The story behind Dean Fleischer-Camp’s documentary Fraud is an interesting one. The director is said to have stumbled upon footage on YouTube—over 100 hours worth—of a American middle-class family of four living out their lives in front of a video camera, but this isn’t just any wannabe reality story. Fleischer-Camp pared that footage down to a scant 52 minutes to paint a picture of a man and woman so materialistic, they would jeopardize their own freedom and their children’s future for the chance to spend, spend, spend.

The family of four—thirty-something parents and two young children both under the age of about seven—is introduced to the viewer on 5/26/12 (according to the camera’s date stamp). Little is known about the family other than what can put together through the footage: they live in a small, cluttered house, suggesting lower-middle-class, and they are obsessed with anything related to an affluent lifestyle. As their bills mount and their resources dwindle, the family takes desperate measures to improve their cash flow so they can live what they perceive to be the good life, consequences be damned. The film ends on 10/3/12.

Less than five minutes into Fraud, I had my hand raised, calling shenanigans (please forgive the granularity of the next paragraph; it’s in support of a greater point).

At the film’s start, The Man, who does 99% of what presents itself as around-the-clock filming, records The Woman reading a pair of bank notices. The first notice is a decline letter for a new credit card. The other is in reference to a bounced payment. I understand the narcissistic obsession that comes with self-recording, but that The Man would record something as humiliating to himself and his family as that, and The Woman wouldn’t object, felt like a stretch. Still, and despite any change in tenor to The Family’s mood, I allowed that maybe reaction shots and debates had been edited out. I allowed it, that is, until the next scene where, in the interest of raising money, The Family has a yard sale. By the time the dust settles, they take their loot and head off to several retailers, including an Apple store, where everyone in The Family scores a new iPhone.

I called shenanigans again. Their declined credit card application suggests they were maxed out on their existing plastic, and the bounced payment suggests they were cash-strapped too, leaving only their yard sale earnings to fuel their shopping spree. I’ve never known a yard to generate north of $1000 in a single afternoon, and while the quick cuts of the film don’t afford a good look at the wares on sale, The Family’s living conditions suggest they didn’t have anything of high value to begin with, nor did they have a high quantity of lower-value items to unload.

This sequence is a terrific example of the film’s strength—it moves fast—but it’s also emblematic of the film’s great, great problem: it strains credulity from start to finish. Even if the action in the first five minutes of the film is factual, it raises such an eyebrow that all subsequent moments become the subject of intense scrutiny. That scrutiny then helps expose other improbable actions and events, up to and including the crime the film is named after and the subsequent cover-up; blatant timeline discrepancies between when events actually happen and the time stamp of the video; more private, humiliating moments filmed without shame or objection; the complete absence of questions from people The Family interacts with; and, perhaps most unsettling, the lack of any sense of genuine emotion between The Man and The Woman (and by extension, The Kids). These two people are more like high school buddies than a committed couple, and not once did I believe they were emotionally involved with each other or their children.

By the end of the film, so many unbelievable events and moments and decisions had happened, I called shenanigans on all 52 minutes. In a world where anyone is capable of anything, and anyone is capable of filming anything they are capable of, the four months this family spends on a money-burning binge rang as improbable as anything can.

And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the film after it was over…and the next day, too. Despite the superficiality of it, I couldn’t deny how mesmerizing it was. Part of this is because of the audacity of the director, but the other part of it, the larger part of it, is that while this so-called family might not have gone through those onscreen moments “in real life,” a lot of families in America have indeed suffered (or enjoyed, depending on how you look at it) some of those moments—living beyond their financial means, committing fraud, endangering children, you name it—all in the name of being able to spend money they otherwise wouldn’t normally have to spend. The nuclear (wasted) family Fleischer-Camp presents onscreen is like a composite of the unseemly denizens of an America obsessed with materialism and wealth, and it is chilling.

Therein lies the dilemma in terms of rating this film. As a documentary, it’s bad, and the title is apt. In fact, I wouldn’t even grant this specious work a “docudrama” moniker. But as a piece of visual art, effectively lean in runtime and edited with surgical precision, its statement on the skewed perceptions of the importance of money versus responsibility held by so many Americans, is like nothing I’ve seen before. That it achieves this without passing judgment makes it all the more impressive. Fraud is not a documentary about one family; it’s a reflection on a culture—a reflection that is as hard to look at as it is as hard to look away from.

Watching a documentary filmed in real-time is always fascinating to me. Unlike a traditional doc that starts with an idea and involves months of planning, research, scheduling, and execution, a real-time doc feels much more adventurous; the filmmakers are just as unaware of what will happen next as the viewers. It requires a little luck, too. Picking a compelling subject for a traditional doc is one thing, but for something compelling to happen to a subject in a real-time doc is another thing entirely. Director Christy Garland hopes to capture some of that magic in Cheer Up.

The city of Rovaniemi, Finland is located at the Arctic Circle and, as one might expect, offers a stunning and picturesque winter landscape. But in addition to all that beautiful snow and cold, the city is home to the Ice Queens, a competitive cheerleading squad led by Coach Miia. The term “competitive” is as literal as it is generous, though. The squad technically competes at the Finnish National Qualifiers, but they are dreadful, even to the amateur eye. Tired of losing and tired of coaching a lackluster team, Miia seeks inspiration where nobody does cheerleading better: Dallas, Texas, USA. At Cheer Athletics, Miia visits with the staff and squads who put on a cheering (and coaching) clinic, producing the kind of results Miia could only dream about. Dazzled by the energy of the staff and the commitment of the cheerleaders, Miia returns home energized and ready to make some changes for—and to—the squad, until developments happen in her personal life that change the course of the team’s collective future.

