Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes— the best and the rest of festival cinema.
What is it to have faith, Paul Schrader’s haunting, meditative drama asks, luring audiences into a dreamlike spiritual journey in avant-garde exploration of the disharmony between modern religion and biblical teachings. This artful collision of good intentions turned awry and infectious melancholia pulsates with themes of despair, environmentalism, ailment and self-loathing, lead by a naked...
A potpourri of warmth and goodheartedness, ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor’ explores Mr. Rogers’ overwhelming generosity of spirit and his well-concealed demons through the lens of his radically unfussy television program that ran from 1963 until 2001. Putting the unlikely star back in the spotlight, this heartwarming and tear-duct-attacking documentary from Morgan Neville dazzlingly teaches...
Bart Layton’s audacious feature debut uniquely tacks together documentary and narrative styles to tell the stranger than fiction tale of a notorious art heist gone horribly wrong. Barry Keoghan and Evan Peters are strong as apathetic, bored college students who fall victim to glamorized fables of the perfect crime in Layton’s white-knuckle exploration of young...
Hell is a timeshare. A designated parcel of property allocated to your family for one immobile week each year. A curated escape, one characterized by pool floaties, crawfish-colored sunburns and frozen cocktails melting in plastic hurricane cups, that lives in a state of semi-stasis. There’s a kind of “Twilight Zone” quality to the whole notion...
A brightly burning ode to a troubled firestarter who happens to be the son of the fire chief in a small Norwegian village of about 800, Pyromaniac is an unsettling if unfulfilling character study. This mysterious slow-burn is more interested in the human drama than the narrative twists it sets up but fails to satisfyingly reveals...
Rodrigo Grande’s devilish Argentine caper pits a paraplegic engineer against a malevolent troop of thieves burrowing beneath his house to rob a nearby vault. Nail-biting and pitch black in tenor, At the End of the Tunnel employs star Leonardo Sbaraglia’s dramatic chops to create a complicated protagonist, even if his villainous counterparts are at times...
A stirring tribute to the journalistic heroes of ‘Raqqa is Silently Being Slaughtered’, City of Ghosts takes us into the epicenter of Syria’s ISIS occupation where a troop of citizen journalists seek to expose the true horror tearing their world to pieces. Matthew Heineman’s immersive filmmaking peels back the curtain, crafting a definitive take on one...
A stacked comedic cast aligns for Jeff Baena’s The Little Hours, an unholy send-up of 14th century lust in a small-village monastery. The priest (John C. Reilly) drinks like a fish, while three rebellious nuns (Aubrey Plaza, Alison Brie, Kate Miccucci) flex newfound bad habits when the arrival of a young stud (Dave Franco) spurs...
Aliens. Conquistadors. Cavemen. All three filmic mainstays crop up in soft sci-fi thriller Time Trap from directors Ben Foster and Mark Dennis. A pulpy adventure reminiscent of 80s classics like The Goonies and Back to the Future, Time Trap tells the story of a company of graduate students and their pre-teen tagalongs who go looking for their professor...
This ultra-ultra-low-budget Wakaliwood effort (reportedly made for 200 bucks), which won the audience award at Fantastic Fest (constant nods to Austin probably didn’t hurt), has the same look and feel as the flicks you and your friends made on camcorders back in high school. This nonsensical, irreverent and totally batshit “action” “movie” borders on being...