WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT [2016]

Funny girl Tina Fey takes a bit more of a serious tone in director Glenn Ficcara & John Requa's humorous war drama Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
Inspired by journalist Kim Baker's time she spent in Afghanistan, during the early years of the war, where she was one of the first American civilians to experience what was really going on there.
These folks are so crazily focused on their career in such a self-centered manner they're hard to like, so thankfully the great cast humanizes them enough to make us see the world from this insane point of view.  WTF brings all sorts of interesting ideas to the table but it simply does not have enough time to fully explore them to make any sort of strong emotional connection.
With another 10 or 15 minutes to flesh out it's army of themes and topics this film would have been an thoroughly engaging character study.

3 beautiful mysterious IKEA bags out of 5

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT [2014]

Director Ana Lily Amirpour's feature length debut, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, is an Iranian Spaghetti Western vampire film that's set in a black & white industrial wasteland.

The age-old story of the "boy & girl whose love is torn over one's thirst for blood" is given a refreshing makeover with Amirpour's vision and voice.  She creates a graphic novel like world that feels like a cowboy's Eraserhead with fangs with it's sparse use of dialogue, odd-ball humor, a gaggle of lonely folk who all hide a secret and a seemingly non-existant world outside of the character's immediate gloomy setting. With it's slow-burning pace, poetic visuals and poignant personality the film offers an enticing view to what I thought was a burnt out genre.

4 cat burglars out of 5