In her third feature documentary, Christy Garland doesn’t simply cover the sad-sack exploits of the cheerless cheer squad. She also focuses her lens on the private lives of three individuals from the team: Coach Miia and two teenage cheerleaders, Aino and Patricia. On the surface, they are all unique. Aino is the raven-haired rebel, smoking behind the school and partying at night when she isn’t trying to land a flip. Patricia is the girl-next-door, but one garnering sympathy with a life marred by the loss of her mother. And Miia is the single woman whose obsession with Marilyn Monroe ranges from decorations on her walls to bleach-blonde hair and a “Monroe piercing” above her lip.

While these differences make the young women unique, and while cheerleading connects them, what bonds them (unbeknownst to them) are their fractured relationships with men and their sometimes staggeringly-poor life choices. Aino rushes to live with her immature boyfriend, Patricia is at stubborn odds with her father, and Miia’s man trouble defies even a veiled mention here for fear of revealing too much.

This is the kind of narrative that makes real-time documentary filmmaking so great—a director chooses a general topic that is unique, finds the smaller stories within the larger tale that might lead to something special, and pursues those stories. All of these components are present in Cheer Up, and yet the magic never quite happens.

Most of where Garland struggles is with trying to keep the story compelling. The monotony of the lives of these women seeps through the screen to turn the experience into a monotonous experience. This is no indictment of the women or their lives, but rather how they are presented on film. It’s as if Garland is concerned with being melodramatic, so she reigns everything in so tightly she creates something anti-dramatic. The result is observation to a fault.

Even the most structured and well-planned of documentaries need some kind of drama, so surely a real-time doc needs it too. Cheer Up doesn’t have it.

Garland also retreats from any kind of ongoing focus on the cheerleading aspect of the story, instead occasionally returning to it as a reminder that, oh yes, this is what these girls do. There are moments in practice when Miia pushes the girls harder, and there are moments when more than one girl loses a little blood in the process, but it’s all very rote in its revisitation. The lessons learned in life never translate to lessons learned in the gym, nor vice-versa.

Cheer Up is incredibly well-intended and has some good moments, particularly Sari Aaltonen’s cinematography. But with its flat presentation and dearth of any riveting moments, the film plays more like an after-school special about the pitfalls of teen decision-making than it does a documentary about young women struggling to make something more of their lives.

Not every sub-genre of cinema needs to contain likable characters for films to be successful. A huge number of affecting films have been produced, for years, concentrating on antiheroes: unpleasant characters not featured for the sake of enjoyment. However, when filmmakers are working within the confines of a tight sub-genre like talk-heavy, NYC-based tales of flawed romance, which is essentially what Negin Farsad and Jeremy Redleaf‘s 3rd Street Blackout is, the characters must be relatively pleasant. That’s because rather than focusing on philosophy or atmosphere, the film chooses the route of a double character study and centers entirely on the mind state of the two protagonists, a seemingly happy couple named Mina and Rudy, played by the directors themselves.

Sometimes, when a director makes the decision to place themselves in the spotlight of their own film, they can become so wrapped up in their own vision that the story becomes overly personal and difficult for those who haven’t shared their life experiences. Here, the opposite is true; Farsad and Redleaf are so naturally able to realize the characters they’ve written for themselves that it’s difficult to remember that they’re the co-directors and not a silly New York couple with a set of eccentric friends.

3rd Street Blackout tells the story of a few days in the life of this couple, during which a blackout occurs across the entire city and they’re forced to actually communicate with one another rather than spending all of their time on their phones, as they usually do. This eventually leads Mina to reveal something to Rudy that she’s been bottling up for some time; said “something” is also revealed to the audience in flashback fragments throughout the majority of the film.

The non-linear style of editing that the film utilizes works to its advantage in raising the emotional stakes of the narrative, and simultaneously, creates a feeling of palpable suspense not common in most lo-fi romantic comedies. The film is indeed a comedy, but not in the pure sense at all because the audience is, for the most part, left in the dark regarding the portion of the story being flashed back to. It’s a sincerely funny film—you could draw comparisons between 3rd Street Blackout and shows like Broad City or High Maintenance with regard to its uniquely New York sense of humor—but its structural fragmentation also makes it an effectively frustrating and anxiety-inducing experience.

One of the main reasons why the film works so well is because of the talented supporting cast. Farsad and Redleaf are fantastic and believable as the leads, but the film wouldn’t have been nearly as strong had the slew of supporting characters not been so comically satisfying. The cast is stacked with recognizable faces such as Janeane Garofalo (Wet Hot American Summer), Devin Ratray (Home Alone), John Hodgeman (Bored to Death), Ed Weeks (The Mindy Project), Michael Cyril Creighton (Spotlight) and Phyllis Somerville (Little Children) who, in particular, gives an utterly delightful performance. Lesser known actors such as Katie Hartman and Becky Yamamoto show that they deserve recognition, the former taking on one of the chief supporting roles in the film and nailing every scene, and the latter having only one scene in the whole film, though it was possibly the film’s most hilarious moment.

Ultimately, 3rd Street Blackout is a simple movie focusing on complex characters. The way that the couple avoids addressing important issues through comedy is a realistic dynamic that’s easy for viewers to understand and even sympathize with. Much of the comedy in the film is admittedly crude, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Farsad and Redleaf pull off the crudeness, mostly because the audience can tell it’s not malicious and poorly intended; it feels harmless and reminds one of how important it is to be goofy every once in a while. Characters pop in and out of the film without much introduction, but it doesn’t matter. Actually, it works to the film’s advantage because every character is captivating, and that’s sort of exactly how it is in New York City anyway.

