actioner Repo Men. Both deal with overdue payments, expensive designer organs, and the home surgical theater of collection. On the slightly more thoughtful, low budget side of things, lies Re-Generation. Originally entitled The Limb Salesman, this 2004 production offered a post-Apocalyptic Canadian wilderness where new body part can be purchased by those in power. As with the other films like it, there are subplots involving love, the lack of human dignity, and th...Read the entire review

The Movie:
It's amazing how much some solid writing and great performances can lift a film. A few minutes into Islander, I was ready to give up on it. One of the film's early scenes continually brought me out of the moment with distracting shots and edits. Two characters watch on in close-ups that don't feel at all organic to the wide shots in rest of the scene, in which fisherman turn in their daily catch. The visuals aren't completely amateurish by any means--certain individual shots are even quite lovely--but their clunky assembly belied the film's low budget, and I prepared to suffer through an awkward 100 minutes.

But then something surprising happened. I started to become genuinely involved in the characters, their fragile natures and uncertain futures. The small Maine island community in which the film takes place came to life, as did Eben, a troubled man played by Thomas Hi...Read the entire review

To clarify: by "undead," they mean vampires, not zombies. Don't worry, the main character had to ask, too.

Jordan Galland's comedy "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead" is almost as dementedly clever as the Tom Stoppard play that inspired its title. The script is a tangled web of ideas and references that constantly fold over upon themselves, displaying both sharp literary intelligence and tongue-in-cheek pop silliness; it even goes meta by name-checking Stoppard in the story's play-within-the-movie - then showing a hipster audience smirking at the "clever" reference-joke.

Jake Hoffman plays Julian Marsh, a twentysomething slacker and incurable womanizer who lives in the spare room of his dad's medical office. He takes a job at a low-rent off-Broadway theater, directing "Ros...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Esmeraldero or Emerald Cowboy is the supposedly true story of out of work Japanese American airplane mechanic Eishy Hayata who comes to Columbia with nothing in the seventies and rises to be the largest emerald broker in the world. The scattershot approach and the somewhat self serving storyline make this gritty and realistic film something less than it could have been.

Eishy Hayata is a young Japanese American who travels to Columbia in search of adventure in the seventies, and decides that he wants to be an emerald cowboy, or esmeraldero. Esmeralderos are emerald brokers, sometimes mine owners, speculators and salesmen. Emerald territory butts up against rebel territory, and the trade is very dangerous, full of cut throats and cheats, ready to kill a naïve esmeraldero at the drop of a hat. Hayata is helped along at first by the lovely Susana, played by the actual...Read the entire review

The Film:
Poetry is not exactly my thing. I mean don't get me wrong, because I can read a poem and appreciate it, and even hear a poem and appreciate it. But when it comes to listening to poets read their poetry, more often than not I feel like I'm being forced to observe self-absorbed douchebags verbally masturbating on a stage, and watching anyone masturbate, in any way, simply is not my thing. So it goes to stand to reason that as much as I don't like watching poets recite their poetry, I'm really not going to like watching a movie about poets reciting poetry.

Taking the notion that somehow the world of poetry slams and the brooding, emotionally crippled poets who lurk therein can be remotely interesting, Fighting Words sets itself up to be the Karate Kid III of poetry movies. Jeff Stearns stars as Jake Thompson, a brooding poet, who also happens to be an emotional cripple...Read the entire review

So this is what happens when a couple of stoners try to make a post-apocalyptic kung fu flick.

The movie is called "Black Pearl," unless you're looking at the DVD box, which lists it instead as "10,000 A.D.: Legend of the Black Pearl" on the front and as "Black Pearl: 10,000 A.D." on the back. It turns out distribution company Indican was trying to spin the low budget effort into a possible "10,000 BC" knock-off but stopped caring about halfway through.

