Tribeca 2021: ‘ULTRASOUND’ a Hypnotic Layer Cake of Mindf#ckery

June 16, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Bob Stephenson, Breeda Wool, Chelsea Lopez, Chris Gartin, Conor Stechschulte, Festival Reviews, Rainey Qualley, Reviews, Rob Schroeder, Tribeca, Tribeca 2021, Tunde Adebimpe, Ultrasound, Vincent Kartheiser Leave a comment

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 trained to beware in movies. But there’s little moments too. Little touches that you’ll catch where something is certainly not as it should be. A woman’s bulging pregnant belly is there in one scene and gone in the next. A fully-stocked room service tray is wildly out of place on a deserted country road. Like a Find-The-Mistake picture book (think Dr. Seuss’s ‘Wacky Wednesday’) the anachronisms and scrambled bits of reality in Ultrasound just keep stacking up. Read More

Tribeca 2021: India’s Illuminating ‘The LAST FILM SHOW’ a Deeply Personal Love Letter to Film

June 11, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Bhavin Rabari, Festival Reviews, Pan Nalin, Reviews, The Last Film Show, Tribeca, Tribeca 2021 Leave a comment

In Pan Nalin’s The Last Film Show, the death of film has never hit harder. The Samsara director and Indian auteur has established himself over the years as a filmmaker with a distinct flair for visual storytelling, his films a kaleidoscopic whirl of images that speak to the simple power of colors and lights to evoke an emotional response. With an impressive career making documentaries, feature films, shorts, commercials, and television, Nalin looks back on his own journey to becoming a filmmaker in The Last Film Show, his most autobiographical and personal effort to date.
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Tribeca 2021: A ‘POSER’ Plagiarizes Her Way to Popularity in Devious Stalker-Thriller

June 10, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Bobbi Kitten, Festival Reviews, Noah Dixon, Ori Segev, Reviews, Sylvie Mix, Tribeca, Tribeca 2021 Leave a comment

Art is similar to pornography in the sense that I know it when I see it. There is a very fine line dividing art – whether that be performance art, music, poetry, or visual arts – from empty vacancy or ugly vandalism. Sometimes those lines can be blurred, much like a nipple on Instagram or the modern differentiation between television and film. This is even more apparent in avant-garde expressions of art, made to challenge traditional norms of what can and cannot be classified as art. A founding tenant of any counterculture movement is rooted in artistic pushback against tradition, and, importantly, the perspective of the artist themselves. In Ori Segev and Noah Dixon’s simmering psychosexual music-thriller Poser, the fine line between artist and con-artist melts and refracts as an obsessive podcaster infiltrates the inner sacrum or the Columbus underground music scene. Read More

NIGHTSTREAM 2020: ‘DINNER IN AMERICA’ Is An Aggressive Outsider Love Story That’s Punk As F*ck

October 10, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Adam Rehmeier, Emily Skeggs, Festival Reviews, Kyle Gallner, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Nightstream 2020, Out in Theaters, Pat Healy, Reviews, Sean Rogers Leave a comment

Before punk officially died, it traversed the Midwestern suburbs. Rebellious teenagers found solace in the head-banging misanthropy of the music, what with its promotion of anti-establishment ideals and the “fuck you mom and dad” messages raging through boomboxes nationwide. Patty (Emily Skeggs) isn’t what you would traditionally call “rebellious” but the punk lives within her. Gangly, geeky and clumsy, she moshes quietly in her room. Patty squirrels this part of herself away from her ultra-square conservative family but when convict punk-rocker Simon (Kyle Gallner) bursts into her life like the Kool-Aid Man, everything changes. Read More

SIFF ’19: Confident ‘BRITTANY RUNS A MARATHON’ Is a Big Fat Crowdpleaser

May 16, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Brittany Runs a Marathon, Festival Reviews, Jillian Bell, Michaela Watkins, Paul Downs Colaizzo, Reviews, SIFF, SIFF 2019 Leave a comment

