Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes, the best and the rest of festival cinema.
If you wiggle a pencil fast enough, it appears soft. Rubbery. Made of flesh. It’s only when you reach out and touch the pencil that you realize it’s made of hard wood. In a film, we cannot reach out, we cannot exert force or physical contact, so we rely on cues that the filmmaker plants...
Film originally seen at Seattle International Film Festival ’15. It’s no mystery that Brian Wilson was a tortured soul. Look no further than single “Heroes and Villains”, originally released on 1967’s Smiley Smile, and peel back the oily layer of Wilson’s lyrical metaphors to glance into the depths of his tortured soul. In the tune’s...
Many have tried to imitate the cinematic fine art that is The Evil Dead and few have been able to ape Sam Raimi‘s splatterhead masterpiece with as much boundless, bloody guile as Peter Jackson. Yes, the blockbusting king of Middle Earth Peter Jackson. Though most know the frumpy Kiwi from his work on the Lord...
Ted (Jared Breeze) is a serial killer in the making. He’s only nine years old but all the warning signs are there in Craig William Macneill’s slow burning but explosively rewarding The Boy. Like the great unmade redneck prequel to The Good Son, The Boy shows the quiet transformation of ennui to psychosis as an...
Creative Control takes place in a world of technology just a few year’s out from today. Cell phones and computer screens are composed of sheer cuts of opaque glass and flicker with images only visible to their owner. Apps are controlled with the slightest wave of a finger, like a symphony composer directing his orchestra....
To watch The Frontier is to take a drivers seat in the Delorean and dial the settings to 1971. It has a distinctively “homage” feeling to it – as if it were a previously unreleased Hitchcock movie, filmed a short peck after The Birds. Unlike The Guest or Cold in July, The Frontier doesn’t play...
The comic combination of Nick Kroll, Rose Bryne and Bobby Carnavale is enough to sell this wry but formulaic family-member-moves-home farce wholesale. Ironic that Bryne and Carnavale just co-starred side-by-side in Paul Feig’s underwhelming Melissa McCarthy vehicle Spy as arms dealing peers and they here play another side to partners in crime as a husband...
The old “I could watch so-and-so read a phone book” adage speaks to an ability to turn the banal into something unexpected and has been liberally applied to the works of anyone from Bill Murray to Daniel Day Lewis. In a similar but distinctly different vein, there’s something mundanely alluring about planting Jason Schwartzman in...
From Lina Phillips’ ticks – his quick-burst nervous laughter after nearly everything he mutters, the awkward, uncomfortable way he holds himself, his unsettling obsession with Charles Manson – we know something’s off. The journey is uncovering what and the platform is J. Davis‘ Manson Family Vacation – a dark family drama that knots itself up...
At the bedside of crisped brother Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), older, meaner Deckard (Jason Statham) vows revenge on the crew that turned his sibling into a pin cushion. The camera pulls back to reveal a high security hospital-turned-war zone and Statham slowly saunters past gunned-down guards, ravaged rooms and fizzling tech. The world pisses itself...