The Giver Marco Beltrami Sony Classical For how many years has Hollywood endured the YA novel onslaught? Five? Ten? When was Twilight? It’s strange to think of The Giver as merely the latest in a string of adapted young adult fiction given that its source material, Lois Lowry’s 1993 bestseller, precedes the publication dates of Divergent, City …
The Giver Written for the screen by Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide Directed by Phillip Noyce USA, 2014 The Giver doesn’t want people thinking too much about its heavier themes, so it answers any nagging questions with the Hollywood truism, “Love conquers all.” That’s fine… if the love story works. Sadly, this adaptation of …
The Signal Written by Carlyle Eubank, William Eubank, and David Frigerio Directed by William Eubank USA, 2014 Whether or not we are alone in the universe is an age old question that has racked the brains of mankind for millennia. Extraterrestrial life has been explored and researched countless times over. We have not received a …
Thanks to the likes of James Wan, paranormal horror is all the rage. From Paranormal Activity to Insidious and The Conjuring, audiences are irretrievably hooked to tales of nuclear families being bloodlessly menaced by only-fleetingly-visible entities of malicious intent. What’s remarkable about Mike Flanagan’s Oculus, which follows his no-budget wonder Absentia, is how it manages to wring genuine dread from a beyond-worn subgenre simply by paying close attention to the realities of its deeply troubled characters. Oculus functions equally well as a tragic psychodrama as it does a horror film.