Jillian Bell is off to the races as an overweight and under-motivated millennial living in the Big Apple who decides to turn her life around through the transformative power of running. The seriocomic account of seizing power from dark instincts is laced with the ripe reality of self-destruction and lifted by the hopefulness of finding self-love. Writer-director Paul Downs Colaizzo structures the film as Brittany’s rom-com with herself and Bell, who packed on (and lost) quite a bit of weight for the role, is simply fantastic delivering a marathon of darkly-tinged comedy and uplifting pathos. (B) Read More

Out in Theaters: ‘INDIGNATION’

August 8, 2016 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Out in Theaters Tagged Danny Burstein, Festival Reviews, Indignation, James Schamus, Linda Emond, Logan Lerman, Out in Theaters, Philip Roth, Reviews, Sarah Gadon, Seattle International Film Festival 2016, SIFF 2016, Tracy Letts 1 Comment

The basic plot structure of Indignation couldn’t be simpler. The precocious son of a New Jersey kosher butcher heads off to college, goes on a date, changes dorm rooms and gets appendicitis. For a film with such narrative simplicity, the margins are sprawled with a rich tapestry of emotionally vibrant reveals, loaded with unconventional wordplay comedy and brimming with decadent forbidden relationships, all pumping along to a mule kick of a curtain act. As a crossbred of coiffed 1950s romance and genteel protest piece, Indignation is a delicate ballet that culminates in first time writer/director James Schamus doing a tap dance on your fluttering, caved-in chest. Read More

TIFF ’15 Review: ‘DER NACHTMAHR’ (The Nightmare)

September 11, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Coverage, Festival Reviews Tagged Akiz, Carolyn Genzkow, Der Nachtmahr, Festival Reviews, Reviews, The Nightmare, TIFF 2015, Toronto International Film Festival 1 Comment

If you wiggle a pencil fast enough, it appears soft. Rubbery. Made of flesh. It’s only when you reach out and touch the pencil that you realize it’s made of hard wood. In a film, we cannot reach out, we cannot exert force or physical contact, so we rely on cues that the filmmaker plants within the picture; clues that help us distinguish the realm of the real from that of the imaginary. Der Nachtmahr (The Nightmare) is an exercise in distinguishing the real from the imagined through the lens of what is essentially ET’s aborted fetus. Read More

SXSW Review: EXCESS FLESH

March 13, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Bethany Orr, Excess Flesh, Festival Reviews, Film Festivals, Mary Loveless, Patrick Kennelly, Reviews, Sigrid Gilmer, SXSW 2015

Remember those fetid middle school health videos about eating disorders? The concerned best friend, the bespectacled guidance counselor, the implied offscreen self-abuse. The gorging. The vomiting. The inevitable dramatic hospital visit. Excess Flesh isn’t quite that but Patrick Kennelly‘s wannabe horror feature is still very much the cinematic version of binging and purging. It crams a bunch of junk down your throat only to yuck it back on the screen as watery, indistinct gook. Kinda like the next day stomach movement of a truly ripping kegger. Kennelly’s narrative circle of hell exhumes outdated and/or overplayed models of violence towards women and the violence women inflict on themselves to ill-effect. Aided by a predictable and heavily cliched script from Kennelly and co-writer Sigrid Gilmer (starring bottom-feeding lines like “You’re not gonna get away with this, you know”), Excess Flesh is at once an obvious and oblivious body dysmorphia thriller that’s more than a little flabby. And by curtain time, it, like a half-starved model, has totally collapsed off the runway. Read More

SXSW Review: AVA’S POSSESSIONS

March 13, 2015 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Ava's Possessions, Deborah Rush, Festival Reviews, Jordan Galland, Louisa Krause, SXSW 2015, William Sadler 1 Comment

Traditionally, the horror movies begins with the tabula rasa and from there builds upwards with little narrative Lincoln Logs stacked on shower scares and mirror pop-ins. Ava’s Possessions shrewdly flips the formula on its head, poising an intriguing conceit in the exploration of what transpires after a ghastly, cathartic event. Where is the werewolf at mentally the morn after the full moon? When do the disfigured, backwoods cannibals run out of human stock and have to settle on Ramen? How nasty a case of PDST results from a Eli Roth-style torture session? What is the aftermath of an exorcism? Read More

