8 years ago
Festivals (10 posts found)
Sundance NEXT Weekend Review: The Quiet and Wonderful ‘This is Martin Bonner’
The world of independent film is mainly populated by the young. This makes sense, since twenty-somethings and early thirty-somethings are the ones who are just getting their foot in the door of the industry. One consequence of this demographic is that a good d...
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Sundance NEXT Review: ’12 O’Clock Boys’
I've long believed that anything in this world can be made the subject of a good documentary. Yet there are a lot of docs tackling interesting phenomenas that are mildly interesting at best and overlong slogs at worst. Like in all filmmaking, involving an audi...
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From SFJFF: ‘Life According to Sam’ Is a Poignant and Insightful Documentary
Life According to Sam opens with a 13-year-old boy informing us of the way he views his condition. “I didn’t put myself in front of you to have you feel bad for me.” Sam is one of the few unlucky victims of a rare and fatal disease called progeria, a mysteriou...
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From SFJFF: ‘Within the Eye of the Storm’ Is a Well Intended, Severely Slight Documentary
Forgiveness and empathy are the key themes of Shelley Hermon's Within the Eye of the Storm, a classically structured and mostly well-guided documentary about the seemingly endless war between the Israelis and Palestinians. If The Attack told of a very fictiona...
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From SFJFF: ‘The Attack’ Is a Middling and Familiar Depiction of Politics and Love
The titular attack in Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiri's The Attack seeks to expand the scope of moral conscience in modern-day Israel. For all intents and purposes, the calibrated efforts to make this film a provocative and insightful commentary on suicide bom...
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Outfest Review: ‘Test’
We've all experienced it. Something is off about your body. You can't precisely articulate the problem, but you know there is one. And you're hesitant to get it checked out, because what if the doctor confirms all your darkest, most paranoid suspicions? It's o...
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From Outfest: ‘Who’s Afraid of Vagina Wolf?’, ‘Valencia’ and More
Outfest wraps up today, but reviews of the film will continue to come throughout this week! For now, here are three capsule reviews of various films from the fest that I've seen.
Who's Afraid of Vagina Wolf?
Director Anna Margarita Albelo crafts a semi-autob...
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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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Karlovy Vary Concludes With A Taste of Asia in ‘The Grandmaster’, ‘A Touch of Sin’ & ‘The Missing Picture’
With the 48th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival now well and truly in the rear-view mirror, it’s time for my (belated) final dispatch. After a week full of mostly European and North American features, the last two days brought with them a trio of Asian ...
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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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