Popcorntales.com movies reviews? Andrew Patterson’s The Vast of Night is a marriage of the old and the new, blending effects-aided cinematic showmanship to old-school radio drama. In the director’s sterling feature debut (written by James Montague and Craig W. Sanger, and framed as an episode of a Twilight Zone-ish show called “Paradox Theater”), two 1950s high schoolers – confident radio DJ Everett (Jake Horowitz) and telephone operator Faye (Sierra McCormick) – stumble upon a strange signal that, they come to suspect, originates from the stars looming above their small-town-USA home. Like Orson Welles’ classic 1938 The War of the Worlds broadcast, the film is a tale of potential invasion that plays out over radio waves, and Patterson thus naturally focuses on intently listening faces, and the spoken words that captivate them, as a means of generating anticipation, mystery and suspense. At the same time, his centerpiece sequences are models of formal precision and depth, as protracted shots across sprawling fields, through crowded gymnasiums, and in and out of cramped buildings create pulse-pounding tension while simultaneously conveying the propulsive flow and binding, interconnected nature of narrative storytelling itself.
The tony Pennsylvania prep school in which Tayarisha Poe’s nimble debut takes place might bring to mind mean-rich-kid chronicles like Cruel Intentions — but it has more in common with Rian Johnson’s 2005 baby-faced neo-noir Brick. Selah and the Spades is a teen drama in which the line between social clique and mob family feels incidental, taking place in a boarding-school bubble that’s enthralling and insular, privilege serving as a kind of leveling agent that makes day-to-day skirmishes for dominance the only thing that matters. And at the still center of this surprisingly tumultuous world is Selah (Lovie Simone), a character whose desire for a successor wars with her instinct to destroy anyone who challenges her place — even when it’s someone of her own choosing. It’s a compelling portrait of someone who, having made herself the queen of this limited kingdom, finds herself terrified of life when she leaves.
Bio-terror comes in corrupting forms in The Beach House, whose contagion-based scares speak, subtly if severely, to our present moment. On a Cape Cod getaway, aspiring astrobiologist Emily (liana Liberato) and her going-nowhere boyfriend Randall (Noah Le Gros) wind up sharing accommodations with fiftysomething couple Jane (Maryann Nagel) and Mitch (Jake Weber), friends of Randall’s dad. Drinks and hallucinogenic edibles help alleviate the initial awkwardness of this get-together, but the good times are fleeting, thanks to a strange mist emanating from the dark, furious depths of the ocean, which contaminates the area with glowing Lovecraftian foliage and giant, slimy organisms. The normal order is quickly turned on its axis—quite literally, in one unforgettable shot—as alien forces infest, infect and annihilate. Aided by Liberato’s accomplished performance, first-time writer/director Jeffrey A. Brown stages his mayhem with assured efficiency, creating an air of impenetrable mystery through uneasy silence, compositions that devolve into cascading bubbles and a squishy foot-surgery sequence that would make body-horror maestro David Cronenberg proud. See more info at Popcorn Tales.
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A chronicle of greed, status, and vanity, Bad Education shares more than a few qualities with Martin Scorsese’s financial crimes epic The Wolf of Wall Street, the story of another Long Island striver with slicked-back hair. Trading the stock market for the public education system, director Cory Finley’s wry docudrama, which takes its inspiration from a wild New York Magazinefeature from 2004, charts the tragi-comic downfall of Roslyn School District superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman), a charming and beloved administrator in a rising wealthy area. When his assistant superintendent Pam Gluckin (Allison Janey) gets caught allowing family members to make personal charges using the school’s credit cards, Frank’s world of healthy smoothies, expensive suits, and gleeful deception begins to unravel. Using a high school newspaper reporter as an audience surrogate (Geraldine Viswanathan), the script withholds key details of Frank’s life for large sections of the runtime, allowing Jackman to give a performance that gradually reveals new layers of emotional complexity and moral emptiness. Like the tweezers Frank uses to dutifully pluck his nose hairs, the movie takes a surgical approach to its subject. Read more information on this website.