Love Wolf boasts a bold formal idea that’s wielded to unfortunately perfunctory ends. Jonathan Ogilvie’s Lone Wolf, a political thriller told almost entirely through mock surveillance footage, has an admittedly good hook. The police are surveilling Conrad, the radical owner of an anarchist books and…
TMBMZM oddly tilts toward authenticity rather than camp, to disappointing results. The Manson Brothers Midnight Zombie Massacre is a title that promises a lot. For the record, the titular brothers have nothing to do with notorious serial killer, but are instead a pair of…
Fullt Realized Humans is a half-realized film, awkwardly sliding between authenticity and sitcom superficiality. Bland but inoffensive, Joshua Leonard’s post-mumblecore rom-com Fully Realized Humans resembles nothing so much as the 2010s era of indie sitcoms on FX, stuff like Louis C.K.’s Louie and Pamela Adlon’s Better Things.…
Meander is a dull and derivative dud that fails to deliver the requisite thrills or kills demanded of its genre. On a desolate stretch of road in the middle of nowhere, a thirty-something woman (Gaia Weiss) lies in wait, hoping that a speeding car will…
Not everything works in Sound of Violence, but its effective balancing act of authenticity and go-for-broke bonkers keeps things singing. Writer/director Alex Noyer intends the title of his debut feature Sound of Violence extremely literally. As Alexis Reeves (Jasmin Savoy Brown) explains in her introductory…
Grear Patterson’s debut leaves much to be desired in the portrayal of adolescence and budding identity. Set amidst the waning adolescence of two baseball players, Grear Patterson’s feature debut Giants Being Lonely emulates its teenage protagonists in the worst way — it seems to…
Murder Bury Win is overlong and overconfident, with impressive technical aspects that can’t save a losing game. In building its story around three crowd-funding board game designers, thriller Murder Bury Win makes its indie sensibility resoundingly clear, and keeps its stakes remarkably low. Chris (Mikelen…
Funny Face works as genre deconstruction and cinema of a certain geography, but its attempts at explicit commentary are less successful. Tim Sutton is a director at least in part characterized by his pursuit of a sort of Kubrickian auteurism; each successive film markedly…
Exodus tantalizes with the possibility of incisive critique, but ultimately paints a fairly empty picture. Exodus, the debut feature by cinematographer-turned-director Logan Stone, is a peculiarly insular version of a standard post-apocalyptic thriller. Stone’s vision of America seven years after the Rapture is nearly indistinguishable…
The Mimic is nothing more than an maddening ego flex that is far too confident in its own “brilliance.” The Mimic, from writer-director Thomas F. Mazziotti, is yet another film that claims to be inspired by true events, as if the mere specter of reality…
