Fantastic Fest Review: “The Spirit of Halloweentown”

I still remember the first time I watched Halloweentown: the night of its premiere on Disney Channel on October 17th, 1998. I had just turned eight years old, and every Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM, if you will) premiere was event television in my house. But there was something immediately special about Halloweentown, the story […]

Fantastic Fest Dispatch: “What Happened to Dorothy Bell?”, “The Draft!”, “Ghost Killer”

Ghosts and supernatural entities are common threads weaving together these three films that premiered at Fantastic Fest 2024— the annual festival in Austin, Texas highlighting genre films— but those horror trappings also give way to character studies that are accomplished with varying degrees of success. Read on for my reviews of the found footage horror […]

TIFF Review: “Querido Trópico”

Fractured mother/daughter relationships make ripe stories for some of the most compelling cinema, even when they are versions of the same tale we’ve seen time and time again. That statement certainly applies to Querido Trópico (Beloved Tropic), a Panamanian drama that is the first narrative feature from director Ana Endara (who has four feature-length documentaries […]

Tribeca Dispatch: “Checkpoint Zoo,” “Driver”

I often find observational documentaries the most fascinating, and several made their world premieres at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Below, I reviewed two documentaries that took vérité approaches or made extensive use of first-hand, on-the-ground footage, Checkpoint Zoo and DRIVER. You can also read my review of another terrific vérité doc that premiered at […]

Tribeca Review: “Griffin in Summer”

In the days since the world premiere of Griffin in Summer at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, I’ve seen adjectives like “annoying” and “sociopath” hurled at its 14-year-old protagonist, Griffin Naffly (played by Everett Blunck). And maybe they’re true— at least, the annoying part certainly is. But isn’t it a core trait of a teenager […]

Tribeca Review: “Satisfied”

If you were alive of a reasonable age between 2015 and 2016, you’ve heard of Hamilton. More likely than not, you, along with much of the rest of the world, were a little obsessed with it, Broadway fan or no. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop interpretation of the life of America’s first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander […]

Tribeca Review: “Following Harry”

When we meet Harry Belafonte at the start of Following Harry— Susanne Rostock’s documentary culled from footage from the final 12 years of his life— he’s well into his 80s, and wearing a gray hoodie emblazoned with the name “Trayvon.” It’s an image that Rostock doesn’t linger on, but it’s nevertheless striking: that this man, […]

Tribeca Review: “1-800-ON-HER-OWN”

It’s difficult to condense a whole life into one feature-length film. Dana Flor’s 1-800-ON-HER-OWN, a documentary centering on 90s folk music icon Ani DiFranco, wisely chooses to focus primarily on just one segment of her subject’s very full life and career. The issue, however, is that Flor concentrates on arguably the most banal period of […]

Tribeca Dispatch: “Don’t You Let Me Go,” “Color Book”, “Bitterroot”

Stories of family, both of the blood and found variety, have populated many of the programmed features at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Below are three of them representing familial tales from different cultures and various parts of the world making their world premieres at the festival: Don’t You Let Me Go, Color Book, and […]

Tribeca Review: “Arzé”

In the opening shots of Arzé, director Mira Shaib and cinematographer Heyjin Jun track their title character (played by Diamond Abou Abboud) through the streets of Beirut as she runs errands, capturing the bustling energy of the city in a way that points toward the kinetic pace that will fast pervade the rest of the […]