What's shocking about Body of Deceit is not that it's bad; lots of movies are bad, tons of movies actually, thousands of movies, and sometimes you have to slog through them in order to understand what good movies really look like. Without the bitter, the sweet ain't as sweet, right? That applies to films as much as to anything else, how else are you supposed to develop your taste if all you ever taste is the best? So awful cinema has its niche, it can even be fun, and not every project can be tops. But sometimes you can still be surprised by just how awful a final product can be, after multiple teams of people sat down and de...Read the entire review

Manifesto is an ambitious new movie by visual artist Julian Rosenfeld, who enlisted Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchett to make an experimental, political film about art and artistry. Blanchett, in a free-flowing series of vignettes, inhabits 13 different characters -- a rich woman, a blue-collar worker, a bum, a religious homemaker, a newscaster, and her remote-reporting co-worker, to name a few -- all of whom repeat manifestos from various famous political and artistic figures, ranging from Karl Marx to Alexander Rodchenko. There is no overarching story, nor do the characters have much, if anything, in the way of dialogue outside of the manifestos. The movie is based on Rosenfeld's existing art project, where all 13 pieces were played simultaneously on separate screens.

What's complicated about reviewing Manifesto is that the philosophies about art that the Rosenfeld expr...Read the entire review

Anne Heche puts on the best performance of her career in My Friend Dahmer, and she's probably the third best thing about this film, which you should take as a very healthy sign. For a movie nobody saw about a serial killer nobody wants to remember, this strange biography does so many things right, and cements itself as an under-the-radar yet top-notch production that will surprise a few people when they finally get around to popping it into there DVD player. That doesn't help the filmmakers or the cast and crew, but it's something; My Friend Dahmer is better than the limited coverage it received and should be bumped up your list.

Your guess is as good as mine as to why American Pie worked when so many other coming-of-age sex comedies die a terrible death as soon as they hit the screen, some as soon as they hit the straight-to-DVD shelves. Maybe it was Eugene Levy, maybe it was the pie, who knows, but that film is now a classic, and in comparison, The High Schoolers Guide to College Parties will never be. Not only will it never become a classic, it will never be seen by more than the 200 people globally who invested their time in watching this complete waste of space and regretted every minute of it. Add this film to the long list of those who tried and...Read the entire review

You may think you've seen painful acting before, but you have yet to meet Lake Eerie, a film that is as bizarre, awful, and unimaginative as its title. I'm not sure if my words can prepare you for such a film failure, an amateur attempt at something, I don't know what, that could not possibility have resulted in what the filmmakers were aiming for. Because, if this is the movie that they were trying to make, someone needs to take away their cameras and put them under lock and key. I can only imagine that "haunted house story with Egyptian magic thrown in for good measure" sounded like a great idea, a script was written, and a f...Read the entire review

Such an industry is Star Trek that it supports not only various television and film series, but a growing number of documentaries about it. The first seems to have been Trekkies (1997), directed by Roger Nygard and starring Denise Cosby, with affectionate humor it explores the world of Star Trek fandom. It's funny but not condescending, introducing its audience to fans whose obsessions never hurt anyone but often do good or are empowering, and it's even rather touching at times. A 2004 sequel ventured outside the U.S., in search of international fans.

In between came Mind Meld (2001), a My Dinner with Andre-type conversation between Original Series stars William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. What might easily have been a vanity project (Shatner co-produced) instead proved to be a highly engrossing dialogue between two actors uniquely positioned in this pop culture lexi...Read the entire review

Following the unexpected death of his wife Fiona (Hani Furstenberg) in a fatal car accident, Sherwin (David Oyelowo) retreats into an isolated depression, his days consisting of drinking and mourning. His sister and business partner Penelope (Teyonah Parris) finally forces Sherwin out of the house in order for him to make an obligatory but nerve-wracking trip up to Maine, to bring the ashes to Fiona's mother Lucinda (Dianne Wiest), with whom Fiona had a notably contentious relationship.

The study of grief through a narrative art like filmmaking is always tricky, in which the filmmaker must find the right balance between messy real-life human emotions and the demand of the audience for a story that has, at the very least, an emotional beginning, middle, and end. With Five Nights in Maine, writer/director Maris Curran attempts to lean further toward the messy reality, but in doing so, creates ...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Greed, style, obsession and sneakers

The Movie
I was in an elevator in Boston one night, and a guy asked me about the brown and tan low-top sneakers I was wearing.

"Nice sneakers," he said. "Where'd you get them?"

I looked down, thought for a moment, and replied. "Target."

The revelation that I was wearing mass-market Mossimos resulted in obvious disgust on the man's part, and he departed when the doors opened, while I pondered my fashion faux pas. I have never cared much about the shoes I've worn, as happy with the expensive Nikes my wife bought me shortly...Read the entire review

Film and television fans have had more reason than ever to lament Hollywood's underutilization of the great Judy Greer, what with a number of small and sometimes thankless roles in big-budget blockbusters like Jurassic World, Tomorrowland, Ant-Man, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Another set of film and television fans have had reasons to celebrate, in seeing the renaissance of character actor Natasha Lyonne's career through "Orange is the New Black". Anyone who fits in the part of the Venn diagram where those two types of people cross over may like to know, if they don't already, that an obscure 2015 indie comedy by Jamie Babbit (director of Lyonne's LGBTQ cult classic But I'm a Cheerleader) attempts to resolve the first and support the second, by casting Greer and Lyonne as sisters working in a hotel who get wrapped up in trying to get rid of a body th...Read the entire review