Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes— the best and the rest of festival cinema.
Eight former college friends reunite the evening before their friend’s wedding to play a heady game with far-reaching consequences. Such is the set-up for Greg Jardin’s utterly transfixing debut feature, a precisely-constructed explosion of creativity that smashes together the college reunion comedy, puzzle box thrillers, and a Shane Carruth-esque level of science-fiction precision. Skillfully paced...
Jane Schoenbrun’s audacious followup to their attention-grabbing debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is billed as a horror feature but it takes careful time developing said horror. And delivers a wallop. A quietly remarkable film, and one that spurred a handful of walkouts during its Sundance premiere, I Saw The TV Glow is...
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Freaky Tales, a madcap 1987 Oakland-set anthology, is a lot. Told in four loosely threaded together chapters, this interconnected story of the intersection of corruption, subculture, and violence in Reagan-era west coast America bites off more than it can chew, becoming more of an implosive collision than a meaningful exploration...
When three British teenage friends, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis), abscond for a weekend holiday of hard partying, thumping clubs, and fast sex, they find that their freewheeling existence is more fragile than imagined. Tara, or “Taz” when she’s in full party animal mode, is the rowdy, raunchy heart and...
Teit (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) and Stine (Marie Bach Hansen) are storytellers who’ve left civilization to live off the land for a year – and podcast about the experience – in Superposition. The issue is that might not be the only Teit and Stine out there. This dense and well-constructed metaphysical thriller is designed to screw...
In My Animal, Jacqueline Castel deftly blends ’80s nostalgia and Giallo inspiration into a queer, modern fairy tale. This indie film take on high school werewolf erotica feels like a darker, more niche Stephanie Meyer creation, complete with issues of abuse and alcoholism, the tension of forbidden love, and, yes, werewolf angst. Bobbi Salvör Menuez...
Some of the most romantic movies to ever exist (Before Sunset) don’t feature even a kiss. Enter Past Lives, Celine Song’s achingly romantic two-hander about a pair of entangled Korean childhood friends who must navigate their deep connection across 7,000 miles (she’s in New York, he’s in Korea) and 24 years as they drift into...
A contemplative and unique Korean thriller, Jung Ju-ri’s Next Sohee is artfully directed and performed with reserved grace. Sohee (Kim Si-Eun) is an “extern”, a student worker exploited for their labor, mandated to work a call center as a precondition for graduation. Ju-ri turns the office worker grind into a mental prison that chisels away...
The occult dabblings of the Nazi party casts a dark pall over the estate of a witchy Baroness circa 1975 Austria in Marie Alice Wolfszahn’s Mother Superior. The atmospheric, feminist midnight movie tells the story of deep-cover nurse Sigrun (Isabella Händler) as she attempts to puzzle out the mysteries of her lineage, only to stumble...
Georgie (Lola Campbell) is a 12-going-on-30 type, living on her lonesome in her London flat following the death of her mum in Scrappers. When her estranged deadbeat dad (Harris Dickinson) hops the fence and re-enters her life one day, Georgie has to navigate her newfound feelings towards her out-of-the-woodwork parental figure in writer-director Charlotte Regan’s...