3rd Street Blackout isn’t just great because provides a good laugh; it’ll make you want to sit down and write some comedy of your own. It’s exciting to see a pair of independent directors with such an inspiring and authentic comedic voice.

What if men no longer served any purpose on Earth? That’s more or less the hook of the mockumentary No Men Beyond This Point, which presents an alternate universe where, in the 1950s, women suddenly gained the ability to reproduce asexually (it’s called parthenogenesis, as one of the talking heads explains). As the years went on, and the population of women kept increasing (since they’re reproducing asexually they only use the X chromosomes, meaning no more males being born), men eventually became of no use. No Men Beyond This Point starts in the present day, where the documentary crew follows 37-year-old Andrew Myers (Patrick Gilmore), now the youngest man in the world.

Writer/director/editor Mark Sawers uses a standard documentary approach to his absurd subject matter, employing talking head interviews, archival footage and black-and-white re-enactments, among plenty of other old tricks found in any average middlebrow doc made today. The familiar and banal approach works here because of its pairing with a fantasy/sci-fi concept, and the way Sawers focuses on some of the more nuanced changes that would come from the switch in dominant gender roles makes it easy to go along with his dystopian (or utopian, depending on how you look at it) vision.

Aside from playing out his big “What if?” scenario through social and political contexts, Sawers also focuses on Myers and his situation as the youngest man in the world. With the World Governing Council—a new body of government running the planet—sending men off to sanctuaries across the world to live out their remaining days, Myers manages to get a job as a servant for partners Terra (Tara Pratt) and Iris (Kristine Cofsky). Eventually, Andrew and Iris being showing an attraction for each other, and Sawers uses their flirtations to delve into the messier aspects of his universe.

It’s when No Men Beyond This Point starts exploring sex that the mockumentary begins to falter a bit. Especially giving a rather bland attempt at poking holes in the idea of how women would handle being in power. Earlier on, when Sawers highlights how the stubbornness of men in power ultimately led to their downfall, the idea works. But once women take charge and rule in a reactionary way towards men, essentially trying to speed up their extinction, Sawers portrays their rule as a conservative, sex-shaming authority, where women are not allowed to speak about their feelings of attraction whatsoever. It gives off an implication that women are inherently repressive when it comes to sexuality, a point that some people may take offense to. And with gender and sexuality turning into prominent issues recently, there’s something a little old hat about Sawers’ film operating within the same standards that are being constantly challenged today.

But still, anyone who tries to tackle gender is bound to get into a sticky situation of some sort, and for the most part No Men Beyond This Point is enjoyable despite its issues. It may be a little too deadpan for its own good, but even when the laughs aren’t there it’s fascinating to see just how much Sawers has thought out his idea of a world where women rule everything. I can’t say that No Men Beyond This Point lives up to the mockumentaries of the likes of Christopher Guest (and I’m sure some people will grow tired of Sawers’ premise pretty fast), but I can’t deny that I wasn’t entertained for the most part.

This review was originally published on September 14, 2015, as part of our coverage of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

The sinister potential of New Age practices gets explored yet again in Karl Mueller’s Rebirth, a psychological thriller continuing the somewhat recent trend of films about cults like Faults, The Invitation, and Martha Marcy May Marlene. This time, rather than taking inspiration from the likes of the Manson family or Jonestown, Rebirth bases its eponymous enlightenment group off of the Church of Scientology, and anyone vaguely familiar with L. Ron Hubbard’s creepy “religion” will pick up on the influence within minutes. And while Mueller provides enough intrigue to keep viewers guessing, he has a hard time coming up with a proper conclusion for his small-scale mind games.

Kyle (Fran Kranz) is a typical upper-middle-class office drone, living in a big suburban home with his wife and daughter and spending his days working at a bank in the city. An opening montage establishes the happy monotony of Kyle’s life, which soon gets interrupted when his old college friend Zack (Adam Goldberg) shows up at his work. Zack asks Kyle to cancel all his weekend plans and participate with him in something called Rebirth, which he only describes as “an experience.” Kyle bristles at the boldness of his old friend’s proposal, but he decides to go for it after succumbing to his nostalgic feelings.

Things get weird in a short amount of time, as the hotel Kyle checks himself into for the weekend getaway turns out to be a ruse. A series of clues leads him to a bus filled with dozens of other men, all of whom have to hand over their cell phones and wear blindfolds for the entire ride while they’re taken to Rebirth’s real location. Upon arriving, Kyle and the other bus passengers get taken to a room where a man (Steve Agee) explains Rebirth’s anti-establishment philosophies, making it sound like some sort of college bro’s attempt at copying Chuck Palahniuk. From there, several strange events draw Kyle away from the main group and off into a sort of hellish funhouse, exploring a derelict building where each room offers a different, stranger facet of what Rebirth has to offer.

This section of the film turns out to be its strongest, even though its structure and influences are plain as day. Kyle bounces from room to room, and every door he opens functions as an excuse for Mueller to come up with a bizarre situation to throw his protagonist into. An early highlight involves Kyle stumbling into some kind of support group whose leader (Andrew J. West) torments people both physically and psychologically. It’s a gripping sequence, but it’s a borderline remake of the classroom scenes in Whiplash. Plenty of other influences pop up throughout Rebirth, including David Fincher’s The Game and Charlie Brooker’s TV series Black Mirror, but these comparisons aren’t complimentary; it just shows that Mueller is a competent copycat.

