ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL [2015]

Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's teen drama, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, is one the most pleasant unexpected surprises of the year.
High-schooler Greg is an awkward movie-loving outsider, afraid of intimate social interaction, that has his outlook on life changed when he accidentally befriends Rachel, a classmate recently diagnosed with leukemia.
It's too easy to compare it to The Fault in Our Stars but the film (and the Jesse Andrews novel it's based on) is completely different in tone, mood and themes.  There's no love story to be found but a coming-of-age story about friendship, finding one's purpose and the stark pain of reality.  There's moments of gut-busting hilarity to compliment the mature heartbreak.  It's rare that each character, major & minor, chew up each scene they're in but that's the case here.  They're all interesting and entertaining to come familiar with.  The photography is both beautiful and startlingly creative with it's dizzying camerawork and snippets of stop-action animation.

4 Big Ships out of 5

OUIJA [2014]

Ouija doesn't have a lot going for it before it even gets out of the gate.
A horror film based on a Hasbro board game, produced by Michael Bay, directed by Stiles White (the guy who sloppily wrote Knowing and The Possession) and starring a bunch of young TV stars from Bates Motel, Teen Wolf and The Secret Life Of An American Teenager.
Still interested?  Then you have a great threshold of pain from flat-lining performances, laughable dialogue and general all around lameness.  

1 dip in the pool out of 5

THE SIGNAL [2014]

Director William Eubank's second film, The Signal, once again finds him exploring a low-budget science-fiction world that proves imagination is more powerful than money.

It starts off like a pretty standard story about relationships & growing up but slowly escalates into something far beyond anything I could have imagined it would. It explores the consequences we face when we make choices, whether they're made by logic or driven by our emotions and what happens when both types collide head on.  As visually stunning and fascinating it is to ponder upon, once all is said and done it all feels like a letdown that it set itself up for from the very beginning.  It's a wonderful journey but ultimately cheats you in the end as it tries to go all Twilight Zone on the viewer.

3 hundred mile sprints out of 5

THE QUIET ONES [2014]

Director John Pogue joins the modern Hammer Horror films with The Quiet Ones, a spooky little tale about the attempt to manifest an angry ghost through a troubled young woman.
Jared Harris is better than the material he's offered with a layered performance that harkens back to the days of Peter Cushing, while Olivia Cooke is highly effective as the crazy girl that gives off a nasty case of the uber-wiggins.  It's bleak, washed-out photography looks like it creeped right out of the 1970's when it's not bouncing back into found footage territory which is distracting at best.  It's harshly edited and bumpy in it's narrative, giving off the feeling that it was the tortured victim of a studio re-edit and multiple script rewrites to diminish it of it's eerie atmosphere, that's present but not quite used to it's full effect.
The Quiet Ones delivers the scares and tense moments but not enough to be anything more than a cheap rental you'll forget about within a few hours.

2 warm palms out of 5