Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes— the best and the rest of festival cinema.
Stories based on a true story often face the detriment of audiences knowing how it’s all going to end. That will certainly be the case for many with The Most Hated Woman in America, the decade-spanning biopic/thriller focused on controversial public figure Madalyn Murray O’Hair, but it’s people like me (of the millennial variety) who...
Upon reading that Game of Death was an amalgam of a web series stitched together into a feature, I feared the worst. The formats, though not incongruous, ostensibly serve different ends – one drives towards a rollercoaster of micro-climaxes, the other tells a rounded whole narrative arc. It’s a case of a dozen acts versus...
It’s been a hot minute since Edgar Wright has graced us with his genius. The man responsible for such perfect fare as Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Wright has long been a pioneer of the Trojan horse comedy, trafficking highbrow laughs in with genre trappings. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Wright is known...
The Light of the Moon is an ambiguous enough film title. Jessica M. Thompson’s movie ostensibly could be a werewolf coming-of-age independent film. A non-canonical sequel to Moonlight. Even a bone-headed YouTube short about community college bros flashing their buns to one another. It’s none of those things, thankfully. Instead, The Light of the Moon,...
Robin Hood. Legolas. Katniss Everdeen. That dead-eyed kid from We Need to Talk About Kevin. Archers all. The Archer’s Lauren Pierce is not a name you’ll need add to that list. Bailey Noble does a fine job as the cocksure protagonist, a going-places high school competitor with a sharp eye and a short fuse who...
Colossal, about a drunken dead-ender who discovers she has become an unwitting remote control for a massive horned monstrosity, is a film at war with itself. On the one hand, the spectacularly strange conceit prompts a delicious revision of the monster movie genre. Still, the potential novelty fails to take flight, making Colossal both too...
A case of in utero homicide, Prevenge comes born of triple-threat Alice Lowe’s fertile but twisted mind. Taking duties as writer, director and star in this slop-rock ballad of killer prepartum impulses, Lowe weaves her story of a knocked up avenging angel in the strangest of circumstances. Pregnant at 37, art found itself mimicking reality...
Delicate and hard-hitting, James Schamus’ Indignation is a dramatic and philosophical examination of Korean War-era American values bolstered by wordy comic zest, romantic aches and a challenging moral imperative. Logan…
With Under the Shadow, Babak Anvari has his finger on the pulse of what we want, and deserve, from an independent horror movie. A potent location in 1980s missile-wary Tehran, a compelling lead in Narges Rashidi who grapples with cultural and professional oppression in addition to her family being haunted, and an actively restrained director...
Ned Crowley stresses “comedy” in his offbeat desert kill spree comedy of errors Middle Man. A darkly humorous dredge through despair and desperation, Crowley’s film emulates the dark comedy stylings that define greater desert noir the likes of No Country for Old Men with enough tics to call its own to warrant an existence. Parks...