Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes, the best and the rest of festival cinema.
Damian McCarthy’s SXSW audience award winnerOddity sees a blind medium (Carolyn Bracken) strike out for revenge after her twin sister is brutally murdered. A twisty midnight movie from Ireland that effectively balances jump scares and tension within its unique premise of otherworldly vengeance and recompense, Oddity dolls out its narrative breadcrumbs at a healthy pace,...
Director Pamela Adlon and writer-star Ilana Glazer bring their comedic prowess to Babes, a crowd-pleasing pregnancy comedy that reworks the familiar “oops-I’m-pregnant” trope with a fresh, feminist twist. Despite its predictable plot, the film shines with Glazer’s brassy humor and a heartfelt celebration of female friendship, positioning itself as a millennial answer to Juno. The...
A maladjusted soon-to-be-middle-schooler and her codependent acupuncturist mother navigate summer break and a string of bad relationships in Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Annie Baker’s studious but tedious drama Janet Planet. Janet and Lacy’s intertwined existence rests at the intersection of intimacy and monotony, as the duo swing between piano lessons, summer camp, local theater, picnics,...
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow-up to Drive My Car, the meditative nature drama Evil Does Not Exist, is anti-commercial in every conceivable way, its slow-moving narrative primed to test the patience of viewers used to films with more assertive pacing. Though it takes a while to get off the ground and reveal what it’s actually about, this...
Sew Torn, Freddy Macdonald’s crafty seamstress thriller told in three vignettes, calls to mind the Choose Your Own Adventure books popularized before the internet. Invariably, readers would determine which path their protagonist should take, with most roads leading to a less-than-fortunate ending. In Sew Torn, a pivotal decision takes shape when Barbara Duggen (Eve Connolly)...
In his cringe-tastic treatise on middle school awkwardness Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham captured the universal horror of growing up through the specificity of Elsie Fisher’s Kayla. Her oily identity crisis effortlessly evoked our own transitory 13-year-old state, subjecting us to the lost-but-not-forgotten dread of first crushes, online interactions, and seething parental conflict. With Dìdi, Oscar-nominated...
After the sudden passing of his author wife, a Jewish cantor (Jason Schwartzman) finds himself deep in the throes of a crisis of faith that has his questioning everything from his career to his own worth. When he crosses paths with his childhood music teacher (Carol Kane), herself at a turning point in life, his...
An aspiring actor with an extreme facial deformity undergoes an experimental procedure and ends up missing out on the role of a lifetime. Things only get worse when the life he always dreamed up ends up in the hands of a rival actor, himself facially deformed. Writer-director Aaron Schimberg combines body horror with a Shakespearean-level...
Rose Glass’ Love Lies Bleeding melds a greasy crime drama with a gritty love story, presenting an American saga steeped in steroid-fueled rage, white trash aesthetics, and memorably bad haircuts. Glass leans into B-movie intrigue with an elite level of execution, creating a visually provocative and impressively-performed world of high crimes and low sleaze and...
Kieran Culkin shines in Jesse Eisenberg’s tender sophomore feature A Real Pain. A poignant meditation on loss, grief, and family history that’s part autobiographical and entirely heartfelt, Eisenberg has seemingly found his groove as a creator interested in melding melancholic human stories with relationship-driven good humor. “Anything that I’ve written that’s good is very personal,”...