On the other hand, Mueller’s focus is squarely on creating an entertaining game of figuring out what’s real or part of Rebirth, and Kranz and the committed ensemble (including Harry Hamlin and Pat Healy, who take full advantage of their small roles) make the film’s transparent qualities easier to forgive. It’s in the final act, when the group starts exerting its influence on Kyle’s personal life, that the screenplay starts to break down. By breaking away from Rebirth’s controlled environment and into the real world, the plausibility of the whole scenario gets extremely thin, but not as thin as whatever message Mueller tries to tack on in the closing minutes. After an abrupt ending, the film switches over to one of Rebirth’s promotional videos while the credits roll. The video, a deliberate attempt to mimic Scientology’s promos (including the infamous Tom Cruise video), makes the whole film feel like the set-up for a corny punchline. A brief section of the video, where Rebirth promotes its branded product line, suggests a bit of a sly commentary on New Age ideas getting swallowed up by capitalist interests, but it’s drowned out by the parodic, wink-nudge nature of the clip.

Adapted from a short film that played at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014, Sleeping Giant quickly turned into a Canadian indie success story when it was selected to play at the Cannes Film Festival in the Critics’ Week sidebar. Several months later, Sleeping Giant finally came back home to have its North American Premiere at TIFF in September 2015.

The film takes place over the summer in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where teenager Adam (Jackson Martin) spends his summer vacation with his family. At the start of his trip, he befriends Nate (Nick Serino) and Riley (Reece Moffett), two cousins from the area living with their grandmother. It’s immediately apparent that the friendship between the three boys only makes sense in the context of this vacation, with Adam coming from a sheltered, upper-middle-class life, and Nate and Riley coming from a lower class background. As the summer continues, tensions rise between Adam, Nate and Riley until they tragically boil over.

It’s been said many times already, but Cividino has made an impressive directorial debut with Sleeping Giant. As someone who has made similar trips up north as a kid, it was surprising to see how accurate Cividino portrays that unique feeling of spending your days away from home as an adolescent. In advance of Sleeping Giant’s North American premiere at TIFF, I had the chance to talk to Andrew Cividino about his film. Read on for the full interview below, where Cividino talks about his personal connection to the film’s location, learning how to work with young, nonprofessional actors, his feelings on finally bringing the film home and much more.

Sleeping Giant is currently out in limited release in Toronto, Ontario from D Films.

I never thought of the trip up to Northern Ontario as a rite of passage for kids in Ontario until I saw your film. I did it, my parents did it…I’m assuming this film had to come from a personal place for you.

I grew up spending my summers on the shore of Lake Superior in the exact locations that the film is set in. Every year at the end of the school year [my family] would go up the day school ended, and we could come back on Labour Day. It was like that well into high school, until I had to get a job. I made friends up there that occupied a kind of a special place because we grew up together but separate from our other lives. I think it was a chance every summer to go up and, as your identities form, have this separate group of friends that you’re spending this intense amount of time with. But you’re free from all the expectations of whatever hat you’re trying to wear in your high school in Southern Ontario.

To have that kind of an unsupervised playground hanging out with friends over the summer, you’re really just left to your own devices. You’re in the middle of nowhere. All of the sorts of risks that are associated with living in a more urban setting aren’t there. You just have to come for dinner basically, and that’s about it. You’re free to roam and explore, and that was kind of the genesis for me, wanting to capture what it was like to spend those years up in that place.

Your film feels more about capturing a specific sense of time and place than focusing on a narrative.

I think tone was something that was very important to me from the genesis of the project. There’s something that I saw mirrored that’s inherent to the landscape up there. It’s beautiful, but it’s also foreboding. If you know Lake Superior well, you know that you never feel fully at ease because it’s called Thunder Bay for a reason. There are always storms that could be rolling in, and it’s like the ocean in how the waves will whip up out of nowhere. There was this tension between it being like a romantic postcard view of nature and something much more, if not menacing, certainly indifferent to your existence. I thought was really well mirrored with what adolescent boys are like, the kind of tumult, the lack of empathy and that energy.

I feel like the editing is vital to the film because you’re combining intimate shots of nature, but you’re getting bigger macro shots as well. How did you find that specific rhythm going back and forth between the two types of shots?

I think it was in our philosophy from shooting it on the outset that we wanted to capture the grand scope and the intimate details, from sweeping aerial vistas to fighting insects on bark, and to do the same thing with our characters. It was important to step back far enough with our visuals to get a sense of space and location. It totally affects your understanding of what this story is, what it’s like for these characters to be here, and to get a sense of how isolated they are. There’s something under the surface. Like I mentioned before, [there’s] this idea of the romantic, European version of nature as this inviting thing, and there’s this other side of it which is more nature as a state of chaos. I really wanted to play that duality, both in terms of nature and how we shot it close and wide, and mirroring that with the two sides of the human story.

I’m assuming you had to have a lot of patience while making this in order to capture some of those shots up close, like the insects fighting on the bark.

I think, more than patience, it was about an openness to what’s around you. To recognize that you may be shooting a scene, but if you happen to see two bugs fighting on the tree, you have to run across the island and get your crew, and have them understand that it’s important enough to run with the camera on their back and to stop everything to shoot it. On the day [of shooting] it sounds totally insane, but you need people who can bind to that understanding and philosophy. For instance, we wanted to do a lot of stuff with crayfish. I used crayfish in the short film. We spent a day and a half trying to catch crayfish, but it was not a good year for them. We caught one in total. We couldn’t do it, and we had to re-envision the material. On the other hand, the bugs fighting on the tree was something that was just noticed, and we were able to stop and pay attention and actually capture it.

Did that openness apply to the rest of the production?

