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).

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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.…