REVIEW: Tusen ganger god natt [1,000 Times Good Night] [2013]

“I’ve been waiting for that call since I met you” Being an embedded photojournalist is a concept I cannot quite wrap my head around. To willingly go into a war zone and risk your life to get a shot, not for plaudits, but to educate the world about atrocities we’d rather turn a blind eye towards? It’s one thing to do it in a place where an errant bullet aimed at a rebel or infidel could miss its target and hit you instead and a whole other at present when…

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REVIEW: Berenice [2014]

“I wanted it to hurt” One chapter from the horror anthology Creepers, Jeremiah Kipp‘s adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe‘s disturbing short story Berenice finds itself hindered by what I can only guess was a shoestring budget. A director who has excelled at creating stunning pitch-black tone with ambiguously delicious mystery in carefully composed thrillers, this twenty-minute horror finds itself delivering more unintentional laughs than frightening scares. The over-the-top and often amateurish acting does no favors and its brightly lit digital presentation of footage with a do-it-yourself sensibility puts the artifice…

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REVIEW: The Minions [2014]

“I shouldn’t have went there” Director Jeremiah Kipp once again amps up the mood with his latest short The Minions to follow his similarly aesthetically-constructed The Days God Slept. From the camera angles catching his actors’ expressions in a way that cultivates mystery, the score pulsing along with the imagery as though everything is set to its beat, and the dark subject matter underlying its elaborate masking of reality in the supernatural, William’s (Lukas Hassel) nightmare gradually becomes ours. Scripted by Joseph Fiorillo—and supposedly based on a true story of…

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