Downeast is about what at first sounds like the most boring possible cinematic subject: rebuilding a destitute fish cannery. And yet it's anything but. Filmmaker David Redmon and Ashley Sabin manage to pack politics, economics, and a large dollop of human interest into their seventy-six minute film. Though it's not without its significant problems, Downeast brings light to the desperate economic situation this country is still in via a corner

Writer-actor-director Tom O'Brien is not from Massachusetts, that much is clear. With his perfect diction and skin unweathered by sea spray it's a little hard (this from someone who grew up on the coast of Maine) to imagine him as the protagonist of Fairhaven, a buddy dramedy that premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival. O'Brien plays John, an aimless bachelor still living in his hometown and working on a fishing trawler. We learn early that he wants

Director Ti West's feature debut, “The House of the Devil” (2009), was a deftly executed homage to both classic haunted house flicks and the great female-centered horror films of the sixties and seventies (particularly Rosemary's Baby, 1968). Fanatically aware of the conventions of the genre, its titles were ever lovingly rendered in a classic seventies burnt-orange which matched the nostalgia expressed through its

Directed by Frenchman Xavier Gens (Frontier(s), Hitman), The Divide follows a disparate group of tenants who find shelter in their New York City apartment building's basement during an unspecified nuclear disaster. As the motley group assembles underground the building superintendent, Mickey (Michael Biehn), becomes its de facto leader. This doesn't necessarily bode well; a 9/11-obsessed nut, Mickey seems like

Bob Anderson, Olympic fencer, stunt man and sword master, died […]

Though John Landis’s name may not be as instantly recognizable as those of George Lucas or Martin Scorsese, his contributions to quintessential American cinema are just as popular and venerable as those of his better-known (or perhaps just better-marketed) colleagues. The director of such classics—a very worn-out term that actually applies here—as “Animal House” (1978), “The Blues Brothers” (1980), and “An American Werewolf

Steve McQueen's second feature reprises his collaboration with Hunger star Michael Fassbender and the effect is no less spellbinding. This time, instead of starving for a cause, Fassbender plays a man at the mercy of his urges rather than in control of them: a sex addict. In the frenetic world of New York City it's easy for Fassbender's Brandon to keep his private life a secret. When a vat of pornography is discovered on his work computer