Indie Movies
Independent movie reviews from film festivals, theaterical releases, video-on-demand, home video and streaming.
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Computer Chess
Mumblecore extraordinaire Andrew Bujalski’s (director of Funny Ha Ha and Beeswax) latest effort expands upon his mumblecore roots by wrapping it around a mockumentary format of storytelling that is lensed with aesthetically accurate 80’s technology. The largest achievement the...
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Best Man Down
Everyone has that friend. The guy that’s always too loud, too drunk, makes fun situations better, makes serious ones unbearable, and is strangely predictable in their obnoxious behavior. Lumpy (Tyler Labine) is that guy. After causing a sad, drunken...
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I Used to Be Darker
A natural reaction towards conflict is avoiding the threat by escaping, a common theme found within Matt Porterfield’s indie drama I Used to Be Darker. It is hard to say if the film achieves what it intends to, because...
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C.O.G.
Kyle Patrick Alvarez (Easier With Practice) has been gifted the very first crack at translating the work of acclaimed writer David Sedaris to the big screen with C.O.G., a soul-seeker dramedy adapted from one of Sedaris’ short stories. Faithful...
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Inside Story
The new film Inside Story, a joint effort from South Africa and Kenya, tells the story of a poor African boy who dreams of making it to the big football (soccer) leagues of Europe’s elite. The film also plays...
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Blackfish
Somewhat similar to the documentary The Cove, Blackfish makes persuasive arguments against catching and holding animals in captivity, though this documentary is focused on the directing blame solely on one company, SeaWorld. Blackfish catches SeaWorld in several lies through...
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A Field in England (TIFF Review)
Over the last five years, Ben Wheatley has shown himself to be someone hard to pin down. His brilliant 2009 debut Down Terrace was a hilarious small-scale crime drama that got comparisons to Mike Leigh and Guy Ritchie. His...
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Blue Caprice
The endeavor of dramatizing the events of something as horrific as the 2002 Washington D.C. killing spree of “The Beltway Snipers”, John Allen Muhammed and his then 17-year-old partner, Lee Malvo, requires a deft hand and a measure of...
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Il Futuro
Alicia Scherson’s Il Futuro (The Future) is an adaptation of a Chilean novel by Roberto Bolano about two recently orphaned siblings that must find a way to make it on their own. Their uncertain future is the backbone of...
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Adore
Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival under the name Two Mothers (an arguably more fitting title) has been since changed to Adore, Anne Fontaine’s film about two best friends who end up in relationships with each other’s sons. Due...
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Wasteland
Rowan Athale attempts to breathe some new life into the heist genre by peppering it with dry British humor, stylized visuals, pulsing soundtrack, and characters with realistic motivations, but Wasteland overcomplicates the story with all of its gimmicky deceptions,...
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Stranger by the Lake
Never leaving the rural French lakeside setting on which it opens, Alain Guiraudie’s new film Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac) establishes an economy from its opening frame. In spite of the abundant sunlight and wide, cinematographic expanses...
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A Teacher
A Teacher is in many ways a reversal of the story that is normally told; featuring an older female authoritative figure (a teacher) having an affair with a younger male (a student). On top of that, the adolescent is...
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Afternoon Delight
As Juno Temple (Killer Joe)—playing a glitter-sweating stripper named McKenna—grinds and gyrates on Kathryn Hahn (Parks & Recreation) in a private booth in a strip club, staring seductively, deeply, into the older Hahn’s eyes, it’s a perfect representation of...
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Short Term 12
It’s become fashionable over the past few months to shower Destin Cretton’s (I’m Not a Hipster) social worker drama, Short Term 12 (a veritable Sundance phenom), with buckets of adulation. It deserves every drop—this is a supreme effort for...
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Thérèse
Premiering as the Closing Night film at the Cannes film festival last year was Claude Miller’s final film (before passing away) Thérèse. Adapted from a novel of the same name, Thérèse is a slow-burner period piece about a newlywed...
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Lovelace
Co-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman bring the story of Linda Lovelace, a celebrity in the adult entertainment industry, to the very screen that brought her fame into mainstream culture from her seductive role in Deep Throat. Lovelace was...
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Bad Milo
It comes as a bit of a surprise that, with so many recent horror films aping off of different subgenres from the past, no one has really attempted to tackle the creature feature. Jacob Vaughan’s Bad Milo! sticks out...
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You’re Next
It’s no wonder Adam Wingard’s indie horror flick You’re Next is so damn good—with fellow indie powerhouse filmmakers like Joe Swanberg, Amy Seimetz, and Ti West walking around the blood-splattered set, Wingard was in good company. But take no...
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Austenland
Jerusha and Jared Hess are the husband and wife filmmaker duo that brought us the off-kilter comedies Gentlemen Broncos, Nacho Libre, and most famously Napoleon Dynamite. Jerusha tries her hand at solo directing with Austenland, a rom-com that exchanges...
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Prince Avalanche
The claims that David Gordon Green is going back to his older days, where films like George Washington and All The Real Girls had him heralded as America’s Next Great Director, isn’t necessarily true. Sure, Prince Avalanche is Green’s...
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Hell Baby
The incestuous nature of today’s comedy scene can easily be shown with the cast of Hell Baby. The film is written and directed by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, who were members of the comedy troupe The State...
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Drinking Buddies
Joe Swanberg is a well-known independent director who is notorious for his no budget, no script approach to filmmaking. The results tend to be very personal (he acts in most of his films) and highly realistic since the actors...
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Out in the Dark (SFJFF Review)
A raw and sensuous tale of forbidden love across a cavernous sociopolitical divide (the Israeli-Palestinian divide, to be exact), Out in the Dark is an impressive feature debut for director Michael Mayer, who studied film at USC. Nimr (Nicholas...
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The Attack (SFJFF Review)
Though set in the trenches of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ziad Doueiri’s mystery-thriller The Attack operates predominantly on an intimate, human level, centering on a Palestinian man living in Tel Aviv (Ali Suliman) who’s bent on smoking out the people...
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Rue Mandar (SFJFF Review)
Following the death of their beloved family matriarch, two sisters (Sandrine Kiberlain and Emmanuelle Devos), their brother (Richard Berry), and their French-Jewish families gather in Paris to mourn their loss (each in their own way), annoy the living daylights...
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The End of Love
Mark Webber’s sophomore effort as a director, The End of Love, follows a jobless single-father who is struggling to make ends meet while caring for his son. The film feels incredibly personal to Webber as nearly everyone in the...
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Welcome To Pine Hill
Winner of the jury prize at Slamdance 2012, Keith Miller’s Welcome to Pine Hill is about a man who attempts to right the wrongs in his life upon receiving news that his time on this Earth has been cut...
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Red Flag (SFJFF Review)
Alex Karpovsky (most famously known for his work in Lena Dunham’s Girls and Tiny Furniture) plays an (assumedly) extra-neurotic version of himself á la Larry David in Red Flag, a meta dark comedy that’s somehow both navel-gazey and droningly indifferent. The...
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The Hunt
No film released this year has left me more shattered during its end credits than Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt. The film has moments of immense power and at times is very hard to watch. The story, co-written by Vinterberg,...