Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes, the best and the rest of festival cinema.
With Captain Fantastic, writer/director Matt Ross has tapped enlightenment like a spigot into a maple tree and funneled it into crowd-pleasing dramedy. With a first-rate cast that includes Viggo Mortensen, Kathryn Hahn, Steve Zahn, Frank Langella and Ann Dowd, Ross’ second feature shows a filmmaker emerging with a booming voice, immediately confident enough to corral...
Hot from the critical heralding of Blue Ruin, Jeremy Saulnier returns to the world of white trash and movies with colors in their title with Green Room. An ultraviolet fantasy of viscus and vengeance, Green Room is as unapologetic as a Misfits album, as dead-serious as a KKK rally and as boastfully savage as a...
Goat harrowingly explores the hypocrisy of fraternal brotherhood, bearing witness to the ugly rights of passage that men must submit to into order to earn their badge of masculinity. In Andrew Neel‘s testosterone-fueled melodrama, ideas of modern masculinity are examined through the lens of the Phi Sigma Mu fraternity of the fictitious Brookman University as...
Debuting in a time where discussion on race in American cinema is at an absolute fever pitch, Morris From America explores the idea of cultural and personal identity through the lens of a 13-year old black aspiring free-styler living with his father (Craig Robinson) in the little white-washed German village of Heidelberg. Directed by Chad...
Taika Waititi‘s oddball Hunt for the Wilderpeople continues the Kiwi director’s aggressive expansion into the mainstream while still maintaining his goofy, grinning, soft-centered tendencies. Coming off the roaring critical success of vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, Wilderpeople is a more grounded venture (but then again, what isn’t?) that maintains Waititi’s ironic and...
Wild, or 50 Shades of Grey Wolf, is Germany’s erotic response to Beauty and the Beast. If the beast were a feral wolf and beauty his captor. Like an anarchistic misinterpretation of To Catch a Predator, the German feature from Berlin-native Nicolette Krebitz finds a dissatisfied Ania (Lillith Stangenberg) serendipitously strike up a relationship with...
Jason Lew presents a bleak world of second chances and doomed romance in impact drama The Free World. Lew’s feature gives a Bonnie and Clyde twist to the “Romeo and Juliet” story and those willing to overlook some obvious symbolism will find a feature rich in subtext and striking performances. Featuring the always phenomenal Elisabeth...