Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
Aleppo, Syria, 2025. A bombed out shell of its former self. Ten years prior, it was a flourishing city filled with bustling markets, food stalls, prayer, and congregation. Co-directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes chronicle that ten year transformation through the lens of Israa, an Aleppo native. Filming for One in a Million began in 2015, when Israa was an 11-year-old child, shortly before her family fled Assad’s Syria for Germany. Read More
Shot with cinematic flair, Michał Marczak’s Polish-language documentary Closure is a rattling search and rescue: both for an actual missing kid and the soul of the father searching. Following the disappearance of his teenage son Chris, Daniel diligently scours the Vistula River, hoping to either recover his son’s corpse or uncover some hint that he might still be alive. He and his friends spend their free time checking every creek and crag of the Vistula, mucking out the eddies, breaking apart wash-ups, and scouring its embankments for a decomposing body. In the opening scene, Daniel finds what he’s looking for: a corpse washed up on the riverbank. Fortunately, it’s not his son. Closure eludes him still. Read More
You may have heard the headlines before: without immediate intervention, an “environmental nuclear bomb” is set to go off in the Western USA, in Utah. The Lake, an urgent, fact-filled documentary from Utah-native and first-time feature documentarian Abby Ellis, starts by providing an alarming statistic: over half of the water in the Great Salt Lake is diverted for human use. Utah is the second driest state in the country but has the second highest water use per capita, mostly for agriculture. Without direct intervention and scaling back of human water use, that bomb is set to go off. And soon. Scientists Ben Abbott and Bonnie Baxter publicly report that without immediate change, the lake has five years before total collapse. Read More
In the winter of 2021, a group of 60 climbers—a mix of professional mountaineers, Sherpas, and an uncomfortably large number of novices on a paid expedition—gather at a Himalayan base camp to attempt one of the last unclaimed feats in alpine sport: summiting K2 in winter. The Last First: Winter K2, from documentarian Amir Bar-Lev, charts how this bold collective faces down the mountain, and what it costs them, as competition, commercialism, and outright negligence collide in a perfect storm. Lives are lost, lessons are few, and the takeaway feels grimly simple: mistakes were made. Read More
Rich in both place and emotion, shot in evocative black and white, and scored with delicate precision, Color Book is a heartbreaking tale of grief and perseverance. William Catlett gives a tremendous, pathos-drenched performance as Lucky, a father navigating sudden tragedy, alongside his son Mason (Jeremiah Alexander Daniels), who has Down syndrome, after the loss of their wife and mother in a car accident. Their woe-begotten journey to attend their first baseball game together in Atlanta becomes a soulful odyssey, riddled with the everyday detours of the financially-unstable and the challenges beset by a father and son suddenly jettisoned into a completely new orbit. Read More
A perfectly pleasant — if ultimately forgettable — Irish dramedy about gay author Edvard (James McArdle), who juggles the stress of an impending U.S. book tour while caring for his stroke-recovering mother (Fionnula Flanagan) and looking after the elderly mothers his friends abandoned to attend an overseas Pride Fest. Writer-director Darren Thornton delivers a quietly charming, poignant meditation on dignity: both in balancing personal, professional, and romantic aspirations, and in aging with some semblance of grace. Its somewhat formulaic optimism may not linger and the jokes about getting older all seem overly familiar, but the film’s heart is in the right place and makes for a geriatric crowd-pleaser. (B-)
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Two hours of uncut existential dread and a career-best turn from Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You from writer-director Mary Bronstein is an uncomfortably intimate character study of a mother unraveling under the weight of her daughter’s medical issues and a gaping ceiling leak threatening to drown what’s left of her sanity. Byrne has long mastered the art of self-loathing and performative pleasantries (see her Apple TV+ series Physical for a masterclass), but she’s operating on another level here. As Linda, she’s barely holding together her personal and professional life in this cortisol-spiking, secondhand-stress-inducing domestic drama. Read More
It’s been a decade since the folk duo McGwyer (Tom Basden) and Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) broke up. But if Charles (Tim Key), an eccentric, well-meaning, and possibly unhinged wealthy bachelor, has anything to do with it, their reunion is imminent. He’s determined to bring them together for one last performance—both as a personal passion project and a tribute to his late wife, their biggest fan. What follows is a funny, bittersweet, and deeply charming British comedy musical, powered by strong performances and even stronger music. Read More
Molly Gordon and Logan Lerman are lovers on a seemingly idyllic upstate weekend outing in writer-director Sophie Brooks’ Oh Hi!. What begins as a disgustingly cute romantic getaway takes a sharp turn when the nature of their relationship is drawn into question. Despite their easy chemistry and rollicking sex life, Lerman’s Isaac insists on keeping things casual, while Gordon’s Iris yearns for the most meager crumbs of commitment. When he can’t even manage that, she makes a split-second decision to prove they’re meant to be together, though her methods are, let’s say, unconventional. Read More
The Ugly Stepsister has already earned a reputation around Park City as the horror movie in this year’s Midnight section…the one that made an audience member puke in the aisle. For horror enthusiasts, this is the theatrical equivalent of a Michelin star. You must see this movie, etched in regurgitation. For the first 80 or so minutes of Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt’s no-holds-barred retelling of Cinderella, I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about. And then, the reason someone yakked became grotesquely clear. Read More