Summer in February is rainy afternoon of a film

If there’s one thing the British film industry has over our brasher, better-financed American cousins, it’s our monopoly over the formal period drama.

Summer in February is a fictionalized account of the documented love triangle between aspiring artist Florence Carter-Wood (Emily Browning), land agent Captain Gilbert Evans (Dan Stevens) and rural painter AJ Munnings (Dominic Cooper).

Dead Man Down is promising but falls back on genre trappings

Genre can be a double-edged sword for even the most talented and versatile filmmaker: hew too close to convention and you risk falling into cliche, stray too far and you risk alienating your core audience.

I think it’s revealing that two of my favorite genre films of recent years – Shane Black’s vaguely satirical crime thriller Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Drew Goddard’s postmodern slasher horror The Cabin in the Woods – both deconstruct their respective genres.…