Drowning In Dreams
Sisyphus never managed to roll his stone to the top of the hill. Frank Broennle has never lifted his yacht from the bottom of Lake Superior, near Rossport, Ontario. Actually, the Gunilda belonged to someone else, an American tycoon who was too busy mixing martinis on the fantail one summer afternoon in 1911 to notice…
Machine music
Detroit metal sculptor Chris Turner cranks up the volume….
Faith and footwork
Singer-songwriter Jill Jack finds redemption by doing her muse’s bidding.
Critical Care
It’s no coincidence that the high-tech intensive care unit in Critical Care’s state-of-the-art hospital looks like a futuristic space module. With this black comedy, director Sidney Lumet (Network, The Verdict, Serpico) proposes that the future of medical care is here and God help us all. Second-year resident Dr. Werner Ernst (James Spader), struggling to stay…
One Night Stand
Infidelity is a chance encounter between vulnerable parties, asserts director Mike Figgis in his latest feature, One Night Stand. The free-floating ethos of that concept is actually the thematic base to this, the follow-up to Figgis’ controversial Leaving Las Vegas. As with his other works, Figgis pulls out the old meta-bag of tricks in exploring…
Hollow Reed
British director Angela Pope’s Hollow Reed plays like a TV movie-of-the-week, lightly glossed with the greater explicitness that cinema allows. It has that dour genre’s rather neatly delineated good guys and bad guys, a serviceable naturalism that creeps along between emotional outbursts and a triumphant, if unconvincing, denouement. The script, by Paula Milne, is on…
The Jackal
How perplexing. One would think that with the world full of interesting little pockets of geopolitical skulduggery, makers of thrillers would have plenty of options for nasty characters doing nasty things. Alas, not so. Like lemmings over a cliff, producers have flocked to the Russian Mafia as the most inoffensive villains of the New World…
