Matt Funk

Daybreakers has all the pieces of a great film. Its sole and constant disappointment is that it does not behave like one. The writer-director team of Peter and Michael Speirig diligently assemble a darkly brilliant vision of a future ruled by vampires, but the narrative that inhabits it is built from bombastic lines and cliché drama fitting a blockbuster action flick. They take a piece of art and use it for a newsstand-caliber comic book.

One of the artists lending a grim shine to the film is Ethan Hawke, who I interviewed at the SLS Hotel. The SLS was an ideal venue for Daybreakers-a stark setting with blank, geometric furnishings that suggest both luxury and sterility-and Hawke conveys this aesthetic of chill immortality well in the film. A dramatic actor, his resumé finds him at the center of artistic visions such as Waking Life and Gattica. In Daybreakers, he is a striking model for both the timeless, retro imagery of the vampire world and for the agony of resurrection that the story of humanity's rebirth requires.

Jocelin Donahue is a thoughtful actress. Thoughtful films would be her genre: The former NYU Sociology-History undergrad has starred in period pieces like The Burrowers, a horror-western that was as much about settling the wilderness of the West as about what beasts lurk beneath that harsh terrain. She has been in abstracted short films like The Masquerade and Express 831. Sitting with me in a room at the Four Seasons, draped in the catalog-sharp attire that befits her past career as a model, Jocelin tells me she is drawn to acting because she is fascinated by the formation of identity.

We are here because of a film that radiates identity—Ti West’s The House of the Devil, which is storming the festival circuit from Sheffield, UK to Austin, Texas...

Written and directed by Kyle Rankin
Featuring Chris Marquette, Ray Wise, Brooke Nevin
First Look Studios DVD
Review by Matthew Funk

Infestation seeks no deeper meaning than an orgy of survival horror against an inexplicable man-eating insect assault. Its title has no profound connotation. It does not attempt social commentary. It is what it is. And what it is, is pretty damn satisfying...

Directed by Karyn Kusama
Written by Diablo Cody
Featuring Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Johnny Simmons
Review by Matthew Funk

Fans of Joss Whedon will delight—four years after FOX cancelled Firefly, they pay partial penance with this well-intentioned Buffy: The Vampire Slayer remake: Jennifer’s Body. Like Buffy, Jennifer’s Body uses wit and comic book violence to observe that high school social climbing is a close cousin to cannibalism. Unlike Buffy, it fails to deliver the dramatic goods or to show more sophistication than a bitchy teenager...