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He Did It, He Actually Did It: The Journey of ‘ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE’

Pluck the plumage off the bird because I’m prepared to eat some crow. For years, I doubted the fact that the long-rumored Zack Snyder director’s cut of Justice League would ever exist in a format suitable to be watched outside of a producer’s screening room. It just didn’t make one iota of sense. With WB having moved on from Snyder’s vision after the director was forced to leave the film mid-production when his daughter tragically committed suicide, the “Snyder Cut” was incomplete, with tens of millions of dollars in VFX shots never even brought into post-production. Read More

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SXSW 2021: Urgent School Shooter Teen Drama ‘THE FALLOUT’ is the First Defining Movie of Gen-Z 

We’re only minutes into The Fallout before the carefree world of 16-year old Vada (Jenna Ortega in a star-making role) is turned upside down by a school shooting. Up to that point, her biggest concerns were nagging parents, knowing the answers to an upcoming quiz, and which flavor cake-pop to get at the Starbucks drive through. When her doting little sister Amelia (Lumi Pollack) texts her “911” (she’s gotten her first period and needs to be talked off a ledge), Vada goes to the bathroom to provide some much-needed sisterly advice. She’ll remain trapped there, with popular girl Mia (Maddie Ziegler), when gunshots start ripping off in the hall outside, accompanied by piercing screams of abject terror.     Read More

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SXSW 2021: Floral Horror ‘GAIA’ a Nightmarish Reckoning with Nature 

Eco-horror is having a resurgence of late, as are psilocybin mushrooms as a visual language in film. Jaco Bouwer’s formidable woodland creeper Gaia fits snugly into a recent wave of psychedelic folk horror, a subgenre that binds Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Alex Garland’s Annihilation, Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (a recent Sundance release that would make a pitch perfect double feature with Bouwer’s entry) and even Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God.  Sparked by an increasing awareness of humanity’s abusive relationship with nature, eco-horror pits the survival of man and earth against one another and in the light of a global pandemic, those themes  have never been as prescient. Read More

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SXSW 2021: ALS Activism Documentary ‘NOT GOING QUIETLY’ a Devastating, Inspirational Call to Arms 

Hope is a hammer, Ady Barkan attempts to say. His tongue, lungs, and the rest of his body devastated by ALS (an incurable degenerative disease that paralyzes and eventually kills its victims), Ady tries again and again but just can’t get the words out to the audience of thousands gathered to hear the American healthcare activist speak. This moment, one of many heartbreaking scenes in Nicholas Bruckman’s not-so-quietly devastating documentary Not Going Quietly, perhaps best encapsulates the ironic paradox of Ady’s emergent and often viral voice: the more his body fails him, the less he is physically able to move and speak, the more he has to say and the more people gather to listen to him.  Read More

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Sundance 2021: Stunning Performances Make ‘MASS’ A Sorrowful Reflection On The Aftermath of Violence

Two sets of parents, Jay (Jacob Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton), and Linda (Ann Dowd) and Richard (Reed Birney), meet six years after a tragedy that forever changed their lives. A swirling character-focused chamber piece about responsibility, guilt, grief, parenting, and forgiveness, Mass is an incredibly difficult weepy that honestly confronts challenging material. To go into the specifics of those details is to deny the reader of the hard-fought suspense that the filmmaker works to achieve so do try to go into this as blind as you can.  Read More

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Sundance 2021: Porn Industry Is More Business, Less ‘PLEASURE’ In Phenomenal Star Is Born Cum-Up

The porn industry is first and foremost just that: an industry. Pleasure, the stunning expansion of Swedish writer-director Ninja Thyberg’s 2013 short of the same name, takes an unfiltered and decidedly hardcore look at how the porn industry operates through the lens of newcomer “Bella Cherry” (an incredible Sofia Kappel). A Swedish transplant that just arrived in LA with her mind set on being the next big thing in porn, Bella declares at passport control that she’s in the States for pleasure but soon discovers that she’s there for business. And business can be a sticky situation.  Read More

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Sundance 2021: ‘IN THE EARTH’ Combines Axe Slashers and Lovecraftian Horror With Hallucinogenic Style  

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

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Sundance 2021: Two Emotionally Wounded BFFs Are Going to Kill Themselves ‘ON THE COUNT OF THREE’

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

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Sundance 2021: Crowd-Pleasing ‘CODA’ Allows Other “Voices” to Soar

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

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Top Ten Films of 2020

Even though the theaters were closed for the vast majority of 2020 (at least where I live), I still managed to see nearly as many new releases this year as I did last year. In fact, I only saw five less, despite taking a six-month break from reviewing film. A small silver lining in all the nightmarishness of the year that would not end. Though it concluded rather…inconspicuously, 2020 started with a bang with my attending Sundance Film Festival (for the fifth time) and looking forward to an exciting year of personal and professional growth. Welp, that mostly ended in the gutter but here I am knocking out a Top Ten list because I know it is my sacred duty as a reviewer of film to produce such an annual list so produce I shall. Read More