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HIFF Review: Charming 'Sin Bin' Heavily Indebted To The Work Of Wes Anderson

By Drew Taylor
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October 9, 2012 6:02 PM
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1 Comment

Reviews

Young filmmakers often reference their heroes outright. This isn't a phenomenon exclusive to creatively wayward directors; look at the early films of genuine auteur Paul Thomas Anderson to see wholesale theft from Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman (to name a few). But when the references are a distraction to the point of actively taking away from the enjoyment of the movie, that's when things become a problem. And it's a problem that plagues the otherwise wonderful "Sin Bin," a charming little comedy about a high school kid (Michael Seater) who rents his beat-up van out to his fellow students for sexual liaisons, which owes such a stylistic debt to the films of Wes Anderson that it makes you think somewhat less of the movie.

By Drew Taylor
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October 8, 2012 5:20 PM
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8 Comments

Reviews

This year's Hamptons International Film Festival has largely been defined by movies that make you want to cry your eyes out until they're squishy red gobs. Pictures like "Rust and Bone," "Amour" and "Silver Linings Playbook" challenge even the manliest audience members to sit there with a straight face and not be reduced to jags of blubbery weeping. But no movie at the festival has packed quite the emotional punch of the Disney Animation short film "Paperman," which, in its brief 7-minute run time, will defy even the most stoic viewer to keep a straight face. From the opening frame, the film's sweeping romanticism and groundbreaking visual style proves too much to resist. The fact that this might be the new face of traditional animation isn't something that even registers; it's that involving.

By Drew Taylor
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October 7, 2012 12:18 PM
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5 Comments

Reviews

Like with the two competing Snow White movies earlier this year, Hollywood finds itself in the midst of battling Alfred Hitchcock pseudo-biographies this fall; each detailing the production of one of the master director's seminal films and his relationship with that film's comely leading lady. Timed for optimum Oscar impact, arriving in November is "Hitchcock," with Anthony Hopkins as the tumescent filmmaker and a story centered around the making of his touchstone horror classic "Psycho." And later this month HBO is airing "The Girl," starring Toby Jones and Sienna Miller as Hitchcock and ingénue Tippi Hedren, who the director provoked into starring in both "The Birds" and "Marnie."

By Drew Taylor
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October 6, 2012 11:56 AM
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0 Comments

Reviews

The synopsis for "Sparrow's Dance," the new pocket-sized film from writer/director Noah Buschel, makes it literally sound like the most boring movies ever forged. It's about an unnamed agoraphobic woman (Marin Ireland, most notably from TV shows like "Homeland" and "The Killing"), who struggles with making the simplest human contact. All of that has to change when her apartment becomes flooded and she has to allow a plumber named Wes (Paul Sparks, the colorful goon Mickey Doyle on "Boardwalk Empire") in to fix the leak. That is pretty much as far as it goes for plot. But, amazingly, unburdened with excessive narrative and weighted by a pair of outstanding performances, "Sparrow's Dance" (under Buschel's inventive direction) absolutely flies.