Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
“It’s amazing to be needed,” so says the affectionate day nurse Mona (Eleonore Hendricks) in Georgia Bernstein’s bizarre psychosexual horror Night Nurse. She works alongside a troupe of other young women, each assigned to their own older man, in a luxury retirement home that’s deeply unsettling from the jump. Something peculiar is happening there, but we’re never quite able to put a finger on what. We just know it feels wrong. Read More
There’s something in the air in If I Go Will They Miss Me. Planes drone overhead constantly in this lyrical, Moonlight-coded debut, a feature-length expansion of Walter Thompson-Hernández’s earlier short of the same name. Beneath them, a father and son circle each other in a jagged dance of longing, legacy, and quiet double-edged disappointment. Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson) is a man defined by absence; absent during long stretches of incarceration, and absent emotionally even when he’s physically present. His son, Little Ant (Bodhi Dell), watches him like a mythic figure, both larger-than-life and heartbreakingly small. There’s tension in their bond, Big Ant knows he’s not the man his son should emulate, but he’s too damaged, too volatile to pivot. Or even try to explain himself. Read More
Archival footage reveals a city in flux, swelling amidst years of demonstrations and unrest across Glasgow, Ireland. History falls like dominoes through the flicker of old newscasts. Hope, growth, loss, and resistance all swirling in the streets. On Eid Mubarak 2021, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, immigration enforcement shows up on Kenmure Street, a quiet corner of one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods. Without warning, they seize two Muslim men, vanish them into a van, and prepare to drive off. But citizens appear. One man slides under the van, refusing to move. He forces a standoff. Peaceful protest erupts, spontaneously. Read More
A profoundly upsetting documentary, Sentient explores the multitudinous horrors of the animal testing infrastructure—not just the physical, psychological, and spiritual toll on the animals, but the damage done to the human technicians, scientists, and doctors complicit in the process, all underpinned by science that may not be as solid as it claims to be. Centered on the expansive animal testing industrial complex, particularly the role of primates and most specifically the macaque, this film from Australian director Tony Jones leans on a mission-driven talking heads format, giving space to explore both sides of the moral and ethical quagmire that is testing on creatures as sentient as we are. It strikes a potent balance between the informative and the devastating, channeling an activist spirit without sacrificing journalistic integrity.
When 11-year-old Iris’ absentee father, Aris, slinks back into town for his father’s funeral in their sleepy Greek fishing village, she tracks him down to an abandoned shipyard and tries to wedge herself into his pathetic little life. In writer-director Myrsini Aristidou’s Greek-language Hold Onto Me (Κράτα Με), this relationship, performed beautifully by Christos Passalis (Aris) and Maria Petrova (Iris) in a two-hander demanding unspoken sensitivity, is the scruffy, beating heart of a film about transformation and reluctant redemption. When we first meet Iris, she’s stealing a dilapidated, leaky boat with her older friend Danea (Jenny Sallo), just another day of drifting around their washed-up town. When we meet Aris, by contrast, we’re introduced to an irredeemable huckster of the highest order: a cigarette glued to his lip like a fifth appendage, engaging in petty theft, hawking chintzy goods, and generally being an abominable prick to his long-forgotten daughter. Read More
Anna may be an adult, but her cognitive impairment (unspecified in the film, though decidedly on the autism spectrum) means she requires close care from her adoptive parents. The issue is that they’re now elderly and ailing themselves, hardly ideal caretakers. When Anna’s mother dies unexpectedly, her care falls to her father (Victor Slezak), who appears to be grappling with a case of undiagnosed dementia that anyone who bothered to spend more than a few minutes with him would pick up on immediately. To make matters worse, no care facilities in Florida can take Anna in, thanks to endless waitlists for public options and prohibitively expensive private care. Read More
Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) may be ultra-competent in her strategic planning role at work—and a fastidious survivalist to boot—but she lacks the social skills required to climb the corporate ladder. This is drawn into sharp focus when she’s passed over for a promised VP role after company heir Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) steps into the CEO role and kills her chances of a promotion. Insult compounds injury when she spies the entire C-suite laughing at her Survivor audition tape. But it seems Linda may have the last laugh when their chartered private jet to Thailand crash-lands on a deserted island and only her extensive survival know-how can save the day. Read More
On August 11, 2023, police in Marion, Kansas, a town where “everyone knows everyone” isn’t just a saying, it’s civic policy, raided the offices of the Marion County Record. They seized computers, phones, and personal devices, even searched the homes of the paper’s staff. A day later, 98-year-old newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer died. Her doctor cited stress from the raid as a contributing factor. So begins Seized, Sharon Liese’s clear-eyed examination of tensions between local government and its hardnosed media outlet boiling over, and in the process, becoming overnight national news. Read More
Tell Me Everything unfolds like a memory. Or a bad dream that has grown nostalgic with time. From its oversaturated aesthetic to the buoyant Israeli disco influences and gaudy ’80s production design, writer-director Moshe Rosenthal’s Hebrew-language film is soaked in the specificity of time and place. It hopscotches through timelines in Tel Aviv to tell the coming-of-age story of 12-year-old Greek-Israeli Boaz (Yair Mazor), just before his bar mitzvah, and the young man he’ll grow to become. Read More
An extremely wealthy benefactor decides to buy up a plot of land and provide housing for a small faction of self-proclaimed communists in Alford, Massachusetts in the powerful, provocative, and infuriating documentary from Sinéad O’Shea, All About the Money. Her film begins with what should be a startling statistic—that the top 1% of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined—but we’ve become so familiar with this figure that it lacks the sting it should. Enter 0.01%-er Fergie Chambers, the heir of a long line of media billionaires, who – both accurately and ironically – believes that America’s wealth inequality is fundamentally destructive. And so the wealthy individual does something unconventional about it: a small-scale effort to oversee the function of a community that doesn’t have to worry about money. Read More