The narrative was nailed down, but what happens within scenes, and certainly where scenes happen, was something we had to be very much open to because the weather would repel us from the island. We were constantly having to adapt and reorganize our schedule, but the real openness was within scenes. To be open to allowing the actors to bring their own voices, and being open to explore possibilities while making sure that we don’t get off track of the number of narrative threads and character arcs that have to come together.

How did you approach working with these young, nonprofessional actors?

I was fortunate to do the short and develop a strong relationship with Nick Serino and Reese Moffett. There was a familiarity there, and I learned a lot about working with younger actors. I think the biggest thing of all was casting people who felt close enough to the characters. Not necessarily in terms of the details of their lives, but in terms of their personalities. [It’s] finding those people, and then being willing to change your own understanding of your character to allow them to bring their own element to it. You’re not going to get amazing craft performances out of young actors who usually don’t have any experience, but if you set things up properly, you may have put yourself in a situation where they feel comfortable to bring themselves to that role, to lose themselves in that scene or moment, and to draw on their own experiences if you can find those relatable things. It was about making sure it was a collaboration, and for them bringing their own perspective to it was important.

I wanted to ask specifically about Jackson Martin who plays Adam, because his role is so pivotal.

Jack was the most experienced of the three actors going in. We cast him in a traditional casting session out of Southern Ontario.

Did you deliberately choose a more experienced actor for the role of Adam?

I deliberately wanted a professional actor to play the role of Adam because I felt that the character was going to have to shoulder a lot more of the burden in that way, especially in the earlier drafts of the story. And I also wanted to cast someone who would be a fish out of water. For the other boys, it was essential that they were up there naturally and that was their environment. But I wanted to bring somebody up who felt like this was not their natural habitat.

I did want to talk about the homoerotic aspect between Adam and Riley. What made you decide to put that in the film?

I didn’t want to make a standard love triangle specifically, but I wanted to make something that kind of explored the complexities of sexuality coming online in a person. To me, Adam is not somebody who is necessarily going to land at gay or straight or who knows where on that spectrum. He’s somebody whose sexuality is just coming online, and who has a great deal of…pressure. Not intentional pressure, but expectations around heteronormative behaviour from everybody. There’s nobody in the film that’s homophobic, but the entire world assumes heterosexuality of him. That makes his admiration for Riley confused with [his] affection for Taylor, who’s his female friend as well. All of these things create this intense confusion for him as he’s trying to find his way.

2015 has been pretty exciting for Toronto-based filmmakers. There’s you, Kazik Radwanski (How Heavy This Hammer), and Adam Garnet Jones (Fire Song) to name a few playing at TIFF this year. It feels like a whole new generation of Canadian filmmakers is finally arriving.

I feel like it’s an incredibly exciting time to be making films in Toronto. I feel like I’m part of a community of people who are making really incredible and unique pieces. We share crews, we support each other’s work, we’re inspired by each other’s films, yet the voices are all quite distinct at the same time. I’m not sure exactly why it’s happening right now. I’ve been told by others, and I certainly feel it myself, that it’s something that hasn’t happened in a while. It’s this generation of filmmakers poking through at the exact same time and getting this kind of international recognition. I don’t know what the common threads are, other than the fact that it’s like “by any means necessary.” We go out and we find stories that compel us, and we’re not going to be constrained by financial resources. I’m really excited about where it will go.

You’ve made a film that feels very specific to an experience for people in Ontario, yet this is the first time your film will screen for audiences in Canada. You’ve screened the film at Cannes and Karlovy Vary already. Have you been surprised by the reaction from international audiences, and what do you expect from audiences at TIFF once they see it?

I was really surprised by the international response to the film. I always felt that the location for the film was incredibly beautiful but worried that was always just because of my personal bias towards it. I was really surprised to see how much the setting seemed to speak to people strongly when the film premiered internationally, and it how seemed exotic to them in a way. The colloquialisms, the way the boys speak in the film is so regional in a way that I wondered if that could have ever registered internationally, and I couldn’t believe it fully could. So I’m really curious to bring the film home. I hope that it rings true to people. I hope that it’s more than nostalgia too, I hope that the story connects. I’m curious and a little bit anxious to see how it goes over at home because, for us, this is the home crowd. I’m hopeful and a little bit scared. [Laughs]

A version of this interview was originally published on September 7th, 2015, as part of our coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Few documentaries open as dramatically as Omo Child: The River and the Bush. Headlights pierce the dead of night somewhere in Southwest Ethiopia, a jeep pulls up at a settlement, and a man in Western-style clothing gets out. He is led into the darkness to another man, dressed in tribal gear, who is cradling a tiny baby. “He found her in the bush.” someone explains. “Is she alive?” someone else asks. The answer is obvious.

John Rowe’s gripping documentary introduces us to the Kara tribe of the Omo valley. They live off the land in a remote part of the country, their elders strikingly decorating their bodies with white markings. Like many indigenous tribes living in isolated parts of the world, the Kara are a deeply superstitious people, and believe that children can be born with a curse that will threaten their very existence. For generations, these cursed Mingi children have been killed by the women of the tribe, by strangulation, drowning, or leaving them in the bush for wild animals to take care of.

Our protagonist is Lale Labuko, a well-spoken and pleasant-featured young tribesman. His father stood up against the village elders to send him for some new fangled “education”, only recently introduced to the tribe by visiting missionaries. On his return, Lale discovered the truth about the taboo Mingi killings, which claimed his two older sisters as victims. He set out to save Mingi children from certain death by adopting them as his own, bringing them up far away from his ancestral home, and eventually challenging the Kara elders to bringing the barbaric tradition to an end.

