The Toronto International Film Festival is, of the major North American festivals, by far the most pleasant to attend. Its line-up of films and clout are matched only by Sundance’s, and it substitutes balmy 70 degree weather and large, well-appointed theaters for that festival’s snowy winds and converted high school auditoriums and hotel ballrooms. […]
NEBRASKA: Buy A Ticket – A Lovely, Tart Slice of Americana An unusually strong season for American movies continues with the arrival of the simple and profound NEBRASKA, directed by Alexander Payne from a marvelous script by first-time feature writer Bob Nelson. Among its other virtues, it manages to feature within its 114 minutes […]
In a generally depressed indie film market, Netflix shelled out a reported $20M at Sundance for Chloe Domont’s feature writing/directing debut FAIR PLAY. The splurge made sense: Fair Play has that combination of strong storytelling and hot-button ideas on its mind that should allow it to temporarily take over the internet when it launches […]
BLINDSPOTTING (no distrib): At Sundance, often one doesn’t seek perfection so much as promise, and there’s plenty of the latter in Blindspotting, written by its stars Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal. They have a lot on their minds, from the gentrification of Oakland to police shootings of unarmed black men to the dynamics of […]
The “spoiler” situation with respect to Richard Linklater’s BEFORE MIDNIGHT is a particularly tricky one, because for those passionately invested in the saga that began with 1995’s Before Sunrise and continued in 2004 with Before Sunset, even the most bare-bones description of what the new film is about, which must disclose, by necessity, what’s become of Celine (Julie Delpy) and […]
THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (Searchlight/Disney – in release): The reason for expanding a documentary into a scripted narrative is typically to allow for an exploration of motive and emotional background not available in the existing footage. A documentary can show what happened, but not necessarily why it happened. That makes The Eyes of […]
Virtually every screening at Sundance is followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, and while these sessions can be informative and charming (although 3 questions that need never be asked again are How long did you shoot? What was the budget? and How much was improvised?), they can also be quite sad. Watching them, […]
PALM TREES AND POWER LINES (no distrib): Jamie Dack’s first feature film (from a script written with Audrey Findlay) means to unsettle, and it does. 17-year old Lea (Lily McInerny) is stuck in a dead-end Southern California beach town at the end of summer with a distracted single mom (Gretchen Mol) and friends whose […]