By Elias Savada. The ominous hum of unease that saturates Swiss-born director Michael Krummenacher’s effective yet derivative German thriller Sibylle – being sold worldwide under the title Like a Cast Shadow – sounds distinctly familiar. Is it a doppelganger? A transference tale? A journey-into-madness melodrama? Take your pick. You might see pieces […]
“A Strange, Organized Mixture”: David Farr on The Ones Below
March 15, 2016
By Paul Risker. David Farr’s directorial feature debut The Ones Below (2016) reflects ambition stemming from the storyteller’s youth, before his career in theatre that held back work in film. As Farr explains: “I came out of university in the early to mid-nineties and it was just a very difficult environment in those […]
Breaking Waves with Neptune
March 12, 2016
By Elias Savada. Spiritual and haunting in its low decibel manner, the New England coming-of-age drama Neptune is an indie effort that follows a young teenager’s soul-searching excursion along a disconcerting and sometimes allegorical path. The film is a proudly-shot-in-Maine effort from Portland filmmaker Derek Kimball, making a solid, passionate feature […]
A Conversation with Marco Berger
March 11, 2016
By Mark James. Argentinean director Marco Berger first gained notoriety for his 2009 Berlin Film Festival hit, Plan B—a film that explored modern gay romance in an ironically authentic Buenos Aires where nothing is as it appears on its surface. In the film Berger fuses genuine erotic suspense with romantic comedy […]
Fools Stalk at First Sight
March 10, 2016
By Elias Savada. A semi-creepy opening sequence for director-writer Benjamin Meyer’s micro-budget feature directorial debut Fools had me wondering whether stalking can be an acceptable dating platform. Two people exchange glances and touch hands on a passenger pole aboard a Chicago El train. He moves his grasp higher. Her hand follows. […]
The 2016 DC Independent Film Festival
March 9, 2016
By Gary M. Kramer The DC Independent Film Festival, billed as “the oldest independent film festival in our nation’s capital,” started screening dozens of features, documentaries, shorts and animated films March 4-13. Here are some of the highlights from this year’s program. Train Station (March 10, 8:15pm) is an impressive […]
Secrets Haunt Our Past: The Automatic Hate
March 7, 2016
By Elias Savada. Listen, I have three vices. Movies. Craft beer. And genealogy. Shortly after Justin Lerner’s second feature, The Automatic Hate, begins, there’s an uncomfortable meeting between socially awkward Alexis Green (Adelaide Clemens), an amateur stalker, and Davis Green (Joseph Cross), a bearded chef for a casually refined Italian café […]
The Sentinel Excavated
By Christopher Sharrett. I use the word “excavated” in my title not because the 1977 horror film The Sentinel , directed by Michael Winner, is lost to film history, but because it has been buried – with some justification – by legitimate criticism worthy of respect. I will argue in […]
The Camera as Our Imagination: Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
March 4, 2016
By Paul Risker. Alain Resnais and Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) – two names forever locked in an embrace; the latter a defining and resounding heartbeat within the filmmaker’s cinema. Alongside Last Year in Marienbed (1961), Resnais was the creator of cinematic or narrative labyrinths that liberated filmic storytelling, and furthered attention […]
Conventional Calamity: The Wave
March 2, 2016
By Elias Savada. Disaster movies are a dime a dozen here in the United States. Catastrophes (usually) are Hollywood’s bread-and-butter…and your buttered popcorn. Now, head across the pond to Norway and you’ll — until now, never — have seen such large-scale destruction in a film, where the industry is known for […]