SIFF Capsule Recap #10: STANDING ASIDE WATCHING, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2, LIFE FEELS GOOD, THEY CAME TOGETHER

June 9, 2014 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Festival Reviews, Film Festivals, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Life Feels Good, Reviews, SIFF, SIFF 2014, SIFForty, Standing Aside Watching, They Came Together

The cloud has lifted. SIFF 2014 is over. I’ve seen 40 films. FORTY. (*Takes deep breath, drag off inhaler*) While I grossly miscalculated just how much a marathon watching 40 films in the span of a month (on top of new wide releases) would be and how taxing on my creative spirit, to have it done and over with is like a right of passage. With this capsule review series now at a close, I can assuredly say that SIFForty has certainly had a wealth of good stuff to offer but they’re nothing if not hidden amongst a trove of unenviable watches. As always, the good is mixed in with the bad, brown-paper-bagged and drawn at random. But of course, this is why you read reviews.

Even in this final leg, I’m keeping within the rules and regs of SIFF protocol so these micro-reviews are sliced and diced down to a brief 75 words so you can read them fast, I can write them fast and the studio’s happy. So, short and sweet reading for you, much more time for movie watching for me. This is the close of a beautiful friendship.

Standing Aside Watching (Na Kathesai Kai Na Koitas)

dir. Giorgos Servetas star. Marina Symeou, Marianthi Pantelopoulou, Nikos Georgakis (Greece)

This Greek pseudo-tragedy thinks it blends elements of feminism in a bowl of misogyny but winds up a fallen soufflé of smut; a concoction of hopelessness and gray scenery that reads snuff film. Just when you think the film might barrel into a satisfying direction of minxy revenge, Servetas’ film succumbs to more violence against women and more senseless sentences carried out by the meat-headed minds of men. An unpleasant and dark experience not worthy of embarking on. (D)

How to Train Your Dragon 2

dir. Dean DuBlois star. Jay Baruchel, Gerald Butler, Cate Blanchett, Craig Robinson, Djimon Hounsou (USA)

Soaring nearly as high as its predecessor, How to Train Your Dragon 2 represents the best that animation has to offer. With Roger Deakins serving as a visual consultant, the film looks goddamn brilliant with Dreamworks ushering in a new gold standard for animated features in era of post-Pixar brilliance. And while most (if not all) of the comic beats fall on deaf ears (and ought to have been cut entirely), Dragon’s heart is so big and worn so proudly on its sleeve that you’ll have to be a monster to not erupt in tears on multiple occasions in this undeniably excellent yarn on a man’s maturing relationship with his beast. (A)

Life Feels Good (Chce Sie Zyc)

dir. Maciej Pieprzyca star. Dawid Ogrodnik, Dorota Kolak, Arkadiusz Jakubik, Helena Sujecka (Poland)

Taking a page from the book of My Left Foot, Life Feels Good explores similar territory as a young man suffering from cerebral palsy tries, but fails, to communicate with the world. While Left Foot showed the immeasurable progress of a boy once thought to be a dullard, Life Feels Good is more about the institutional fallacies that circle mental disorders; the metaphysical prison that is disability juxtaposed against the physical prison that is a mental hospital. In Dawid Ogrodnik‘s stirring, wordless performance, we feel just how tortuous being trapped inside yourself would be and how damning the world around you can be. (B-)

They Came Together

dir. David Wain star. Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Cobie Smulders, Bill Hader (USA)

Don’t get me wrong, Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd make for a charming duo. Nevertheless They Came Together is a rom-com spoof in the same witless vein of Jason Friedman and Aaron Seltzer (The Starving Games, Meet the Spartans). Accordingly, it’s somewhat shocking to see Wet Hot American Summer‘s David Wain attached as director and helmer of this jokeless torpedo. His lambasting efforts are futile, his hammy parody a complete wash. While Wain’s conceit appears to be grounded in an attempt to skewer the genre instead of merely recreating pop cultural references, it works like a montage of dead baby jokes and there’s ultimately nothing differentiating this from Scary Movie 6, Epic Movie or Vampires Suck. They Came Together joins the great American tradition of not knowing comedy from an asshole. (F)