Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes— the best and the rest of festival cinema.
Fresno benefits greatly from the duel casting of Judy Greer and Natasha Lyonne as scrubby, flawed sisters who drag each other down a spiral of bad decisions. At the helm, Jamie Babbit makes her own series of bad decisions, often unable to get out of the way of a problematic script from Karey Dornetto and...
To watch The Frontier is to take a drivers seat in the Delorean and dial the settings to 1971. It has a distinctively “homage” feeling to it – as if it were a previously unreleased Hitchcock movie, filmed a short peck after The Birds. Unlike The Guest or Cold in July, The Frontier doesn’t play...
The comic combination of Nick Kroll, Rose Bryne and Bobby Carnavale is enough to sell this wry but formulaic family-member-moves-home farce wholesale. Ironic that Bryne and Carnavale just co-starred side-by-side in Paul Feig’s underwhelming Melissa McCarthy vehicle Spy as arms dealing peers and they here play another side to partners in crime as a husband...
The old “I could watch so-and-so read a phone book” adage speaks to an ability to turn the banal into something unexpected and has been liberally applied to the works of anyone from Bill Murray to Daniel Day Lewis. In a similar but distinctly different vein, there’s something mundanely alluring about planting Jason Schwartzman in...
In psychology class, you learn about the concept of diffusion of responsibility, a sociopathic event that explains that when more people are present or complicit in an unfavorable event, the less personally responsible that group will feel for its outcome. The public murder of Kitty Genovese – in which a woman was stabbed to death...
This is the future. Bicycles remain the only mode of transport and they scream down rubble road decorated with human skulls, past junk yards littered with bits and bobs of discarded robots and towards the odd outskirts ripe for plundering. The land is overrun with masked miscreants of a steam-punk Road Warrior meets Jason Voorhees...
The proof-of-concept for Wild Horses is in the pudding: Robert Duvall in front of and behind the camera, festival “it” boy James Franco and once teenage heart-throb Josh Hartnett saddled at his side. Even though Duvall hasn’t directed a film since 2003’s widely panned Assassin Tango (what. a. terrible. name.) there is promise in the idea...
From Lina Phillips’ ticks – his quick-burst nervous laughter after nearly everything he mutters, the awkward, uncomfortable way he holds himself, his unsettling obsession with Charles Manson – we know something’s off. The journey is uncovering what and the platform is J. Davis‘ Manson Family Vacation – a dark family drama that knots itself up...
Like Funyuns, Melissa McCarthy is an acquired taste. In her least delicate projects, she vaults around the frame, sharting and cursing to the apparent delight of squealing audiences that I just don’t relate to. Even in Paul Feig‘s Spy – a film that affords her at least an attempt at a three-dimensional character – a...
Take it from the effervescently crass mouth of Amy Schumer, “The title was always Trainwreck. Trainwreck or Cum Dumpster.” Oh Amy, you are such just so…you. From talk radio appearances to gross-out Twitter posts, the Schum has crafted her image on being unapologetically, oh-so-adorably crude and in the context of Trainwreck, it’s miraculous to take...