Alexandra Simpson’s debut feature, No Sleep Till, is hardly a typical disaster movie. There’s no panicked fleeing, no looting, no screaming and crying. Her approach…
On the most basic level, Graham Swon’s second feature, An Evening Song (for three voices), could be called a pre-war domestic melodrama, a gothic mystery,…
Over the past few years, much has been written about the undeniable wave of “Covid films,” narratives molded by lockdowns, themes shaped by isolation, and…
Lucy Kerr’s feature debut Family Portrait begins in media res, at the titular scene. There’s chaos, but initially the chaos is only visual. The soundtrack…
In contrast with the high-profile and ostentatious trappings of Everything Everywhere All At Once, which enmeshed the idiosyncrasies of genre with patent identity politics, Kit…
While technically a “Covid film,” shot on weekends with friends and family during the first wave of lockdowns in early 2020, Tyler Taormina’s Happer’s Comet…
Ashley McKenzie’s debut feature, Werewolf, already suggested a talent to watch in its refracted take on the addiction/relationship drama. While its dramatic sense felt stuck…
Alternative music was serious business in the 1980s and ’90s. Fed up with not just stale, bombastic radio rock but hardcore punk’s stylistic blinders, underground…
Actual People captures actual truths about the ways that young people behave. Kit Zauhar follows up her promising short film, Helicopter, with an equally talky debut…
Superior sources a number of eerie genre influences in the creation of a bold, singular debut. Functioning as both an expansion and direct continuation of her…
Ham on Rye is a welcome departure from the typical trappings of a coming-of-age film. Coming-of-age narratives make up a significant proportion of contemporary independent…
Grace Glowicki shows promise with Tito, but the film is ultimately little more than a strange trifle. Grace Glowicki’s Tito is the kind of strange,…
As its title suggests, transformation is the subject of Ashley McKenzie’s feature debut, Werewolf—a film that is at once empathetic and unsentimental. McKenzie follows Blaise (Andrew…
For an actor, part of the art of embodying a morally questionable character is to first seek a point of empathy rather than glaring signs…