It's the far future, long after we've bombed ourselves back to the stone age. The planet is now populated by dreadlocked white guys who, between Phish concerts and rounds of hackey sack, beat the snot out of each other in poorly edited fight scenes. Yes, this is another film where everyone thinks they're an awesome martial arts superhero while the filmmakers are stuck having to hide their actual mediocre talents behind clumsy camera angles...Read the entire review

I bet someone who's taken Ecstasy would tell me I just don't "get" co-writer/director Billy Samoa Saleebey's Rolling, which follows a group of twentysomethings in Los Angeles all addicted to the drug's special brand of high, and admittedly, I don't live in Los Angeles, I don't go to clubs, and I don't do- drugs (gee, aren't I boring?), so I know almost nothing about any of the three "scenes" presented in the movie. Even if I did, however, I doubt knowing the lifestyle would change the amount of cinematic masturbation drowning the film's first half. Saleebey switches between a vaguely magnolia-style group of intersecting characters and, even worse, fake "interviews" with the characters, which are inherently dislikable and performed by the cast with the worst kind of artificial realism.

The film mostly takes place over the course of a single night, set around a warehouse party, then conti...Read the entire review

The Film:
There is no way you can watch the documentary If I Die Tonight and come away not feeling something. More likely than not, the feelings you'll have will be conflicted, which is a testimony to the complexity of the issues presented in the film, and the lengths filmmaker Seyi works to address the topic of police brutality. In a lesser film, by a lesser director, the already volatile subject of police brutality could easily be presented as a one-sided screed that serves the agenda of the filmmaker. But Seyi's agenda is to get people thinking about the subject matter in ways they may have never considered before.

The primary focus of If I Die Tonight is the victims of police brutality and the advocates that work to ensure accountability on the part of the cops. The most notorious examples profiled in the film are the shooting death of Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant ...Read the entire review

The Film:
It is at times like this that I don't like being a film critic, because I know that no matter how hard I try, whatever I write is going to sound negative. And while I didn't dislike director Tyrone Dixon's 8 Wheels and Some Soul Brotha Music--and in fact, I got exactly what it was he was trying to do--the film repeatedly came up short in too many areas for me to see this cinematic cup as being anything other than half empty, even though I wanted to see it as half full.

8 Wheels is an examination of roller skating culture in the African-American community, and that idea is great. No, I take that back. That idea is brilliant. Even though I went to skate jams when I was kid, flailing around and falling on my ass while the dj spun late seventies and early eighties funk, soul and hip-hop, and as I marveled at all the other black kids that could do what I could not (which...Read the entire review

Though flawed when viewed with critical eyes, Fallen Idol: The Yuri Gagarin Conspiracy (2008) is a fascinating documentary contending that the Cold War cosmonaut hailed as the first man in space actually wasn't - that his mission was thrown together at the last minute on the heels of a catastrophic failure days before, and further suggests Gagarin didn't die in a 1968 jet crash but murdered by the KGB when he became a liability in a post-Khrushchev Soviet Union.

Though reportedly shot and mastered in 1080i/24 frames-per-second high-definition, we received what's billed as a "special 90-minute 'pre-release' DVD" and thus have no idea what to expect of the final product. The DVD this reviewer watched was unenhanced 4:3 matted to 1.78:1 and rife with combing issues, but presumably the final product will be up to professional standards.

　

Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/37162 Thu, 07 May 2009 23:16:01 UTC Rent It

The Film:
Several years ago, I recommended the documentary Shanghai Ghetto to a good friend of mine. Shanghai Ghetto was about Jews who escaped the holocaust, and found refuge in China. My friend, who happens to be Jewish, said to me, "The last thing I want to see is another movie about the holocaust," which at the time struck me as being a bit cold-blooded and cynical. And then I found myself watching the Civil Rights documentary Dare Not Walk Alone, and the one thing running through my head was, "The last thing I want to see is another movie about Civil Rights and racism in America."

In all fairness to Dare Not Walk Alone, I just recently re-watched Eyes on the Prize, the landmark, unequalled 14-part documentary on the Civil Rights movement. It doesn't get much better than Eyes on the Prize, and watching Dare Not Walk Alone so soon afterwa...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/34209 Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:54:26 UTC Rent It

The Movie:

As the actor Sir Donald Wolfit (though it has been attributed to manyothers also) is supposed to have famously quipped when, in his death bed,he was asked how he was feeling "Dying is easy.  Comedy is hard." Truer words have rarely been spoken.  Watching a great comedy it seemsso easy.  String together a bunch of funny lines, add a humorous plot,and watch the audience fall out of their chairs laughing.  It doesn'talways work that way however.  Case in point:  the animated filmThe Chosen One.  While it has an interesting premise and sometalented voice actors the movie never really gets off the ground but managesto crash during the ending anyway.

Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/34163 Sat, 02 Aug 2008 06:39:18 UTC Skip It

Dateline! 2001. Everyone was groaning that the price of gas had risen all the way up to a buck and change a gallon, thirteen year old girls were still going batshit over boy bands, and cameras started rolling on The Mallory Effect, the first real acting role by supermodel Josie Maran. Okay, now flash forward six years. The sticker price on gas has more than tripled, I...don't even know what those damnfool kids are listening to anymore, and...hey, The Mallory Effect! The movie never did pick up a distributor to give it so much as a blink-and-you-woulda-missed-it theatrical run, but it did finally limp onto DVD in '07. After years of making the online rounds with no sign of the flick in sight, here I sit with The Mallory Effect at lon...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/34123 Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:48:29 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

With their feature debut directorial effort, husband and wife filmmaking team Pi Ware and Susan Kraker have delivered an interesting psychological drama that, although made on a microscopic budget, is definitely worth a watch.

Hilary (Mary Thornton) and Soledad (Ronne Orenna) are friends who live at a commune out in the deserts surrounding Phoenix, Arizona. When the film beings, the pair are planning to move to Flagstaff where Hillary will work as an agent for Soledad, who hopes to make it as an artist. They pack their bags and get ready for the trip only to find that their truck isn't working. Hillary decides that the pair can borrow her brother Louis' (Patrick Belton) car. They head over to his apartment, which is a total disaster area, just as he's about to kill himself.

Hillary obviously changes her travel plans to try and take care of her brother and Soledad sta...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/34043 Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:57:59 UTC Rent It

The Film:
If there is one thing that can be said with any degree of certainty about writer-director Chris Chan Lee's Undoing it is that the film has an undeniable quality of craftsmanship that is enough to make the film worthy of checking out. On the flipside, that same level of craftsmanship is not always consistent, making the film a mix of finely realized moments and missed opportunities. The result is a film that goes from engaging to annoying as easily as it does poetic to plodding.

Sung Kang stars as Samuel, a low level gangster who returns to Los Angeles after a year-long absence. Samuel's hasty departure from his stomping ground came on the heels of the death of his best friend Joon (Leonardo Nam), who ends up on the wrong side of some bullets after he foolishly gets involved with drug dealers. Samuel's return to LA is an attempt to make the wrong things right. This includes...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/33315 Thu, 22 May 2008 00:50:15 UTC Recommended

The Product:
Race - a difficult, demanding subject. Prejudice is problematic for many obvious reasons, especially within the realm of entertainment. Hate-spewing characters create their own instant associations, and reactions. Gone are the days when Archie Bunker could run the gamut of insensitive slurs and audiences laughed. Indeed, the issue of ethnicity and the bifurcated nature of the human response to same have driven an international discussion, but few cinematic insights. The reason is simple - a filmmaker must finesse the subject less they be accused of pandering to one side (or God help them, the "other"). Pariah decides to take a more confrontational approach. By dealing with skinheads in Los Angeles circa 1998, writer/director Randolph Kret gets the subject matter scrutiny out of the way right up front. Yet as with any discussion of bigotry, the causes get lost in a legitim...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/32681 Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:46:00 UTC Recommended

I wasn't familiar with The Stunt People before reviewing Contour. They are, name says it all, a crew of martial artists-acrobats running around San Francisco making their own little short films and features. You can check them out here. Filmed in 2006, they first sold Contour through their website. This year it has been picked up for wider release via Indican Pictures.

