Indie Reviews
Review: HONEYDEW, Exciting Rural Horror
Sawyer Spielberg, Malin Barr, and Barbara Kingsley star; Devereux Milburn directed.
Review: DEEPER WOUNDS (EXPANSIVAS), Stripped Down Thriller Speaks Clearly to its Intended Audience
Sisters Ana and Flavia reunite to gather their mother's remains. The eldest sister Flavia still harbors a lot of anger and hate about her death. She is determined to prove that it was their father who killed their mom so...
Review: VOYAGERS, In Space, Hell Is Other (Beautiful) People
Colin Farrell, Tye Sheridan, and Lily-Rose Depp star in the sci-fi adventure, directed by Neil Burger.
Review: Almodóvar & Swinton Make Short, Beautiful Music in THE HUMAN VOICE
Conceived as a short project during Covid lockdown, Pedro Almodovar's The Human Voice, based on Jean Cocteau's stage play, with its popping colors and its melodramatic theme, is a quintessential Almodovar film. It is also a great reflection on filmmaking...
Review: 2021 OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS - LIVE ACTION, Fraught With Tension
All five titles nominated for Academy Award, Best Live Action Short, are included in the program, now playing in select theaters.
Review: 2021 OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS - ANIMATED, Dazzling Array of Ideas, Emotions, Characters
Eight films are featured in the program, including all five nominated for Academy Award, Best Animated Short.
Review: NO ORDINARY MAN, Finding Joy & Struggle in Transgender History
Anyone who is a part of a marginalized group can tell you that representation matters; not just having someone like ourselves in movies or books, but seeing ourselves in history, as a part of the world, making a mark on...
SXSW 2021 Review: SOUND OF VIOLENCE
After surviving a horrible childhood tragedy that took the lives of her whole family, Alexis has been chasing down sounds that help her experience the phenomena called Synesthesia. It is usually an involuntary experience in a second sense. Alexis sees...
Cinequest 2021 Review: THE YELLOW WALLPAPER, The Dark Bends of the Fragile Mind
We've barely begun to scratch the surface of how the human brains works; that strange grey muscle that contains all these chemicals vying for supremacy, our emotions swirling, bumping against each other, always, it seems, at the edge of madness,...
Cinequest 2021 Review: A HARD PROBLEM Offers No Easy Solutions
John Berchtold, Catherine Haena Kim, Jennifer Hasty, and Victoria Platt star in a sci-fi drama, directed by hazart.
SXSW 2021 Review: JAKOB'S WIFE, Keeping This Marriage Together Is Going To Be The Death Of Them
As anyone who has ever taken the plunge can attest to, keeping a marriage together is no simple task. The routines that comfort us in the beginning can start to feel like ruts after a while, and it is very...
SXSW 2021 Review: THE SPINE OF NIGHT's Fantasy Revels In Rotoscoped Gory Glory
We live in a heyday of adult animation on television, but when it comes to feature length films, it's been a bit more sparse over the last couple of decades. Apart from brutally raunchy fare like the South Park film...
SXSW 2021 Review: OFFSEASON, Eldritch Horrors Meet Silent Hill Gameplay In This Effective Diversion
After receiving a mysterious letter, a woman travels to her family's remote ancestral home somewhere in New England and finds herself trapped by an ancient force in Mickey Keating's latest mumblegore effort, Offseason. A kind of Eldritch-esque survival horror that...
SXSW 2021 Review: Pull Up A Chair For THE FEAST, A Superb Welsh Folk Horror
Set at an ostentatious estate nestled garishly upon the lush green landscapes of rural Wales, director Lee Haven Jones makes his feature directing debut with the astonishingly elegant eco/folk/revenge horror film, The Feast (Gwledd). The family of a politician are...
SXSW 2021 Review: GAIA, Mother Earth Will Have Her Revenge In This South African Eco-Horror
A forest ranger plunges deep into the jungle on a routine observation mission and finds herself face to face with a pair of unkempt survivalists teetering on what seems to be the edge of paranoid madness in South African director...
Review: HAPPILY, Sly, Subversive Comedy of Romantic Manners
As a general rule, romantic comedies give audiences or viewers exactly what they want from the genre, ending with a central couple overcoming obstacles, setting aside manufactured differences, and embracing in joyful celebration of the “happily ever after” life they’ll...
SXSW 2021 Review: WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED: A HISTORY OF FOLK HORROR, An Expansive Examination Of An Evergreen Subgenre
An epic and sprawling investigation, dissection, and contextualization of the cultural impact of folk horror in cinema, first-time feature director Kier-La Janisse's Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is an outstanding achievement in the academic treatment...
SXSW 2021 Review: BROADCAST SIGNAL INTRUSION, A Compelling Conspiracy Thriller Can't Quite Stick the Landing
There's something about the unexplained and seemingly unexplainable that can turn the most rational person into a conspiracy theorist when they start to look too closely at details that were never meant to be put under a microscope. In Jacob...
Review: PHOBIAS, An Anthology Of Fears
Who doesn’t like a good anthology film? It gives directors a chance to try out new things in a short timeframe, and it gives viewers a chance to discover the work of someone they might have otherwise missed out on....
Miami 2021 Review: CUBAN DANCER, The Journey of Passion and Growth
A hat-tip to my friend Mattie, who has taught me a lot about the art and science of ballet over the past several years. While every art form has its own rules, quirks, individuality in how the work is done,...
