Wild Fire begins at dawn – a liminal time of change. There is an immaculate garden surrounded by trees and full of birdsong, and beyond it a beautiful modernist home. Upstairs in the bedroom, a glass and wine bottle sit on the floor, and a silk robe lies discarded on the end of the bed….
Although the chronology of Til Death Us Do Part is not quite as straightforward as it first seems, the film begins with two sequences of apparent marital bliss in the present that also offer glimpses of the future. In the first, as the Best Man (Cam Gigandet, in hilarious form), seated in a pew, struggles…
As its very title suggests, My Sister’s Wedding is concerned not just with the institution of marriage, but also with a protagonist who is simultaneously at the film’s centre and on its sidelines. When it comes to her family, Allison Valentine (Samantha Sayah) is always caught in between. She is the middle sister to older…
Sunrise first published by EyeforFilm, 3 Dec 2005 After his film The Last Laugh (1926) was met with critical rapture (if not quite box office success) in America, F.W. Murnau was lured to Hollywood by William Fox’s offer of a blank cheque and carte blanche to make any film he pleased. The result was Sunrise, loosely adapted…
The prologue to Have Hold Take is a disorienting montage. First we see three doors marooned alongside one another in a smoky void. Then there is a luxurious house – a real space but also, thanks to the bold whites, blacks and reds of its classically decorated interiors, suggestive of a Lynchian limbo. A fourth door –…
Brightwood has its world première at Cine-Excess 2022 “Welcome to Divorce Survival Guide Podcast,” says the distorted voice that opens writer/director/cinematographer/editor Dane Elcar’s feature debut Brightwood, “where we have open and honest conversations about co-parenting, separation, divorce, and the hardest question of all: should you stay or should you go?” Jen (Dana Berger) is jogging…
Held first published by VODzilla.co Held begins with a young woman, her boyfriend and his male friend, all drinking in a car that is parked on a concrete tarmac in the middle of nowhere. It is all going well until the boyfriend announces, “She’s all yours,” and then tells his horrified girlfriend, “Relax , babe…
The Honeymoon Phase first published by Through the Trees In writer/director/editor Phillip G. Carroll Jr.’s The Honeymoon Phase, we know from the start that things are going to end badly between aspiring author Tom Jacobs (Jim Schubin) and his illustrator girlfriend Eve (the director’s real-life wife Chloe Carroll). We know this because the film opens…
Much as genre producer Travis Stevens’ feature debut, the haunted house movie Girl On The Third Floor (2019), exposed the toxic masculinity at the heart – and in the very architecture – of the American home, so too his follow-up Jakob’s Wife continues this gendered (and genre’d) preoccupation with domestic relations. The very title of…
“Falling in love with somebody is like, um – it’s like being pinned down by some great big animal before you even realise that it’s been following you.” So, some way into Jennifer Sheridan’s feature debut Rose, says Sam, played by the film’s writer Matt Stokoe. Rose is certainly a love story – indeed A…
An opening scene can weigh on the rest of a film. If you somehow missed the first minute and a half of It Cuts Deep, you might imagine that you are watching a breezy relationship film in which the inadequacies of Sam (Charles Gould) are exposed and skewered to hilarious effect. He is a mamma’s…