True/False 2023 Dispatch: “Going to Mars,” “Red Herring,” “Dogwatch”

Greetings from the 20th True/False Film Festival! I’m excited to be back in Columbia, Missouri this weekend celebrating thrilling new works of documentary filmmaking. For my first batch of capsule reviews from this year’s festival, I’m looking at two feature debuts (one a world premiere) and a doc about a well-known subject that recently premiered […]

Review: “Palm Trees and Power Lines”

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in school, but I remember that liminal space known as summer vacation. Days bleeding into each other with no job or commitments that require you to keep track of time, the overbearing heat prompting you to shuffle between the sunny poolside and dim air-conditioned interiors. When we […]

Review: “Cocaine Bear”

Piranhaconda. Arachnoquake. Sharknado. Those are just a handful of the ridiculous titles of movies that promised an equally ridiculous premise that were prevalent on the Syfy Channel throughout the early to mid-2000s. Cocaine Bear sounds like another absurd creature feature that would feel right at home among them, but with one crucial difference: whereas those […]

Review: “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”

There’s a scene during the climax of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in which Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and his 18-year-old daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), who now has a similar suit to his that allows her to change size, have both grown to a gigantic size to fight off the bad guys in […]

Review: “Knock at the Cabin”

If you could save the entire world from the apocalypse, but you had to sacrifice a member of your own family to do so, would you? That’s the question M. Night Shyamalan poses to Eric (Jonathan Groff), Andrew (Ben Aldridge), and their seven-year-old daughter Wen (Kristen Cui), vacationing in a remote cabin in Pennsylvania when […]

Review: “She Is Love”

It’s a classic romantic comedy set-up: after years apart, exes catch a glimpse of each other through a doorway. The catch? One of them runs a boutique hotel in the countryside, and the other is an unsuspecting guest. But in writer/director Jamie Adams’ She Is Love, there’s nothing cute about this awkward meeting, and the […]

Review: “Infinity Pool”

We’re all guilty of indulging in a little self-destructive behavior every once in a while. But while for me the extent of that may be shoveling an entire pizza in my face in one sitting, for James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård), it’s the idea of what he can get away with by throwing some money around […]

Review: “When You Finish Saving the World”

Evelyn Katz (Julianne Moore) is, by textbook definition, a good person; she’s devoted her life to running a shelter for victims of domestic abuse. Her teenage son Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard) might on the surface be considered the exact opposite. He’s a musician penning tunes he refers to as “classic folk rock with an alternative influence” […]

Review: “Missing”

In 2018, Aneesh Chaganty presented a unique twist on an otherwise run-of-the-mill thriller with his directorial debut, “Searching.” A father’s (played by John Cho) desperate quest to find his missing daughter is depicted entirely through his computer screen: video calls, text messages, web searches, and phone calls. I remember enjoying “Searching” quite a bit when […]

Review: “Alice, Darling”

It’s all in the details. Tugging out her hair. Leaping to answer her phone every time it dings. The constant calorie-counting. Always needing to have her hair and make-up done just right. When we first meet Alice (Anna Kendrick), she’s meeting her two best friends Sophie (Wunmi Mosaku) and Tess (Kaniehtiio Horn) for dinner, but […]