REVIEW: Here Lies Joe [2016]

“There is hope. There’s a way back to your life.” Only dying can bring two people lost and finished with the world back from the brink of death. That may not make sense to read, but it does in my head. I think maybe writer/director Mark Battle and cowriter Pamela Conway will understand as their film Here Lies Joe deals with the issue—the hope bred from a vacuum of sorrow. To be alone is to embrace the end, yet to attempt suicide is to be anything but alone. There are…

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REVIEW: El Club [The Club] [2015]

“Has it ever occurred to you that you’re a criminal?” This is a film about deafening silence and how one unexpected intrusion can turn the normalcy of its sequestered solitude on its head. It’s a silence we have seen before a couple months ago in Spotlight—there too it was extracted from secret penance to the penal system of public consciousness. Pablo Larraín‘s vision is on a much smaller scale although the ramifications are just as brutally blunt and far-reaching. For him the issue wasn’t exposing the crimes of Catholic priests…

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