Shameless Self Expression

Set in near-future Canada where two sisters (Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood) are left to fend for themselves on their property in the woods, while there appears to be a massive electricity outage. An outage that lasts months, with their supplies running out, and two sisters with different ideas on how to use said supplies. Oh look, Michael Eklund has just turned up on their property. He sure looks friendly. Callum Keith Rennie is the girls’ father, Wendy Crewson plays their mother in flashbacks, and Max Minghella plays a nice guy Page is dating who wants her to go away with him to Boston. Good performances and nice photography don’t quite get this 2015 adaptation of the Jean Hegland near-future sci-fi/drama from writer-director Patricia Rozema ( “When Night is Falling” , “Mansfield Park” ) over the line. A lot of oestrogen in front of and behind the camera doesn’t add enough of a difference to counter the fact that this has been done to death. The main conflict meanwhile, is...

The story of the DeFeo family murders in a house later purchased by the Lutz family of hucksters who supposedly experienced some spooky stuff that inspired a book that was turned into the film “The Amityville Horror” . Diane Franklin and bullying Paul Ben-Victor are the volatile parents, John Robinson (looking completely different from his debut performance in “Elephant” ) is their troubled son, whilst Burt Young and Lainie Kazan are the superfluous grandparents. Although the Lutz family are shameless bullshit artists whom no one hopefully believes anymore (original author Jay Anson deserves some of the scorn too, admittedly), the 1979 film “The Amityville Horror” can at least claim to be a decent and iconic haunted/evil house movie. I’d go so far as to say that it’s a bit underrated, if entirely stupid. The house was scary as fuck, and the film worked OK for what it was. The sequels were almost entirely dreadful (I seem to recall the 3D one being tolerable at least), the re...