Tribeca Review: “Break the Game”

Narcissa Wright is more than just an avid gamer. You could say that video games are her life. She’s set speed run records in many games (that’s when you beat a game as fast as possible in one go), competing in competitions and winning awards. Thousands of followers watch her Twitch streams. But as supportive […]

Tribeca Review: “Chasing Chasing Amy”

In 1994, Kevin Smith’s black-and-white, low-budget comedy Clerks took the indie film world by storm, first at its Sundance premiere (which it entered with virtually no buzz), then critics and audiences, cracking many end-of-the-year lists. Smith’s 1995 follow-up Mallrats was less well-received. But it’s Smith’s third film set in the same universe, the 1997 romantic […]

Tribeca Review: “Breaking the News”

In early 2017, Donald Trump was sworn in as President, and the Women’s March on Washington served as a scream for many of America’s frustrated and scared inhabitants. Amidst the fear and uncertainty, journalist Emily Ramshaw saw a possibility. She left her steady job with the Texas Tribune along with colleague Amanda Zamora and started […]

Review: “Twilight” (1990)

Hungarian filmmaker György Fehér’s 1990 noir Twilight (Szürkület), loosely based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 novel The Pledge: Requiem for the Detective Novel, is a film that’s been so rarely seen, there isn’t even an existing Wikipedia article about it, and the press release announcing its new 4K restoration wasted no time drawing a comparison to […]

Review: “Passion” (2008)

When friends gather at a restaurant—a glimpse at the sign above the entrance, El Secreto, not-so-subtly foreshadowing what’s about to occur inside— to celebrate Kaho’s (Aoba Kawai) birthday, the jovial gathering spirals into an evening fraught with questions and confusion when Kaho and her boyfriend Tomoya (Ryuta Okamoto) make an announcement that ought to have […]

Review: “The Taking”

John Ford. John Wayne. Cowboys and six-shooters, Native Americans and horses and epic battles to survive not only squabbles with other humans, but the unforgiving landscape they’ve settled in, one made of both towering beauty and abject terror. These elements, and dilemmas physical, moral, and spiritual, have come to define the western film genre. Just […]

SXSW Dispatch: “Late Bloomers,” “Parachute,” “The Starling Girl”

For this dispatch from this year’s SXSW Film Festival, I’m reviewing three films from first-time female filmmakers that all center around women confronting their circumstances and grappling with what they want out of their lives. Two of those films had their world premieres at the festival (Parachute and Late Bloomers) while The Starling Girl recently […]

SXSW Dispatch: “The Young Wife,” “Appendage,” “I Used to Be Funny”

For my final batch of reviews from the 2023 SXSW Film Festival, I’m covering three more (very different) films from female filmmakers: Tayarisha Poe’s The Young Wife (one of my top favorites of the fest), Ally Pankiw’s excellent I Used to Be Funny, which sees star Rachel Sennott taking a turn toward drama, and Anna […]

SXSW Review: “Problemista”

In his feature writing and directing debut, Julio Torres lends his deadpan comic stylings to Problemista, in which he also stars as Alejandro, an Ecuadorian immigrant who is living in New York City because he’s required to be situated in the United States to apply for his dream job: that of a toy designer for […]

SXSW 2023 Dispatch: “Molli and Max in the Future,” “Until Branches Bend,” “Tobacco Barns”

For the dispatch from the 2023 SXSW Film Festival, I’m tackling three films that made their world, international, and U.S. premieres in the festival’s Visions section. Read my reviews of Until Branches Bend, Tobacco Barns, and Molli and Max in the Future below. UNTIL BRANCHES BEND dir. Sophie Jarvis At the start of Until Branches […]