Rowe and his intrepid crew filmed over a period of five years, and the documentary works best when dealing with the rhythms of tribal life. He has a real photographer’s eye for both the landscape and the people, and his images are particularly eloquent when focusing on the hard-worn faces of the elders and their women folk, many of whom have lost children to the Mingi curse.

The director is less confident dealing with narrative and the pacing of Omo Child drags because of it. This could be because our modern-day expectations of documentary filmmaking, and the material at Rowe’s disposal in such a challenging shooting location. So many documentaries today are a montage of footage from various sources, from CCTV to smartphones, giving them a sense of urgency and spontaneity that old skool documentaries rarely had. Perhaps by necessity, Rowe has to rely on straight up testimony to tell the tale. There’s plenty of gorgeous landscape shots interspersed with talking heads giving their account. The endless talking heads have the effect of slowing a riveting tale down, and perhaps a more experienced filmmaker may have found ways to show rather than tell. The result sometimes feels a bit National Geographicky.

Still, the retro style of the filmmaking doesn’t hamper the overall punch of the documentary. This is the story of one man who had the courage to challenge the accepted wisdom of his society, dealing with death threats and succeeding in bringing about a change. The film won the Ethos Jury Prize at this year’s Social Impact Media Awards.

Rowe sensibly allows the elders to voice some opinion. They are wistful about the modernization of their culture. One woman tells how traditionally the tribe would wear animal skins, but the kids just want to wear Western attire. Despite their resistance to the modern world, traces of modernity are found—some elders sport bucket hats like those favoured by Oasis and Ocean Colour Scene in their Britpop heyday; guns look even more brutal and deadly when handled by a half-naked tribesman.

The most shocking testimony is from an older woman who unapologetically admits to murdering twelve children without any remorse. Rowe encourages some empathy with the elder’s feelings—Omo Child is also a portrait of a community in transition, and treats their deep-rooted superstitions with respect.

Ritualized infanticide may be shocking to our sensibilities, but the film allows you to understand that to the elder’s sensibilities it would seem crazy not to kill these children when a curse is potentially hanging over the community. As Lale’s crusade gathers pace, one elder talks about letting the Mingi kids live with the air of incredulity some Westerners adopt when speaking about Political Correctness Gone Mad.

Despite the harrowing subject matter, Omo Child is an uplifting film. It enthusiastically demonstrates how one person can make a huge difference, and Lale Labuko’s fearless endeavours make it easy to overlook that Omo Child sometimes resembles an extended showreel for his organization. Beyond his exceptional work saving children’s lives in Ethiopia, his story also offers some hope to us all in our era of fear and intolerance.

There’s something off with Darling, Mickey Keating’s latest horror movie (his second in 2015, after unveiling Pod at SXSW). Shooting in black-and-white on a presumably low budget (given its single location and glossy digital sheen), Keating’s film is a combination of familiar elements from psychological horror that never feels genuine in its execution save for the set-up: a young woman (Lauren Ashley Carter, referred to only as “Darling”) gets a new job as a caretaker for a large house in Manhattan, which the owner (Sean Young) claims is the oldest house in the city. But right before the homeowner leaves Darling to care for the house on her own, she also mentions two other pieces of information: the house has a reputation for being haunted, and the previous caretaker jumped from the roof to her death. Darling doesn’t seem to mind, seemingly unfazed by her new boss’ oversights.

With the owner out of the way, Darling turns into a largely one person show for Carter, who goes insane as she picks up on some strange things in the house: a room she can’t enter, a necklace with an upside-down cross, doors opening on their own, and other sorts of things that can only be attributed to unseen, sinister forces. Keating shows an awareness for traits commonly associated with austere, refined horror (rigorously composed shots, an emphasis on mood, and obfuscated character development, to name a few) but he has no idea how to properly implement them. Darling is woefully underdeveloped, with an ominous shot of some scars on her body serving as backstory, and the eventual reveal of Darling as a victim of sexual trauma is more offensive in its laziness than its insensitivity. Keating makes his protagonist nothing more than a victim succumbing to her traumatic past, and by doing so exposes his usage of sexual/physical abuse as a plot device, the sort of behaviour that should be left in the time period Darling tries to emulate.

The offensiveness of Keating’s story might not have been so transparent if everything else didn’t feel so half-baked. A five-chapter structure feels as superfluous as the different typefaces used to introduce each section, but the worst part has to be Keating’s insistence on stroboscopic effects and quick cuts throughout. What might have been an attempt to portray Darling’s fractured mental state turns into an obnoxious and annoying attempt to shock rather than scare, relying on bursts of static over Carter’s screaming face as a way to jolt viewers awake. Carter, looking like a grown-up Wednesday Addams, manages to come out of the film unscathed, doing a fine job acting unhinged while easily carrying the film along on her shoulders. But no matter how magnetic Carter’s presence is in front of the camera, it’s no escape from Keating’s asinine attempt at both a horror film and a character study.

This review was originally published on November 16, 2015 as part of our coverage of the Ithaca International Film Festival.

“I don’t need permission to do good things.” states Pastor Gennadiy Mokhnenko halfway through Steve Hoover’s absorbing, unsettling sophomore feature Almost Holy (originally titled Crocodile Gennadiy). Mokhnenko wears the collar of a clergyman, but he also devotes himself to vigilante activities, scooping drug-addicted kids off the streets of his hometown, Mariupol, Ukraine, and forcing them into rehabilitation. He’s a charismatic, outsized presence, and his self-assurance in making that statement provides the documentary with its tricky moral quandary.

