Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes, the best and the rest of festival cinema.
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...
As is always the case, gazing upon the list of 400 entires to the Seattle International Film Festival can be daunting for even the most knowledgable of cinephiles. Cutting through that list to cull a selection of desirables is an unwieldy task that demands more research than should be dedicated to a pleasure activity but...
Mean Girls meets Scream in Tyler MacIntyre’s trendy satirical midnight horror-comedy Tragedy Girls. Like Heathers for the social media age, MacIntyre’s coming-of-age serial killer misadventure satirizes iPhone-obsessed culture as two popular girls go on a killing spree in order to gain followers, accrue likes and establish a brand. A fucked-up ode to friendship first and foremost,...
A more lovable loser there may not be than Jake Johnson’s Eddie Garrett in Win It All. The 18th (!!!) feature from mumblecore originator Joe Swanberg, Win It All is the second “official” collaboration between Swanberg and Johnson, who paired up last year to middling success with Digging for Fire after previously working in a...
The great John Hawkes was relegated to character actor status for far too long. That wiry, weaselly-looking fella who’s cropped in all those movies and tv shows you love who you can never put a name to? It’s probably John Hawkes. In 2010, Hawkes received some long overdo attention with an Academy Award nominee for...
There in perhaps no film in existence that better exemplifies “cult” status than Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. A titanic miff on every level imaginable, Wiseau’s self-produced “romantic drama” is often called the worst movie ever made. And rightfully so. Anyone who’s had the privilege of witnessing this filmic trainwreck is treated to a level of...