Film production and distribution company KRG Studios is teaming with acclaimed filmmaker Anjali Menon on a Tamil-language feature film. Menon’s London Film…
Film Shorts // April 14-20, 2021
Vanquish (R) This thriller stars Ruby Rose as a former mob drug courier who becomes the target of extortion after a retired cop (Morgan Freeman) kidnaps her daughter. Also with Patrick Muldoon, Nick Vallelonga, Ekaterina Baker, and Julie Lott. (Opens Friday)
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OPENING
Jakob’s Wife (NR) The latest horror film by Travis Stevens (
Girl on the Third Floor) stars Barbara Crampton as a small-town minister’s wife who rediscovers her youth when she’s bitten by a vampire. Also with Larry Fessenden, Bonnie Aarons, Nyisha Bell, Sarah Lind, Mark Kelly, and CM Punk. (Opens Friday in Dallas)
Ever since
The Invisible Man, the upper-class wife whose luxury real estate becomes an overbearing metaphor for her isolating marriage seems to have become a go-to set-up for indie filmmakers. Last year we had
Swallow and
The Nest, and this year that plot gets a straight-up genre treatment in
Held. The perennially pained-looking Emma (Jill Awbrey, who also wrote the script) is clearly over her square-jawed husband Henry (Bart Johnson), but they’re giving it one more try by escaping to a secluded, automated smart house vacation rental. Naturally, the property’s version of Alexa has other plans drugging them and forcing them into chivalrous machinations straight out of a 1950s marriage manual. Held doesn’t hold back, skimping on character development, rushing into the concept and mainly using the first act to set things up to pay off later. Basic druggy montages, a visually uninteresting set and an even more uninspired baddie sap
What’s new on VOD and streaming this weekend: April 9-11
Including Nomadland, Sugar Daddy, The Nevers, Held and Exterminate All The Brutes By Kevin Ritchie and Norman Wilner
Apr 9, 2021
N
OW critics pick what’s new to streaming and VOD for the weekend of April 9. Plus: Everything new to VOD and streaming platforms.
Sugar Daddy
(Wendy Morgan)
NOW named Kelly McCormack one of Canada’s rising screen stars in 2019. Watch Sugar Daddy and you’ll see why: Morgan’s slightly stylized, emotionally charged drama stars the Letterkenny and Killjoys scene-stealer – most recently seen as an unwelcome guest in Ginny & Georgia – as a struggling musician who joins an agency that provides “paid dinner companions” to older men who don’t want emotional attachments, or anything further. Naturally, the reality of it turns out to be a little more complicated. McCormack wrote and produced the film, and does her own singing, but Sugar Daddy’s not just a showcase for her