8 years ago
All posts by Dan Schindel
Outfest Review: ‘The Most Fun I’ve Ever Had With My Pants On’
The Most Fun I've Ever Had With My Pants On both delivers everything one would expect from an indie road trip movie and throws in a few surprises along the way. It's not just that the film twists the formula by following two women instead of men or a mixed gro...
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Outfest Review: Finding Oneself In ‘C.O.G.’
Stories about "finding oneself" are all the rage, especially when independent filmmakers go hunting for easy plots. But C.O.G. turns many of the conventions of such stories on their respective heads, which is almost cathartic for any viewer who is tired of the...
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‘Crystal Fairy’: A Hit and Miss Success from Chilean Filmmaker Sebastián Silva
Crystal Fairy is a movie for people who like Michael Cera and kooky, free-spirited female characters. It's even more of a movie for people who hate Michael Cera and kooky, free-spirited female characters.
Chilean director Sebastián Silva and co. have ma...
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Your Guide to Outfest 2013
Having run since 1982, Outfest is one of the older major LGBTQ-focused film festivals in the United States. Now through July 21st, scores of movies about gay, lesbian, transgender, and more otherwise non-heteronormative people will be playing at various venues...
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‘Persistence of Vision’: An Incomplete Portrait of an Unfinished Project
The Thief and the Cobbler is the greatest movie never quite made, and the biggest tragedy in the history of animation. As the first major telling of the movie's sad tale, Persistence of Vision doesn't measure up like it should. The documentary does a good job ...
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LAFF Review: ‘My Sister’s Quinceañera’
Independent cinema has exploded thanks to the proliferation of technology, but truly independent film remains on the periphery. Film festivals are often chock-full of "independent" movies that are headlined by known actors, made by established industry profess...
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LAFF Review: ‘Winter in the Blood’
James Welch's 1974 novel Winter in the Blood is a quietly important piece of work, one of the earliest voices to emerge in modern Native American literature. Now, sibling directors Alex and Andrew Smith, unheard from since their 2002 debut feature The Slaughte...
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‘Between Us’
It's tough to successfully bring stage plays to cinema. With Between Us, director Dan Mirvish (co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival, incidentally) and writer Joe Hortua (who wrote the play on which the film is based) are clearly trying to capture a Who's ...
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‘A Hijacking’
Coming down the pipeline in a few months is Captain Phillips, a Paul Greengrass-directed, Tom Hanks-starring action thriller based on the 2009 hijacking of the Maersk Alabama. It looks to be full of shaking cameras, soldier-type people running around, and aggr...
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LAFF Review: ‘Concussion’
By my highly scientific calculations, there have been approximately eleventy billion movies made about people seeking solace from their loveless marriages by throwing themselves into affairs. Concussion narrowly drags itself out of that pack to become somethin...
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