Indie Movies
Independent movie reviews from film festivals, theaterical releases, video-on-demand, home video and streaming.
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This Is Martin Bonner
Chad Hartigan’s This Is Martin Bonner won the Best of NEXT Audience Award last year at the Sundance Film Festival, up against some fantastic competition (Computer Chess, Escape From Tomorrow, A Teacher, among others). Because the film is remarkably...
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Nothing Without You
Having taken a short break from independent films for a short while, I was able to watch Nothing Without You with a fresh set of eyes and an eagerness to get back to the indie scene. What Xackery Irving...
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Here Comes the Devil
One could say that Here Comes the Devil opens with a bang. Literally. The opening scene is striking; two women having passionate sex while a loud and unpleasant soundtrack obliterates your ears. The scene is reminiscent of something David...
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Paradise: Hope
The last installment of the Paradise trilogy is Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Hope, a coming-of-age film about a teenage girl who develops a crush on a doctor at a camp for overweight teens. Although this film is by far Seidl’s...
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Inside Llewyn Davis
The latest creation from masterminds Joel and Ethan Coen is about a folk musician named Llewyn Davis; a couch surfing cat-lover with a full beard who rarely is without his guitar, and is more concerned with being an artist...
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Lenny Cooke
How is it possible that the #1 high school basketball player in America never ended up playing in the NBA? You probably never even heard of his name before. The documentary Lenny Cooke attempts to answer this question by...
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Let The Fire Burn
In Jason Osder’s bleak, infuriating documentary Let The Fire Burn there’s a feeling of amazement at what he and editor Nels Bangerter have achieved through their self-imposed limitations. The subject matter, a long battle between the City of Philadelphia...
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The Punk Singer
Throughout the ’90s and into the early 2000’s, Kathleen Hanna blazed a trail for young feminists everywhere, fronting the blistering punk band Bikini Kill and the dance-y electroclash band Le Tigre, and co-founding the riot grrrl movement. Her rousing...
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Faust
Aleksandr Sokurov’s 2011 film Faust, screening now at New York City’s Film Forum, is essentially a story of striving and corruption. Drawing from Goethe’s famous play (which is based on an even older legend), the film begins with our...
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Cut To Black
Cut to Black, Dan Eberle’s fourth feature length film, charts the well-travelled waters of a 1940’s film noir style with (despite a few divergences,) surprising freshness. Staring Eberle himself as the hard-boiled, hard-drinking ex-detective Bill Ivers, the story follows...
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Roulette
To say Roulette is dark film would be an understatement. The film holds nothing back as it shows the story of how three different individuals all arrive at the same place, rock bottom. Director Erik Kristopher Myers first began...
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Fill the Void
Turning 18 means different things in different cultures, but almost every culture agrees it’s an age of adulthood. In the religious culture of Orthodox Judaism, at 18 a young woman is preparing for the important ritual of marriage –...
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East Nashville Tonight
Originally attempting to film a documentary to promote touring country music songwriters, co-directors Brad and Todd Barnes (Peace Queer: The Movie, The Locksmith) ended up with their “hypothetical documentary”(as they describe it), East Nashville Tonight. The film is a...
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Humano
With such a philosophical subject as trying to discover the reason for our existence, Humano is indeed as heady of an experimental study as it sounds. At one point the filmmaker, Alan Stivelman, takes hallucinogens while pondering if the...
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Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
Renowned filmmaker Michel Gondry has an animated (I say that both figuratively and literally) conversation with the famous linguist, philosopher, and political activist Noam Chomsky. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? takes an unorthodox approach by presenting the...
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American Promise
American Promise is a terrific film about racial imbalance and family dynamics, whose immense 13-year production process (from 1999 to 2012) was lengthy by design; filmmakers Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson began documenting their son, Idris, and his best...
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Abracadabra
Lucile Desamory’s Abracadabra as a film seems to evade simple classification. To call it art house meets surrealist mystery thriller might overstate the latter, but it comes close. Try to imagine blending Robert Bresson’s austere dialogue and visually compelling...
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And While We Were Here
Kat Coiro’s tender romantic drama And While We Were Here takes us into the romantic, yet foreign, background of Italy to emphasise a situation that’s all too familiar – a marriage in trouble. The film was originally screened in...
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Spinning Plates
In Spinning Plates, a documentary for both rabid foodies and casual diners alike, we follow the stories of three restaurants, each operating in distant corners of the dining world, as their owners guide us to the the roots of their...
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God Loves Uganda
In the most infuriating, jaw-dropping piece of footage in Roger Ross Williams’ polemical documentary, God Loves Uganda, members of the Ugandan parliament are gathered in a room, cheering and chanting, elatedly rejoicing for the first reading of a newly...
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Haunter
It doesn’t take very long for Vincenzo Natali‘s Haunter to get to the point. What starts out as a typical boring Sunday for Lisa (Abigail Breslin) takes a turn when her parents take issue with her weird behaviour. She...
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The Trials of Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali is one of the most enduring social and pop culture figures of our time; he’s almost universally revered as an American icon and one of the best boxers to step into the ring . It’s quite fashionable these...
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Escape From Tomorrow
First time filmmaker Randy Moore certainly made a name for himself when Escape from Tomorrow first premiered nearly a year ago at the Sundance Film Festival where critics were calling the film bold, insane, and mind-melting. Initially, many people...
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The Way Way Back
From the Oscar winning minds behind the story of The Descendants, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash bring a similar family oriented film that aspires to be a charming crowd-pleaser, but ends up with the same underwhelming results. The Way...
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Cutie and the Boxer
As a bracing, painfully honest look at the artistic temperament in its full kaleidoscopic nature, few films will come as close this year as Zachary Heinzerlig’s Cutie and the Boxer. Following the trials and tribulations of Japanese-born, New York-based...
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Finding Hillywood
Do not be deceived by its gorgeous landscapes, Rwanda is still feeling the effect of the painfully horrific genocidal mass slaughter of its people. Finding Hillywood shows the attempts to heal and educate Rwandans through local filmmaking from passionate...
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Ass Backwards
Sometimes a film can be so bad its existence is baffling. Ass Backwards, a comedy co-written by stars June Diane Raphael and Casey Wilson, is a perfect example of that kind of movie. With a script so painfully unfunny...
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Ride with Larry
Larry Smith was forced to retire early after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease after serving 26 years as a police officer. He and his family moved to South Dakota so that his wife could teach at a state university...
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We Are What We Are
Jim Mickle loosely remakes Jorge Michel Grau’s 2010 horror flick, Somos lo Que Hay, with We Are What We Are, an American Gothic mutation of Grau’s well-received tale about a family of cannibals. More family drama than gore fest,...
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Concussion
A moody, sexy drama with bursts of black comedy sprinkled throughout, Concussion takes familiar themes–infidelity, complacency, mid-life anxiety–and explores them from the fresh perspective of a fascinating (if a little unsympathetic) protagonist, a lesbian suburban housewife named Abby (Robin...