Hoover’s crew follows Mokhnenko on his nocturnal raids of gruesome shooting galleries around the city. The Pastor’s nickname “Pastor Crocodile” comes from an old Soviet-era children’s show, where a friendly crocodile goes about righting wrongs and battling an evil witch. Some of the kids Mokhnenko encounters with track marks on their arms are as young as ten-years-old. These kids have fallen through the cracks of society and belong to broken families with parents who themselves are junkies or alcoholics. Simply put, there’s no-one around to help them. There’s no state scheme to aid their plight, and the police are shockingly apathetic. The situation creates a space for someone like the Pastor, operating in grey areas of the law. Once in his care, he adopts some of them, and under his patronage, many will go on to lead healthy, normal lives. Others will leave or escape back to the “freedom” of the streets.

Hoover weaves together footage to create a portrait of this self-styled saviour. Hoover eschews a straight narrative by using a fragmented series of vignettes, skipping back and forth through time. With the aid of cinematographer John Pope and utilizing a discordant score of industrial ambience, Hoover creates an atmosphere of hallucinatory dissociation, presenting the Ukraine as a post-Communist dystopia. News footage and soundbites chronicling the country’s troubled recent history put the events in some context, Mokhnenko’s rescued souls representing smaller, more personal dramas set against a backdrop of national identity crisis.

Mokhnenko is a person of boundless energy and self-confidence. He has set up 40 rehabilitation centres under the banner “Pilgrim Republic”. Mokhnenko describes feeling like Superman when he first saved someone’s life, working as a firefighter in his younger years. It’s interesting that he reaches for the Man of Steel comparison, when his methods are closer to those of Batman. Dressed all in black, with a long coat flapping round him like a cape and an oversized crucifix on his chest like an emblem, he’s a self-modelled dark knight, as comfortable roughing up sex offenders as he is making insinuating threats to pharmacies supplying under-the-counter drugs to kids.

Hoover presents many of the episodes in stark verite style, showing the harrowing reality of the drug addict’s surroundings. One especially squalid encounter involves a mentally ill, deaf and dumb woman kept in a shed by an older man, who routinely sexually abuses her. Distraught and discombobulated, the woman can’t even remember or articulate what became of her baby, a mystery that Pastor Crocodile later resolves. As self-cast judge and jury in the cases Mokhnenko involves himself in, he decides that she should be taken into psychiatric care, and cooks up a bogus statement to make sure the hospital accepts her admission.

While Hoover describes the film as a portrait, the most significant problem with Almost Holy is a lack of perspective. It becomes obvious that the director is enamoured by Mokhnenko’s outsized personality when he treats him like a movie star, filming him swim in slow motion and working out at the gym. At times it feels a little like hero-worship, showing the Pastor as an inspirational speaker, a badass on the streets, a political firebrand, and a father to his extended family of lost boys.

On the flip side, Hoover often lights the pastor from behind or obscures his face with shadow, making him look like a gangster. Hoover acknowledges the shady side of the pastor’s activities, without offering any opinion of his own. These conflicted directorial choices make it a little difficult to decide what the Hoover’s actual stance is, and testimonies from other people in the story would give us a more rounded portrait of the man. Is the pastor motivated by fame, power and self-interest, as his critics suggest, or moved to help these people by a genuine sense of altruism? Is he playing tough for the cameras, or his he toning down his methods because a camera is present? What do his rescuee’s really feel about the pastor’s methods, once their past the shock of being virtually abducted by him?

“I don’t need permission to do good things.” Pastor Crocodile states, and in his environment that statement is at least partially true. It seems that he has transcended the law and is doing whatever he feels is best. The difficulty is that in doing his good deeds, he takes the voiceless from one dire situation and puts them in another where once again their feelings or opinions are disregarded. The question hanging over the whole piece is this—Gennadiy Mokhnenko is saving these people from themselves with his questionable methods, but should he? In many cases shown here, he’s rescuing them against their will.

Almost Holy is a handsomely shot documentary (though not surprisingly considering Terrence Malick as an executive producer) and some segments are as well-crafted as a prestige fiction film. With a charismatic and enigmatic central figure like the Pastor Crocodile, it should go down well with discerning arthouse audiences, and offers plenty to debate.

Pandemic is exactly what it says it is. There is no deceptive setup, no mind-altering plot twist, and no moment where the story’s world suddenly expands to encompass something much more grand and complex. Director John Suits’ infection thriller has none of the disease politics of Contagion or the thematic underpinnings of Blindness. It skews much closer to the raw thrills of something like [REC], sticking to a simple, survival plot, relying on its POV gimmick (the film is shot almost entirely through cameras mounted on the characters’ hazmat suits) and gore money shots for entertainment value. This is an unpretentious B-movie executed with enough competence to keep it out of the Syfy Channel’s late night rotation, but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly compelling.

Lauren (Rachel Nichols) is newly stationed at a compound that serves as a quarantine zone for survivors of an outbreak that has swept across the planet in the near future. The origins of the disease are kept relatively vague, but we’re given plenty of hints at the condition of the outside world through a dose of exposition that opens the film. Our protagonist gets assigned as a doctor to a four-person squad. Their mission is to maneuver a bus across a ravaged Los Angeles to a school, where they must gather any survivors hiding there and pick up whatever supplies they might find. As you might expect, the trip doesn’t exactly go as planned, and the team finds itself stranded amongst diseased monsters.

Standing in the way of the main characters’ survival are the infected hordes. They’re never referred to as “zombies” but they might as well be, if not for their intelligence. There are multiple levels of the virus’ degradation, and depending on where someone falls on that scale, they may have the ability to set traps and use tools, or they may possess superhuman strength and exist in an animalistic, heightened state of awareness. Either way, they’re out to kill anything that moves.

