The title of this series comes from a line in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”: April is the cruelest month. It’s certainly the cruelest month for me.  I don’t understand how so many tragedies managed to gather so close together within the span of 31 days. I do know from talking to other people that sometimes it…

“In the Earth” is a film made for midnight showings. It’s ominous, brutal, pretentious, and often stirring. Even though parts of it feel rushed and it falls apart at the end, every part of it is memorable. Set mostly in gloomy fairy-tale woodlands, where two representatives of science are terrorized by forces both human and uncanny, this is…

The phrase “trigger point” refers to the parts of the body which actually trigger pain; so if you’ve got a lower back condition, you may get an injection at the “trigger point” of your affected area. As is customary for many hack films, the writer or producer or whoever it was that nailed down the…

You know how watching a bad action movie can sometimes feel like watching somebody else playing a video game? Watching George Gallo’s “Vanquish,” on the other hand, is more like watching someone beta testing an exceptionally buggy game for a system that’s soon to be phased out. This is a rehash of genre cliches that…

To be an accomplished artist, especially one considered an “outsider artist,” is to be the master of one’s own language. The self-taught painter Bill Traylor was clearly such a master, with his abstract depictions of his life experiences during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow America; memories articulated with long-limbed human figures, oval dogs, sketched out crowds, and…

You can tell some things about the gory hostage thriller “For the Sake of Vicious” just by looking at its title. That exploitation-friendly name is a giddy declaration of intent. For 80 minutes, you watch a series of explicit, slowly escalating acts of violence set in or around one central location: the nondescript two-story home…