Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes— the best and the rest of festival cinema.
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...
Landline reunites Obvious Child star Jenny Slate and director Gillian Robespierre for a mid-90s NYC dramedy about a deteriorating family. Slate’s Dana and sister Ali (Abby Quinn) discover their otherwise tame Dad (John Turturro) is having a heated affair. The rub is that Dana has also just turned up the heat on her own extramarital...
The sheer artistry in just one frame of Endless Poetry is enough to send you into sensory overload. Raw, sexual and bold, blindingly funny until its tragically melancholic, Alejandro Jodorowsky crafts a divine artistic manifesto – a living-play-cum-autobiography about an poetic soul sending off his childhood and paving his way down a road less traveled. Larger...
A potent familial eye-opener probing the fierce competitiveness in various corners of Korean life, Come, Together from Shin Dong-il circles a nuclear family on the brink of collapse; company man Beom-gu has just been fired from his job of 18 years; credit card saleswoman Mi-young battles an esteemed and spoiled co-worker for a prized family...
A father and doctor recounts the story of his daughter’s premature birth in Baltasar Kormákur’s latest thriller, detailing how he would have done anything, anything, to save her. Finnur (Kormákur) is given the chance to do so when her fiendish, drug dealing new beau (Gísli Örn Garðarsson) sucks Anna (Hera Hilmar) into a world of...
It’s nothing short of ironic that the 5 films featured in SIFF ’17 that I’ve already seen, I haven’t actually written anything about yet. So, in hopes of getting you all up to speed on as many of the SIFF features as possible, I’ll fill you in on the likes of those that I’ve already...