by BOB GREEN

Mixing splatter and hilarity, the surprising Cabin in the Woods makes a good case for post-modern horror. Consider first, if you will, the ingenious poster for the long-delayed project: There’s a basemented cabin (not in the woods) suspended in blank white space, whose naked architectonics reveal that the structure can be manipulated like Rubik’s cube, twisted this way and that.

by Stephen Agustin

Unless you were a bully yourself, you have probably been bullied in school. The cruelty of children is common doctrine, no?

by David Parrish

Like many who read him as an adolescent, my introduction to serious literature was Edgar Allan Poe. So when I heard, some 50 years after Roger Corman’s campy cinematic send-ups, that a truly serious attempt at transposing Poe to the screen had arrived at the multiplex, I was as curious as excited.

OpeningContinuingDoris Duke TheatreMovie MuseumManufacturing RealityMaoli Film Fest A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.

by Robert Pennybacker

First-time filmmakers can glean some very helpful tips from Chuck Mitsui’s debut feature: the Hawaii-based One Kine Day. Neophyte directors often fail because of the self-applied pressure to make Citizen Kane, Breathless, She’s Gotta Have It or Reservoir Dogs on the first outing.

by Bob Green

It’s too bad that the word “icon” has become the most overused term in what passes for modern celebrity journalism. But if the word icon doesn’t apply to Bob Marley, who became a kind of quasi-religious figure to millions, a sign of hope, and, as it turns out, financially generous, to whom can it possibly apply?

OpeningContinuingDoris Duke TheatreMovie MuseumYWCA Laniakea A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.

by BOB GREEN

This writer saw The Three Stooges, the longest-running comedy team in American movies, in person only once–as a late-career stage act at a state fair. And after a more than 30-year career, the three–minus the marvelous Curly Howard (substituted by the mediocre Curly Joe DeRita)–had honed down their best movie sketches, brought along their all-important soundman (Bonk!

by Niko Rivas

What inspired you to start the Found Footage Festival? My friend Joe [Pickett], who I’ve known since sixth grade–he’s the other guy doing the festival–we were just bored in our small hometown of Wisconsin.

OpeningContinuingDoris Duke TheatreMovie Museum A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.

by BOB GREEN

Oka! tells tales within tales of primitive, transitional and perhaps sustainable Africa. For her third film, part-time Hawaii writer-director Lavinia Currier (Passion in the Desert, full disclosure: this writer worked as a consultant on this film) has chosen an intricate challenge: a narrative without melodrama, telling several stories: Equatorial Banzele forest pygmies enduring enmity from neighboring Bantus; incursion by timber companies and illegal hunters (some from China) chasing after the magnificent elephants within the forest; a quest by a terminally ill American ethnomusicologist trying, before shades fall, to complete his musical-instrument collection by finding the befabled Molimo, an extremely rare instrument said to be able to call elephants.

by Niko Rivas

Karen, a sophisticated 40-something poetry and dance teacher almost exclusively referred to as “Ma’am,” gazes around the classroom before zooming in on her prey. “When you stare at a woman, do you undress her with your eyes or cover her up?” she asks Marlon (Paolo Avelino), a struggling student utterly enamored by the enigmatic poetess, played by Jean Garcia in this film, the lineup in this weekʻs Third Annual Filipino Film Festival.

OpeningContinuingDoris Duke TheatreMovie Museum A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.

by Bob Green

Franchise comedy movies–meaning a stable of at least three or four films with related casts and plots–are rare, the most lucrative of the lot belonging to the American Pie collective, six and counting (two of these on direct-to-DVD). The newest, if not the freshest, is the current American Reunion, replete with scatology, cunnilingus, fellatio, infidelity, sex-with-food, major drunkenness and old jokes.

by Don Wallace

Listening to Science Friday on NPR last week, I heard the author Ian Tattersall opine on the question as to whether Homo sapiens had any more evolution left in them. Based on the population pool of 7 billion and counting, he said, the answer was no.

OpeningContinuingDoris Duke TheatreMovie Museum A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.

by Bob Green

The comedies of director Lasse Hallström (Chocolat, My Life as a Dog come to mind) are like no one else’s: deft, “humanistic,” character-driven and funnier as they go along. They often begin gently, with here and there a few chuckles, and then rope audiences in, ending up far more eccentric than they first appear.

by BOB GREEN

Dinner and a movie was a weekend standard until the tab for two crept past $40. An evening better spent would be to pair up rented Netflixed or streamed movies with complementary edibles.