This is the kind of film where Stunt Person Eric Jacobus gets a lot of credits (star/writer/director) but being a $5,000 film that everyone made during their spare time (according to the extras, literally, being lucky to get peanuts) you can safely say it was a collaborative group effort. That budget is the real key here. The only ambition is to have some fun, entertain, do the best they can with very little means, so don't expect a top notch production. The action, writing,...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/31601 Wed, 05 Dec 2007 03:53:32 UTC Rent It

"Fakers" is pleasant, passable entertainment, even if it's all too lightweight. It's a caper involving con men and art forgeries, and while its central concept is slick enough to win over fans of the genre, there's just so little to it that it almost instantly fades from memory. It's a film that goes through the motions - doublecrosses, switcheroos, a couple of close calls - but adds nothing else. It's paper thin.

Yet for most of the film, "paper thin" works. The adventure is barebones enough that the whole thing breezes by on charm and energy, a scant 85 minute run time not bothering with such things as elaboration. We're in, we're out, we get a nifty caper somewhere in the middle, and the sheer economy of it makes for enjoyable afternoon viewing.

The story finds young grifter wannabe Nick (Matthew Rhys) tangled up with an overdue debt to a local mob boss (Art Malik); Nick must pay £50,...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/30800 Tue, 02 Oct 2007 12:12:37 UTC Rent It

THE MOVIE

"Screen Door Jesus" is an overlooked, ignored gem. I almost said "forgotten," but that's not true. Anyone who's actually seen it isn't likely to forget it anytime soon.

Crafted like a sprawling Robert Altman film, it has dozens of characters occupying the small town of Bethlehem, Texas, where religion plays a part in everyone's lives. What makes it different from most films about small Southern towns, though, is that the religion is treated intelligently and knowingly, rather than merely being used as a shorthand method of describing someone. (How many movies feature characters summed up as "narrow-minded Christian from the South"?)

The central event is that old Miss Harper (Cynthia Dorn) has discovered a shape on her screen door that looks like Jesus. Soon her front yard is overrun by pilgrims eager to see the Lord and worship at His screen door image. The whole town'...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/30331 Mon, 10 Sep 2007 03:46:47 UTC Skip It

The Movie:
As a critic, I have endured an unthinkable amount of bad cinema. Some films can be unbearable, others so bad they're entertaining. However, the worst type of bad films are those that are a chore to sit through. "Three Walls" falls into this classification.

The story: A documentary filmmaker named Chandrika decides to make a film about 3 particular inmates: Jaggu the poetic lawyer, a man named Nagya who is convinced he is innocent, and the con artist Ishaan who has a history of breaking out of prisons. Does Chandrika have a secret reason behind making the docu? Can she uncover the truth about certain inmates innocence? All is revealed in the end.

The root of the problem lies within the cut and dry/routine script by Nagesh Kukundoor. The story, characters are laid out within 20 minutes. Before the revelatory coincidental over-the-top twist end sequence in the final 10 minutes, ...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/30268 Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:34:35 UTC Highly Recommended

The Product:
One of the joys of reviewing DVDs for a living/hobby/obsession is the occasional discovery of something really outstanding. It doesn't happen often enough, and most of the time, a reviewer sees nothing but mindnumbing, skull soaking sameness. It's a miserable mantra - nothing is great. Nothing is awful. It like a flatlining EKG - no emotion...no excitement...no life whatsoever. So when we witness something new and novel, there is a tendency to go overboard, to praise the perception right out of the evaluation. This newly discovered gem may not be the second coming of cinema, but we react so simply because we've been lulled into a sense of substandard complacency, and latch onto anything that seems real, inventive, or original. It is safe to say, however, that The Legend of God's Gun is not just one of these kneejerk joy-fests. Instead, pals and filmmaking partners Mike Bru...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/30260 Tue, 04 Sep 2007 06:55:53 UTC Rent It

The Movie:
One of the aggravating aspects about screenplays is that many screenwriters tend to stick to conventional storytelling techniques. The reason I admire writers like David Lynch and Charlie Kaufman is that they think outside the box and approach storytelling in a ground breaking and inspiring manner. Writer/director David Morwick sadly winds up going down the same tired old route full of cliches with this film "Little Erin Merryweather."

The story: After being abused as a child, a disturbed young woman exacts her revenge on young male college students. Peter and two of his friends/fellow students, and a teacher begin to investigate the grisly murders only to discover who the killer is far too late.

