Indie Reviews
DOC NYC 2024 Review: UNION, A Film That Won't Be Streaming on Amazon
In a world of plutocracy, the working-class struggle is not a left or right issue.
HIPPO Review: Uncomfortable Laughs, Ludicrous Characters, and Much More
An unusual family lives an unusual life in Mark H. Rapaport’s Hippo, one of the stranger films that has played at the Fantasia Film Festival. Rapaport drops us into a suburban dystopic home where society’s rules don’t seem to apply,...
DREAM TEAM Review: Analogue Aesthetics and Conspiring Coral
Imagine it's the 90s, in the early days of wide home computer use, with dial-up models, compact discs as the main mode of music listening, and you've fallen asleep in front of your television. You wake up in a dark...
ELEVATION Review: Nothing Is Elevated in This Unexciting Sci-Fi Action
Director George Nolfi's film stars Anthony Mackie and Morena Baccarin.
A REAL PAIN Review: Dueling Character Studies on Unusual Road Trip
Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin star in a film written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg.
CHASING CHASING AMY Review: Self-Discovery, Acceptance, and the Dark Side
Revisiting cinematic legacies has become a genre unto itself. In 2021, the Tribeca Film Festival showcased Eddie Martin's documentary The Kids, a behind-the-scenes expose of Larry Clark's cult classic, revealing a web of collective trauma, exploitation, and victimhood. This...
HERETIC Review: A Diabolical Hugh Grant Takes Two Mormon Missionaries On A Hell Of A Ride
A pair of Mormon missionary sisters find themselves in a dangerous battle of wills with a charming but sinister spiritual seeker in Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’s religious themed horror puzzle box, Heretic. Sisters Paxton (Chloe East) and Barnes (Sophie...
SPIRIT IN THE BLOOD Review: Coming of Age Surrrounded by Monsters
I don't want to discount the possibility of the supernatural, since there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, but most 'monsters; do turn out to be human. And more often than not,...
Lausanne 2024 Review: MAKAMISA: PHANTASM OF REVENGE Confronts the Ghosts of Colonial Power through Subversive Silent Cinema
Filipino provocateur Khavn de la Cruz reimagines colonial-era Philippines through a fractured cinematic lens, blending experimental visuals with silent cinema aesthetics to unravel a surreal and haunting exploration of history, violence, and national trauma.
Lausanne 2024 Review: BEEZEL, Hex Marks the Spot in Haunted House Found Footage Horror
American indie filmmaker Aaron Fradkin fuses old-school horror aesthetics with modern found footage techniques to deliver a multi-generational tale of supernatural terror, unfolding within a cursed New England home.
MAGPIE Review: Daisy Ridley Delivers Knockout Performance in Marital Neo-Noir
When Daisy Ridley (Sometimes I Think About Dying, The Marsh King's Daughter, the Star Wars sequel trilogy) last appeared on screen in Young Woman and the Sea earlier this year, she was literally and figuratively swimming for her life. She's...
YOUR MONSTER Review: Effortlessly Smashing Genres, With Top Shelf Performances
Melissa Barrera, Tommy Dewey, Edmund Donovan, Kayla Foster, and Meghann Fahy star in a film directed by Caroline Lindy.
DIE ALONE Review: The Post-Apocalyptic Zombie Sub-Genre Gets a New, Fresh Spin
Every genre, sub-genre, and micro-genre eventually exhausts itself. But genres typically don't end; they expand, they evolve, and adapt, drawing on new ideas from outside the genre, mixing elements from other genres, and ultimately resurrect themselves, reborn on the ashes...
New York 2024 Review: SUBURBAN FURY, The Truth is Still Out There in This Captivating Documentary Thriller
Even with all the collective force of human imagination, evidenced by books, scripts and conspiracy theories, nothing can be as wonderfully and sometimes scarily incredible as reality. Some history lessons, even seemingly lesser ones, are so genuinely wild it’s hard...
Montreal Nouveau 2024 Review: ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL
It's hard to imagine what any of us would do, if we were driving along a quite road and came across a dead body, let alone the body of a member of our family. For Shula (Susan Chardy), on her...
Hawaii 2024 Review: Hard Justice in BALOTA
It seems like election conflicts are the norm right now, or perhaps it’s always been this way, and we just notice it more in the age of constant social media and news. Kip Oebanda’s (Abandoned, Liway) latest film, Balota, addresses...
ANORA Review: Wildly Entertaining
The experience of watching Anora is akin to a spontaneous and unexpected invite to a epic house-wrecking party. It starts off with surprise and wonder, plunges into drunken euphoria, loses all your friends, projectile vomits on you in a car ride around...
Montreal Nouveau 2024 Review: THE HUMAN HIBERNATION, Under a Cow's Eye
Like many Canadians (and others who live in a colder climate), I often dream - at least fleetingly - about hibernating for the winter, like our bear brethren. Sleeping away those colder months, and reawakening with the earth as it...
New York 2024 Review: PAVEMENTS Has Great Fun Selling Out
In the romanticizing of 90s indie music, it's oft said that no band better epitomized the rock & roll slacker ethos of rebelling against establishment/commercialism/‘whatever else ya got’/etc. than Pavement. If true enough, then how exactly do you make a...
Montreal Nouveau 2024 Review: THE HYPERBOREANS, The Puppetry of Memory
Human memory is fallable, at least on an individual level; though as some cultures can tell you, a poor memory has also been of great service to larger groups of people who need to forget, or need others to forget,...
