Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
At the center of Sam Hobkinson’s stirring documentary Misha and the Wolves is a beautiful story of youthful resilience: a 7-year old girl in Nazi-occupied Belgium trying to find her parents is taken in by a wolf pack. Through German forests, she evades and searches for her captive mother and father, the pack helping the young girl to survive both the elements and the Nazis that lay in her path. Read More
No one can wring more documentarian juice from a conspiracy theory than Rodney Ascher. With A Glitch in the Matrix, the director of Room 237 – a deconstruction of the multitude of fan theories centered around Stanley Kubrick and his making of The Shining (including the oft-trend myth that the film included a subtle confession that Kubrick helped fake the moon landing) – and The Nightmare – an eerie, if wonky, study of the terrors of sleep paralysis – has settled soundly into his niche, creating his most complete and haunting film to date as he begs the question, “Are we living in a simulation?” Read More
The year is 1987. Halloween is on the horizon. You can tell because there’s a calendar hanging in the kitchen marking down the days. More importantly, the footage of Erin Vassilopoulos’ Superior is intentionally dated-looking, reflecting the lo-fi technology and grainy look of the end of the Regan era. After escaping a dangerous ex, Mary retreats to her unsuspecting identical twin sister’s suburban home, the perfect (and only) hideout she can think of in her unsuspecting Middle America hometown. Read More
The largely uneventful wanna-be Polish thriller Prime Time portends to be an inditement of the modern addiction to online attention, achieved so easily through social media platforms and their endless call to share, but as a narrative feature, it largely fails to stir up much storytelling juice to serve that purpose. Read More
Hogir Hinori’s haunting POV documentary Sabaya takes us to hell itself: Syria’s ISIS-run Al-Hol encampment. There, captured Yazidi (Kurdish religious minorities) women are kept as sex slaves. Beaten, raped, sold into marriage. Forced to convert to Islam. Sold again. Raped. Beaten. Sold. They are known as Sabaya. In the Yazidi Home Center in northeastern Syria, Mahmud, Ziyad, and an extremely brave and bold network of former Sabaya women plot, plan, and execute the rescue of these women. Read More
Creating horror has been and will always be a sociopolitical act and with In The Earth, British auteur Ben Wheatley reflects the reality of the pandemic back at us in startling, disorienting fashion. The result has notes of all kinds of horror, but most distinctly a tent-in-the-woods slasher crossed with Lovecraftian cosmic horror, all set to the backdrop of some airborne viral infection that’s driven the population into quarantine and starved them for a cure. Read More
Jerrod Carmichael and Christopher Abbott do a high wire balancing act in tragicomic suicide bromance On the Count of Three, a movie that’s sure to leave viewers shaken and maybe just a bit disturbed, but nonetheless absolute certain of what Carmichael came to say. Read More
Like an even more depraved episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, if they did a Belgian spin-off starring the McPoyle twins, crossed with the no-holds-barred slapstick comedic absurdity of Dumb and Dumber and the fourth wall-breaking, ultra-low-budget shenanigans of The Eric Andre Show, Mother Schmuckers is tasteless and offensive and grotesque. And it had me cackling in no short measure. Read More
Kids grow up so fast these days or so the adage goes. In Pascual Sisto’s anti-coming-of-age dark psychological thriller John and the Hole, this phrase is taken quite literally when 13 year-old John (Charlie Shotwell) decides he’s old enough to be the man of the house, drugs his family, and stuffs them in a literal 20-foot hole in their backyard. Read More
Inclusive, funny, original, and genuinely moving, CODA is just about the most wonderful start to the 2021 Sundance Film Festival that you could hope for. This endearing fish-out-of-water coming-of-age story about the only hearing daughter in a deaf family embracing her love of singing feels like a revelatory discovery; not only is it a standout film in and of itself but it’s the kind of movie that uses inclusiveness to tap into new voices and entirely new types of stories. Read More