Potentially useful as pedagogical sledgehammer, Burning unfortunately isn’t much of an aesthetic object. Vividly illustrating Australia’s devastating “Black Summer” wildfires, which raged off and on from June 2019 into May 2020, Eva Orner‘s new non-fiction film Burning attempts to document a horrific event while engaging with…
Clerk plays out like a love letter from Smith to himself, not offering much for the rest of us involved in the film-watching process. For movie nerds of a certain age, the story of Kevin Smith and his 1994 debut film, Clerks, is the stuff…
Filmmaker Lucy Walker’s new documentary Bring Your Own Brigade is a large, unwieldy film, bursting at the seams with ideas. While occasionally unfocused, Walker deftly navigates a tangled melange of tangential threads that eventually coalesce into a tapestry of human suffering brought on by…
The Strings is pure vibe-y lite-horror, director Ryan Glover skilled at eerie mood-setting and constructing effective compositions and ambiance. Ryan Glover’s new film The Strings is almost entirely a one-woman show. An evocative, moody chamber piece, the film (co-written by Glover and Krista Dzialoszynski) follows musician…
by Daniel Gorman Film Horizon Line
Mother, I Am Suffocating. This is My Last Film About You. | Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese
Mother is both brutal and poetic, a contention with self and homeland, and an introduction to one of contemporary cinema’s most exciting voices. When Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s film This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection was released earlier this year, this critic mistakenly identified it…
Uppercase Print mishmashes modes and can become a bit of a slog, but there’s enough formal playfulness to recommend it as a valuable addition to Jude’s body of work. Building upon the explicit interrogation of images and their meanings that one finds in I Do…
Hell Hath No Fury is something of a departure for Jesse V. Johnson, but the director once again delivers a tough, kinetic actioner, here aided by newfound narrative heft and twisty moralism. Amongst the DTV faithful, there are a handful of directors that have distinguished…
A Cop Movie is a clever deconstruction that doesn’t add up to much more than a grab bag of meta elements, but it at least seems to value real people rather than brandishing any copaganda nonsense. Like an episode of Cops filmed by Harvard’s Sensory…
One Shot employs its titular gimmick to no discernible value, but its actioner bona fides offer top-notch DTV thrills. Over the course of the last decade or so, Scott Adkins has staked his claim as the premier star of the DTV action scene. A remarkable…
Gleefully violent and hyper-stylish but ultimately empty and overlong, The Harder They Fall ultimately manages only to trade in well-worn tropes and clichés. The Harder They Fall begins with a bold proclamation — large type, all-caps letters that fill the screen declaring “THESE PEOPLE…