Email Author Nick Schager

2013 Stories by Nick Schager

• A Respectable Cast Can't Bring The English Teacher Any Laughs

  published May 15, 2013

  A film seemingly produced only because it boasts enough sizable roles to entice multiple stars, Craig Zisk's The English Teacher... More >>

• Pieta Tells of Redemption and Rebirth and Mother-son Handjobs

  published May 15, 2013

  A Jesus-and-Mary dynamic becomes psychosexually twisted—replete with a horrific mother-son handjob—in Pietà, an... More >>

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  Ethan Hawke, Before and After: Watching an Actor Grow Up

  published May 15, 2013

  Before Midnight may be the greatest film ever made about impermanence -- a fitting theme for a work that also reestablishes the... More >>

• Hollywood Farce He's Way More Famous Than You Is Unhinged and Hilarious

  published May 8, 2013

  A self-referential, insider farce about the hunger for Hollywood stardom, He's Way More Famous Than You is—like its leading... More >>

• Released Says Don't Do Drugs

  published May 8, 2013

  Ultimately amounting to an advertisement for the Castle, the NYC residence for recently paroled convicts, Released presents an... More >>

• Indonesian Buddy-copy Flick Java Heat Muddles Through

  published May 8, 2013

  Java Heat's title refers not to hot coffee but to the Indonesian island, though caffeine is certainly recommended to make it through... More >>

• Pilgrim Song Takes to Appalachia

  published May 8, 2013

  Disaffected and searching for clarity and answers, James (Timothy Morton) takes to the Kentucky Appalachians' Sheltowee Trace Trail in... More >>

• Uwe Boll, Worst Director Alive, Can't Get His Movie About Killing Wall Streeters to Open in New York

  published May 8, 2013

  Uwe Boll will no longer fight you -- at least, not with his fists. Often lambasted by critics as the worst of the worst, Boll once... More >>

• One Night Stand is a Flimsy Home-Movie Portrait

  published April 24, 2013

  The 24 Hour Company is an organization that, for charity, enlists Broadway and television actors, writers, directors, composers, and... More >>

• Ridiculously Long Fists of Legend Blasts "Eye of the Tiger" On Five Different Occasions

  published April 10, 2013

  No clichéd fight film can ever have quite enough "Eye of the Tiger," as evidenced by the fact that Survivor's Rocky III theme... More >>

• On Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal, Or How the Art World Is Fuled by Kill-or-be-killed Bloodlust

  published April 3, 2013

  Carnage breeds creativity for Lars (Keep the Lights On's Thure Lindhardt), a former up-and-coming painter who finds himself back at the... More >>

• Sexy Thale Foregoes Mystery for Didactic Disclosure and Slow-mo Murder

  published April 3, 2013

  If you had to stumble upon an angry, vicious mythic creature, you could do worse than the sexy monster found in Thale by Elvis (Erlend... More >>

• The Brass Teapot Cutesy Conceit is a Struggle

  published April 3, 2013

  Even The Twilight Zone would have struggled with the cutesy conceit of The Brass Teapot, a greed-corrupts cautionary tale about... More >>

• Family Weekend Attempts to Turn Its Clichés Into Parents

  published March 27, 2013

  Quirky indie hell, thy name is Family Weekend. Benjamin Epps's film is the very definition of affected cutie-pie whimsy and weirdness,... More >>

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  Dog Pound: Those in Cages Will Rage

  published March 27, 2013

  A fictional Scared Straight! for the modern juvenile delinquent crowd, Dog Pound follows a trio of teens serving time at... More >>

• Old School Crime Bosses Spar in New World

  published March 20, 2013

  Cops and criminals—they're all the same! So says South Korean writer-turned-director Park Hoon-jung, again, with New World, which... More >>

• Love and Honor Annihilates Probability One 60s Cliché at a Time

  published March 20, 2013

  The CW version of the Vietnam War and the 1969 counterculture, Love and Honor hews to a mushy formula far older than its subject... More >>

• Murph: The Protector: Hagiography for a SEAL

  published March 20, 2013

  Posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2007 for his service as a Navy SEAL, Lt. Michael P. Murphy is celebrated as a man of... More >>

• Reincarnated, An Ode to Snoop Dogg's Consumption of Weed

  published March 13, 2013

  Snoop Dogg travels to Jamaica to make a reggae album and be baptized in Rastafarian culture in Reincarnated, but mainly, Andy Capper's... More >>

• My Amityville Horror Revisits the Hauntings of Daniel Lutz

  published March 13, 2013

  After years of based-on-a-truish-story movie sequels, the most convincing explanation for the purported hauntings in Amityville, New York,... More >>

• Emperor: General MacArthur is Not Ready for His Close-Up

  published March 6, 2013

  Tommy Lee Jones pontificates and poses with hands on hips as General Douglas MacArthur during his scant screen time in Emperor, vainly... More >>

• Dead Man Down is Not Movieland, U.S.A.'s Best Offering

  published March 6, 2013

  Nominally set in Manhattan but in actuality taking place in Movieland, U.S.A., where the police don't materialize even when exploding cars are... More >>

• In Stoker, Girlhood Blooms into Violence

  published February 27, 2013

  Puberty is sex and sex is murder in Stoker, a Hitchcockian stew of hothouse familial jealousy, sadism, and psychosis all tied together... More >>

• BBC's One Life Unveils (and Anthropomorphizes) Nature's Wonders

  published February 20, 2013

  Less mushy than its Disney Nature counterparts but still driven by the same anthropomorphizing philosophy, One Life (the first film... More >>

• Shanghai Calling Stumbles Through Cutesy Melodrama Towards Preordained Love

  published February 13, 2013

  He's an ambitious Chinese-American lawyer who finds himself a fish out of water when sent to China to close a big deal. She's a blond single... More >>