Holler stumbles a bit on the way to its ending, but its strength of direction, character, and milieu make for an often thrilling bit of industrial indie cinema. There’s a scene about halfway through Nicole Riegel’s debut feature Holler where Ruth (Jessica Barden) and her…
Near its end, Gully gives a glimpse of what a less maximalist, more successful version of itself would look like, but it comes too late. Something like the crude watercourse described by its title, Gully’s very nature inheres in the transformations undergone at intersections,…
Tove disrupts standard biopic conventions and mines meaning from its language-heavy approach. In a 1946 letter to her love Vivica Bandler, Swedish writer and artist Tove Jansson wrote: “I know you don’t believe there is an afterwards. How surprised you will be, Vi, when I…
The Real Thing isn’t without considerable flaws, but it still allows plenty to percolate across its behemoth runtime. The unspoken commonality of all the projects that find notions of TV vs. cinema foisted upon them is their duration. Not just the cumulative length of…
In the cinema of the filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s not hard to notice a motif of water that stands out across his work and often plays a crucial role. Whether it’s the seaside (in The State I Am In, Jerichow and Barbara), lakes and…
Bad Tales certainly tries hard but comes off mostly like an artfully-directed after-school special. The stink of desperation wafts heavily from Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo’s Italian never-coming-of-age drama Bad Tales. An unholy hybrid of the dreamy lyricism of The Virgin Suicides and the stomach-churning…
All Light, Everywhere is a Herculean effort meriting praise, but one in which the parts prove more impressive than the whole. If it hadn’t already been claimed, a much more appropriate title for Theo Anthony’s All Light, Everywhere would be The Act of Seeing…
Slow Machine introduces a directing duo happy to noodle and experiment with various modes, but who aren’t yet refined or cogent enough in purpose. Jacques Rivette proved some decades ago that it’s possible to conjure a Langian cinema without Langian means, to describe the…
Port Authority boasts a thoughtful, intimate texture, but somewhat betrays its material in its character perspective. Going into Port Authority, two outcomes feel equally likely: A) the film will be just wildly offensive, full of derogatory stereotypes about trans women and chasers, and reductive…
Moby Doc is an absurd vanity project, proving Moby is less a fun meme and more an insufferable dope. Moby is, by most accounts, something of a complete cultural meme at this point in time, possibly only rivaled by the likes of Fred Durst and…