"Little Erin Merryweather" is first and foremost a cut above 99% of indie horror films. Compared to some of the flicks Lionsgate is releasing straight-to-dvd, this is an Oscar winner...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/29829 Wed, 15 Aug 2007 17:50:06 UTC Recommended

The Movie:

Amid the firestorm over illegal immigration, advocates on both sides of the issue can easily let political discourse overwhelm the humanity involved. Documentaries are particularly helpful in this regard, lending a human face and voice to a public debate not likely to be resolved anytime soon.

El Inmigrante doesn't contribute much insight about how to tackle the problem of illegal immigration. What it does provide, however, is an up-close and personal look at the porous U.S.-Mexico border and the sometimes deadly consequences of crossing it. In particular, the filmmakers cast light on the case of Eusebio de Haro Espinosa, a young Mexican national killed in May, 2000, while he was trying to rejoin his girlfriend and baby daughter in San Antonio. De Haro, who was sneaking back into the U.S. after having been deported, made the mistake of asking for water at the Kinn...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/27655 Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:18:17 UTC Rent It

The Movie

The average movie sets up its own reality and then sticks to the rules of that reality. The exceptions are films where we learn that reality isn't what it seems, such as any movie where it was all a dream. Most dramas are set in the real world, and thus, the characters acts as if they are in the real world, even if they do odd things. But, when a character does something incredibly unrealistic (or something which makes little sense), it pulls me out of the story. Such a scene occurs very early in the foreign film Moonlight and for me, it was all downhill from there.

As Moonlight opens, we witness two disturbing events. First, an adolescent Boy (Hunter Bussemaker) (we never learn his name), who is being used as a drug "mule" is shot and left for dead in the woods. Then, Claire (Laurien Van den Broeck), an adolescent girl who lives in a large house, hav...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/27604 Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:11:24 UTC Skip It

The Movie

It's been said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. (And if you've seen the film Highway to Hell, then you've seen an hilarious sight-gag based on this quote.) This comes from the idea that the wicked claim that they are going to do something, but never follow through with it. In a similar vein, the road to movie hell is often paved with good ideas. There are a slew of movies which have an awesome concept, but simply can't close the deal. Cruel World is such a movie.

Edward Furlong stars in Cruel World as Philip Markham, a man who was rejected by Catherine (Jaime Pressly) on a reality show similar to The Bachelor. As the film opens, Catherine and her husband (the winner of the show) Daniel (Sam Page), are about to leave for a vacation, when Philip suddenly appears, seeking revenge. Catherine and Daniel had been living in ...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/27253 Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:35:00 UTC Rent It

THE MOVIE:

I'm starting to think there is only so much you can do with a drug addiction story anymore. As a genre, it may have played itself out. When it comes down to it, junkies aren't as interesting as the long-time fascination writers and filmmakers have had with them might lead us to believe. Take Gillies MacKinnon's 2002 film Pure. It has a promising beginning, an angle that we may have seen before that still feels fresh, but halfway through the movie, as we see one of the main characters jonesing for a fix, we realize there's something terribly average about the experience of addiction. The scene is all too familar, and we've heard the same old junkie lies a million times before. Even the lingo hasn't changed in, like, forever. Did I really just wri...Read the entire review

]]> DVD Video https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/review/23414 Fri, 25 Aug 2006 07:29:45 UTC Rent It

The Movie

Everybody loves movie stars, mega-pricey set-pieces, and big dazzling spectacles, but when it comes to simple stories about (relatively) normal characters, your best bet is to focus on the indie fare. Treat yourself to a film festival some time soon and you'll find more movies like Solitude than you'll know what to do with: a three-person character study that feels a whole lot like a stage play and is more than a little, let's say, rough around the edges.

But if simple little "people stories" are your cup of tea, then obstacles like mega-low budgets and "no-name" casts should be much of an impediment for you, and if that's the case, then Solitude might give you something to much on. It's the story of a brother, a sister, a newcomer, and the sometimes very ugly ways in which human beings depend on one another. Hilary and Soledad, you see, are new lovers who've only sto...Read the entire review

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