Ernest Hardy

Brotherhood

GO  BROTHERHOOD Leanly scripted, directed for maximum tension, fast-moving and filled with a surprising amount of droll humor, writer-director Will Cannon's Brotherhood (co-written with Doug Simon) illustrates the catastrophic consequences of boys being boys when groupthink, machismo and the survival instinct all converge. When an ostensibly fail-safe fraternity initiation (robbing......

Glove

GLOVE A successful male sports flick has to pull double duty: It has to be inspirational in reinscribing traditional values of hard work, sacrifice, discipline and a stiff-upper-lip approach to loss, while paradoxically providing a space for men and boys (onscreen and in the audience) to unashamedly shed tears. The......
Aunjanue Ellis

Pan African Film Festival 2011

Given the right material and director, Aunjanue Ellis (Ray, Brother to Brother, The Caveman's Valentine, countless TV appearances) is a spectacular actress, but she also manages to shine in wack shit. Proof of the latter is offered in director Ryan Richmond's horribly titled Money Matters (U.S.), a coming-of-age tale in......

Immigration Tango

IMMIGRATION TANGO Director David Burton Morris, working from a script he co-wrote with Todd Norwood and Martin L. Kelley, would seem to be in the thick of heated political debate with this film about the citizenship struggles of immigrants, but Immigration Tango — an unfunny comedy — bungles the gift......

Hello Ghost

HELLO GHOST Writer-director Kim Young-Tak flips the script hard in the third act of Hello Ghost (a megahit in Korea), transforming an overlong, somewhat predictable tale into a moving tearjerker. When the chronically suicidal Kang Sang-man is revived (yet again) in a hospital, he quickly discovers that he’s picked up......

Lemmy

LEMMY "Lemmy is the baddest motherfucker in the world," exclaims Dave Grohl in Lemmy: 49% Motherf---er, 51% Son of a Bitch. It's a sentiment shared by almost everyone who appears on camera (Dave Navarro, Ozzy, Metallica, Slash, Billy Bob Thornton) in this fawning documentary. Devotees of Motorhead frontman/certifiable rock icon......

Violent Blue

VIOLENT BLUE Drawing inspiration from highbrow art-house templates, lowbrow midnight-movie blueprints and silent film, writer-director Gregory Hatanaka's Violent Blue is a mishmash of tones and intentions. Three overlapping tales play out; in the main one, Katarina (Silvia Suvadova) is a brilliant music scholar trying to complete the potential masterwork of......

THE TEMPEST

In Julie Taymor's hands, Shakespeare's The Tempest becomes a listless feminist parable. The duchess Prospera (Helen Mirren) has been forced into exile, stripped of wealth and position by her scheming brother Antonio (Chris Cooper), who's branded her a witch by using her prodigious smarts against her. But her maligned gifts......

THE DREAMS OF JINSHA

THE DREAMS OF JINSHA It would be great to be able to recommend an old-fashioned, hand-drawn animated film right about now, something to counterbalance the barrage of CGI/3D fare with which we've recently been inundated. But director Chen Deming's The Dreams of Jinsha, five years in the making and China's......

ME, TOO!

GO  ME, TOO! Thirty-four-year-old Daniel (Pablo Pineda) is trapped between opposing worlds — internal and external, his truth and what the world projects and assumes about him. Born with Down syndrome, he's also a college graduate whose side passion is art. After getting a job working for an advocacy group......