Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) and Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen) are Finnish High School students and ride-or-die best friends. In Alli Haapasalo’s Girl Picture, the inseparable duo attend school before working together at the mall where they hawk smoothies with names like “It Takes Two to Mango” or “Just Breathe”. On the clock, they dish about romantic trysts...
‘After Yang’ is a stunningly beautiful, emotionally yearning science-fiction drama about what it means to be family; and what it means to lose family. Grounded in emotional depth and philosophical…
When a red truck is left parked on her property, a public speaking professor inadvertently begins an escalating feud with two townie hunters. Based on the short story “Winter Light” by James Lee Burke, God’s Country is a frosty thriller about bad blood in the Alaskan backcountry where an attempt to be reasonable breaks down...
’Til distance do us part. Not death. These are the vows of the slave – or “domestic” – in Krystin Ver Linden’s Alice. But death may always interfere. And distance – through space and through time – proves to be but an illusion. Alice (Keke Palmer) is a slave. She wants for liberation, daring for...
In life, one always has the option of just being nice. With the endearing SXSW Grand Jury Prize winner Shithouse – an overtly sensitive college-campus drama that riffs on the sub-genre of conversation-driven romance films like Before Midnight – and now with Cha Cha Real Smooth, writer/director/star Cooper Raif has proven this to be his...
In the near future, a process called “replacement” allows dying individuals to clone themselves in Dual. The goal: their living loved ones will no longer have to miss them. When Sarah (Karen Gillan) starts vomiting blood one day and is told stiffly that she will assuredly die very soon, she decides to gift her loved...
Jesse Eisenberg‘s debut feature When You Finish Saving the World is a cantankerous study of an insufferable family trying – and failing – to live together peacefully. Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) is pouty and dense. Evelyn (Julianne Moore) is self-important and overbearing. He livestreams his folksy music to an eclectic mix of international audience members for...
Take the helplessness you feel when you’re in a foreign country but don’t speak the language and add in an inattentive husband and a possible stalker and you have a formula for a very bad trip abroad. In Watcher, this is Julia’s life now. Stranded in Bucharest, Romania, the unemployed actress and wife to an...
There are certain moments in life when everything in our body tells us to run away from a situation but we still hesitate because we want to be polite. Maybe it’s a weird conversation with a glassy-eyed drunk we got trapped in at a fundraiser. Or a flirtation turned suddenly uncomfortable with some girl we...
July 17, 2014. Irka (Oksana Cherkashyna) and Tolik (Sergey Shadrin) live humbly in the Ukraine border town of the Donetsk, an Eastern region of disputed territory during the dawn of the Russian-Ukraine Donbas war in Klondike. They’re expecting a child. The film opens as the couple discuss birthing plans and getting somewhere safe to deliver the...