By Gary M. Kramer. Keep an Eye Out juggles so many different styles of farcical humor and manipulates the police genre that its few lapses can be forgiven.” French writer/director Quentin Dupieux makes idiosyncratic films that either charm or annoy viewers. Folks who admire the cheekiness of his 2010 breakout […]
A Boy’s Best Friend is His Mother: Ivan Kavanagh’s Son
By Thomas Puhr. A well-crafted genre exercise…[that] ultimately offers mere glimpses of what made The Canal so strange and surprising. One of the great joys of our streaming era is the discovery – usually after scrolling through dozens of bottom drawer B-movies – of an overlooked horror film: one that […]
Dinner Served Darkly: Michael Mayer’s Happy Times
By Elias Savada. There is plenty of dark humor to be found in this Israeli-American hybrid from Haifa-born and Los Angeles-based director Michael Mayer…[a] horror excursion into impolite Los Angeles manners….” Don’t let the title fool you. What looks like happiness on the surface ain’t what’s underneath. Nowhere. No how. […]
Trzebinia, the Small Town: Tomasz Jurkiewicz’s Everyone Has a Summer (Każdy ma swoje lato)
By Alex Ramon. This modest small-town-set charmer, the debut fiction feature of its director, operates with a stealth subversiveness that proves all the more refreshing.” The biggest splashes in Polish cinema over the turbulent past twelve months have been made by two films: Mariusz Wilczyński’s Berlinale success Kill It and […]
An Artist in a Land Divided: Arman Nshanian’s Songs of Solomon
By Ali Moosavi. A praiseworthy debut feature for Armenian director Arman Nshanian.” Songs of Solomon, which is Armenia’s entry for this year’s Foreign Language Oscars, uses the life of the Armenian composer known as Komitas to cover an era of history which includes the Hamidian Massacres of Armenians by the […]
A Trance in Monochrome: Simon Lavoie’s No Trace
By Yun-hua Chen. Probing deep into the possibilities of filmmaking, Simon Lavoie invites his audience into a trance-like journey….” Slamdance Film Festival, the premiere festival with the mission of “by filmmakers, for filmmakers”, is unique in terms of its democratic programming and precise policy to support independent filmmaking; it focuses […]
Welcome to Full MAGA Cardiac Arrest: Cactus Jack
By Elias Savada. The combination of hallucinogenic talk radio sketches and Taxi Driver‘s Travis Bickle on steroids affords actor R. Michael Gull to follow the filmmakers’ urgings: ‘Let’s just make some shit in our basement … and show hate like it really is.’” I’m still trying to wrap my head […]
The End Goes On – Apocalypse TV: Essays on Society and Self at the End of the World
The Leftovers (HBO, 2014-17) A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. While the collection lacks cohesion, the entries are consistently strong when considered in isolation; consequently, Apocalypse TV might work best as a media studies reference tool or even as a springboard into future projects.” Television shows about the apocalypse remain a hot […]
The Slow Burn of Jordan Graham’s Sator
By Elias Savada. Graham plays you with creaking floorboards, flashlights shining in dusty interiors, and just plain gloom.” Fans of last year’s Tenet know that its title connects to the Sator Square, the ancient stone with early Christian contexts. Filmmaker Jordan Graham takes a different (and much lower budget) approach […]
Facts over Glory – Bumpy Road: the Making, Flop, and Revival of Two-Lane Blacktop
A Book Review by Tanja Bresan. Townsend successfully rips out the sentimentally and nostalgia of the counterculture era in which the film is set, serving cold facts…. reading the events [with] a sobering effect.” Sylvia Townsend’s production history Bumpy Road: The Making, Flop and Revival of Two-Lane Blacktop (Mississippi, 2019) […]