Reviews and coverage from major film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, SIFF, TIFF, and Cannes— the best and the rest of festival cinema.
In life, one always has the option of just being nice. With the endearing SXSW Grand Jury Prize winner Shithouse – an overtly sensitive college-campus drama that riffs on the sub-genre of conversation-driven romance films like Before Midnight – and now with Cha Cha Real Smooth, writer/director/star Cooper Raif has proven this to be his...
In the near future, a process called “replacement” allows dying individuals to clone themselves in Dual. The goal: their living loved ones will no longer have to miss them. When Sarah (Karen Gillan) starts vomiting blood one day and is told stiffly that she will assuredly die very soon, she decides to gift her loved...
Jesse Eisenberg‘s debut feature When You Finish Saving the World is a cantankerous study of an insufferable family trying – and failing – to live together peacefully. Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) is pouty and dense. Evelyn (Julianne Moore) is self-important and overbearing. He livestreams his folksy music to an eclectic mix of international audience members for...
Take the helplessness you feel when you’re in a foreign country but don’t speak the language and add in an inattentive husband and a possible stalker and you have a formula for a very bad trip abroad. In Watcher, this is Julia’s life now. Stranded in Bucharest, Romania, the unemployed actress and wife to an...
There are certain moments in life when everything in our body tells us to run away from a situation but we still hesitate because we want to be polite. Maybe it’s a weird conversation with a glassy-eyed drunk we got trapped in at a fundraiser. Or a flirtation turned suddenly uncomfortable with some girl we...
July 17, 2014. Irka (Oksana Cherkashyna) and Tolik (Sergey Shadrin) live humbly in the Ukraine border town of the Donetsk, an Eastern region of disputed territory during the dawn of the Russian-Ukraine Donbas war in Klondike. They’re expecting a child. The film opens as the couple discuss birthing plans and getting somewhere safe to deliver the...
A one-of-a-kind allegorical delicacy, Fresh revels in taboo subjects to poke fun at the stomach-churning appetites of the modern dating world. A delirious mash-up of cheesy romance and body horror shlock, the debut film from Mimi Cave begins in deliciously grotesque fashion, showing flashes of both American Psycho and Martyrs as her devilish meat-cute puts...
In Clean, Adrien Brody is a garbage man named Clean. After a tragedy in his past that haunts him to this day, Clean has gone clean. He’s trying to redeem his past mistakes by cleaning up the streets of Utica. Taking out the trash, literally and metaphorically. Dirty cops and rancid garbage, all must go....
Like Clue with lycanthropy, Josh Ruben’s Werewolves Within is an ensemble-driven horror-comedy with lots of earnest charm and plenty of satisfying laughs. A hairy whodunnit about a small Vermont community terrorized by what they assume to be a werewolf, Werewolves Within is that rare effective video game adaptation, reworking Ubisoft’s multiplayer Mafia-like VR game of...
From the very first moments of Ultrasound, something is off. In fact, a lot of things are off. There’s the obvious fact that the movie starts with a brilliantly uncomfortably ‘car breaks down in the rain’ moment where a soaked man seeks shelter in the only house nearby, the kind of scene audiences are instinctually...