Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
Andrea Riseborough may be our greatest under-appreciated actress working today. Delivering standout turns in indie favorites like Mandy, Possessor, and Birdman as well as leading Amazon’s excellent crime drama ZeroZeroZero, Riseborough has slowly proven herself a transfixing chameleon presence. A la the great Tilda Swinton, with whom she shares vampiric lily white skin and sharp angular features, Riseborough creeps into the skin of her roles, the real persona rarely peeking through. Read More
Eco-horror is having a resurgence of late, as are psilocybin mushrooms as a visual language in film. Jaco Bouwer’s formidable woodland creeper Gaia fits snugly into a recent wave of psychedelic folk horror, a subgenre that binds Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Alex Garland’s Annihilation, Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth (a recent Sundance release that would make a pitch perfect double feature with Bouwer’s entry) and even Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Sparked by an increasing awareness of humanity’s abusive relationship with nature, eco-horror pits the survival of man and earth against one another and in the light of a global pandemic, those themes have never been as prescient. Read More
Hope is a hammer, Ady Barkan attempts to say. His tongue, lungs, and the rest of his body devastated by ALS (an incurable degenerative disease that paralyzes and eventually kills its victims), Ady tries again and again but just can’t get the words out to the audience of thousands gathered to hear the American healthcare activist speak. This moment, one of many heartbreaking scenes in Nicholas Bruckman’s not-so-quietly devastating documentary Not Going Quietly, perhaps best encapsulates the ironic paradox of Ady’s emergent and often viral voice: the more his body fails him, the less he is physically able to move and speak, the more he has to say and the more people gather to listen to him. Read More
In present-ish day Brazil, the fight for reparations for citizens of African descent reaches a violent impasse. Lawyer Antônio (Alfred Enouch) wants his government to impose equitable laws to atone for the nation’s past sins, chief amongst them slavery, but the fascistic government opts instead to offer a one-way ticket way “back to Africa” as a kind of mocking fuck you to the idea of reparations. Confusion, outrage, and mockery follows but the high-melanized (the term “black” has fallen out of politically-correct vogue) population have no idea how bad things will soon get when the government imposes an executive order that will instead force any citizen with a hint of melanin out of Brazil and back to Africa. Read More
Timing is a fickle thing and often means a world of difference. Timing divides those who murder the stock market and those that are steamrolled by it. It’s the difference between perfectly scrambled eggs and inedible burnt yellow mush. And in the case of recently broken-up Nick (Ben Coleman) and Leah (Ali Vingiano), bad timing means that you have to quarantine with your ex during the COVID-19 stay-at-home order in The End of Us. Read More
SXSW has a history of bombast. What was once a modest Austin festival that celebrated the local scene, music, and emerging artists grew into one of the largest and most-attended festivals the world over. As crowd sizes grew so too did the prestige and scale of debuts with massive blockbuster movies like Furious 7 or Ready Player One playing to salivating fans willing to wait hours to see the world premiere. Read More
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised), Ahmir Khalib Thompson’s (aka Questlove) infectious collection of never-before-seen-footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival (defamed for generations as “Black Woodstock”) is both a musical spectacular blowout and a powerful deconstruction of the Black experience of the era. In a lyrical collage of glorious music and sociological study set at the end of the Civil Rights Movement, Summer of Soul looks through the lens of performance, activism, and musical genealogy to speak to our country’s history, black identity, and the all-transformative power of soul. The musical segments alone make Questlove’s Sundance-winning documentary an absolute must-see. The sociopolitical commentary that runs throughout however makes it essential. Read More
Two sets of parents, Jay (Jacob Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton), and Linda (Ann Dowd) and Richard (Reed Birney), meet six years after a tragedy that forever changed their lives. A swirling character-focused chamber piece about responsibility, guilt, grief, parenting, and forgiveness, Mass is an incredibly difficult weepy that honestly confronts challenging material. To go into the specifics of those details is to deny the reader of the hard-fought suspense that the filmmaker works to achieve so do try to go into this as blind as you can. Read More
As a piece of metafictional drama, Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings delivers a wholly unique spin on the power of storytelling, weaving a story within a story that’s characterized by Shakespearean turns and prison-palace intrigue. Deep in the first of Côte d’Ivoire’s Abidjan lies “La Maca” prison. There, the inmates run the asylum. Read More
The porn industry is first and foremost just that: an industry. Pleasure, the stunning expansion of Swedish writer-director Ninja Thyberg’s 2013 short of the same name, takes an unfiltered and decidedly hardcore look at how the porn industry operates through the lens of newcomer “Bella Cherry” (an incredible Sofia Kappel). A Swedish transplant that just arrived in LA with her mind set on being the next big thing in porn, Bella declares at passport control that she’s in the States for pleasure but soon discovers that she’s there for business. And business can be a sticky situation. Read More