The Fitzgerald Family Christmas Movie Review

Every family has troubles and internal drama. It’s very easy to spot it in other families, but to turn the lens inward and examine your own circumstances is difficult. We have a tendency to always think of ourselves as reasonable despite evidence to the contrary. Harder still is to turn a literal lens onto a family’s problems and conflicts and shape it from paper to screen into a compelling story that people might learn something from. Edward Burns has been trying to do that since his independent filmmaking career began auspiciously more than fifteen years ago during the American renaissance (which turned out to be the last dying gap) of indie films.

Damsels in Distress Movie Review

Damsels in Distress is Whit Stillman’s fourth film and his first in 14 years. If his first three films fit together as a sort of trilogy (some characters cross over) of early 1980s Urban Haute Bourgeoisie (a term created by one of his characters in Metropolitan, Stillman’s first film), then this one takes off in a new if slightly familiar direction. For one thing, Damsels in Distress is his first film that focuses almost exclusively on female lead characters (he even gives them the title). More importantly, whereas Stillman’s earlier films were grounded in the real world, his latest has a setting that belongs more in the realm of fantasy.

Newlyweds Movie Review: Presented by Director Edward Burns at Huntington Cinema Arts Centre

Edward Burns' newest film was released digitally at the end of December. It is available for digital download here and also on iTunes.

In my years away I’ve missed everything Edward Burns has written and directed in the last decade. I’ve followed his career with some interest because he’s a Long Island film maker and I like supporting my community, but he hasn’t quite lived up to the promise of his first feature The Brothers McMullen. He received a great deal of recognition for that film made on a shoestring budget at a time when I was just getting interested in cinema. His follow up She’s the One showed what he could do with a bigger budget and A-list stars, but he fell backward after that. Sidewalks of New York, released in 2001 was his last film I saw. After that nothing really made a big enough splash that I was enthused enough to seek it out. Recently he’s begun releasing his films on DVD and the Internet to avoid the hassle of distribution and striking film prints. Eschewing the offers the direct studio pictures, he’s come back to the kind of small personal films that he’s passionate about.

His newest film Newlyweds was released in late December simultaneously on DVD and various Internet outlets such as VOD and iTunes. I was lucky enough to attend an event at my local Arts Cinema where Burns was an invited guest for a Q&A and reception following the screening. As an added surprise, he brought along two of his co-stars in the film.