“Working with her was a revelation,” he said. Photo by Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images for SBIFF Of this year’s SBIFF honorees, Jamie Lee Curtis perhaps has had the most untraditional career. While she was the daughter “two bonafide movie stars—Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh“—she originally planned to be a police officer.  “I’m an unplanned actor,” she

Based on a short story called Ernest by Geoff Manaugh, “We Have a Ghost” opens with the Presley family moving to a fixer-upper in Chicago. Father Frank (Anthony Mackie) is struggling to make ends meet and to maintain a healthy relationship with his increasingly-distant son Kevin (Jahi Di’Allo Winston, so good in “Charm City Kings” and

Written and directed by Antebi, “God’s Time” comes out of the opening credits swinging with different visual styles, a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, fast editing, and Caribel’s volatile performance that burns up the screen. Because of its tight timeline and frenetic dash around the city, there’s a resemblance to Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” in the

Regardless of the questions raised by her presence, Julia is here now, availing of the NHS in her time of need after being diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. (There’s commentary in the idea of a wealthy American choosing a humble English clinic over a famous American hospital, but this movie isn’t that astute. Instead,

Along with cinematographer Thomas Favel, Chou visualizes Freddie’s trip under a cloud, with many of the movie’s key scenes taking place as the skies are overcast, raining, or when the streets are slicked with rain. The mood is restrained yet somber, sometimes even romantic, given the neon-lit scenes in the city and its nightlife. One of

Cinematographer Dean Francis’ warm photography, stained with sunny hues of marigold, belies the aching feeling inside of Casey as he traverses a highway flanked by fields of grain toward a truck stop. The white cowboy hat topping his boyish face and muscular frame attracts a bearded trucker; their bathroom encounter is the first of Casey’s

After opening with a spooky dolly shot into some woods, this movie, also written and directed by Robert Machoian, shows us our title character, who is shaving OFF his beard. He leaves behind a sculpted swath of lip hair that he tells his wife is his “hunter’s mustache.” In a mess of expository dialogue between

“Night Ride” – Eirik Tveiten’s film is the kind of simple, well crafted, self-contained comedy that few shorts filmmakers conceive these days. Ebba (Sigrid Kandal Husjord) accidentally starts up a tram and puts it in motion after the driver stubbornly refuses to drive so he can take a long break. As she quickly learns what

Red is a mess. She lives in the garage behind her mother’s house and goes inside every day for meals. She’s never snipped the apron strings. She is a serial job-loser. Something always seems to go wrong. She’s “quirky,” but it’s quirkiness with an edge. When she drinks too much, she goes bananas. In fact,

Mother reassures her Daughter in Vietnamese. This early conversation seems to go on for longer than it should, but the silences that punctuate Dinh’s speech only deepen the unsettling mood established by a wide-angle master shot, which highlights the sheer size and emptiness of Father’s garage. Natural light, some film grain, and an unusual focus