The environment of Pandemic is a post-apocalyptic cityscape that’s all too familiar. Short drive-by montages show signs of a severe societal upheaval; bodies hang from a towering crane, disenfranchised citizens shuffle along the sidewalks, and the walls are covered with ominous messages written in graffiti. The film’s world is grimy and squalid, but the up-close and personal nature of the POV camerawork does little to sell viewers on its authenticity. Clearly showing the limits of its low budget, the key locations are confined to empty interiors and small portions of isolated side streets. The idea of a larger city, teeming with dangers, existing beyond the boundaries of these secluded spaces is almost never grasped with any tangibility, and this is a major blow to the sense of immersion that Pandemic tries to evoke.

When it comes to the compact unit of protagonists, the details aren’t any more inspired. The armed bodyguard of the group (Mekhi Phifer) is gruff and authoritative, full of big talk and more than capable of backing it up with action. He criticizes Lauren for her dangerous indecisiveness and knocks heads with the team’s driver (Alfie Allen), a scrappy ex-con who manufactures a snarky line or hotheaded retort for every occasion. Completing the group of four is a navigator named Denise (Missi Pyle), a warmer presence in comparison to the other two who befriends Lauren. Phony banter between team members is consistent throughout, and the chemistry shared by the actors is nothing more than superficial.

Screenwriter Dustin T. Benson tries to fill out these one-dimensional characters with a series of emotionally contrived backstories, giving almost everyone a missing or dead loved one. The undercurrents of self-doubt and atonement give some weight to the characters’ predicaments, but these redemptive arcs are so tired it’s hard to care about how they play out. As with the setting, these conflicts are far from new, and neither the middling direction nor the serviceable performances are enough to elevate the familiarity to something more nuanced.

However, Pandemic is a film with schlocky roots and instincts, taking more pleasure in its cheesy-looking creatures and bloody encounters than in its tacked on human drama. But a mix of dark settings and shaky POV cinematography makes it difficult to see every moment of action. Only one sequence—which transforms a locker room into a gory obstacle course—stands out as especially riveting. But it’s only one scene in a long string of dull skirmishes and numbingly repetitive jump scares.

When looking for outbreak thrillers, there are a lot of films worse than Pandemic, but this is hardly prime material. The film offers nothing new besides its POV visuals perspective, and even that aspect isn’t terribly memorable. Poor effects and mediocre sound design round out what amounts to a bland, derivative experience.

As a small-scale Sundance character drama, writer-director Matt Sobel’s debut feature defies a handful of natural expectations. In its first act, Take Me to the River follows Ryder (Logan Miller), an openly gay California teen who wants to come out to his extended family during a visit to their farm in Nebraska. But his mother (Robin Weigert) and father (Richard Schiff) are considerably nervous about the consequences that would manifest if their conservative relatives were to learn the truth about Ryder’s sexuality. Sobel often goes out of his way to illustrate the level of social ineptitude that permeates the family. One blind relative, maybe an aunt, actually touches Ryder’s leg when she hears from others about the length of his shorts. In addition to this, Ryder is asked about girls and whether he has a girlfriend on multiple occasions. This initial conflict allows viewers to sympathize with Ryder quickly, but it doesn’t say anything new about what it’s like to be gay in America. It’s a good thing Sobel isn’t done setting up his story.

It’s perhaps worth noting that, while the teenage and adult members of Ryder’s extended family sneer at his queer appearance, the kids seem to adore it. One of his nieces, Molly (Ursula Parker), is particularly drawn to him and convinces her redneck dad Keith (Josh Hamilton) to allow them to search a nearby barn for birds’ nests. But something happens in the barn that results in Molly tearing back toward the gathered family with a bloodstain near her crotch. The accusations from her father are instantaneous and damning: Ryder is a pervert who has, in one way or another, assaulted and injured his daughter. The mysterious cause of the bloodstain could be anything from a fall to a cut to a case of premature menstruation, but Sobel avoids getting to the bottom of this enigmatic rising action. In this crucial early moment, and in many thereafter, Sobel insists on employing cinema’s eternally overvalued subterfuge: ambiguity.

Because key developments are so murkily communicated, the otherwise straightforward world of Take Me to the River often registers as surreal and dreamlike. This enhances the film aesthetically but cripples it narratively. Sobel doesn’t venture far enough into the skeletons in the closets of the quarreling relatives to properly grasp the tension boiling under nearly every scene. The framework of his story suggests an exploration of conflicting American mindsets, yet the actions of the characters are left shrouded in mystery when they could be used to reveal much more about what’s actually going on.

Misplaced obscurity aside, Sobel does do an impressive job of enhancing individual scenes. Whatever’s going on, there’s usually something engaging about the frame. Sobel will often inject queer imagery into the film’s redneck-laden Nebraska landscape. One shot, for example, depicts Ryder and one of his nieces riding small horses over a hill blanketed entirely by shimmering yellow flowers. Keeping in mind that Ryder’s nieces are the only members of his extended family with speaking roles who accept him, it’s almost as though the shot is conveying their environment’s satisfaction at being momentarily occupied only by people who accept each other.

More of what glues Sobel’s debut together is the strength of his cast. Robin Weigert is a standout as Ryder’s mother, embodying a woman clinging to a sliver of resolve to protect her son with deft skill. Logan Miller is also quite convincing in the central role. But the most impressive work might come from Ursula Parker, who seems to fully grasp the implications of her role in the film and uses that level of understanding to her advantage. Her ability to grasp complex concepts and then apply them to her character is astonishing considering she can’t be more than twelve or thirteen. Take Me to the River proves Sobel is a talented director, one who knows how to frame a shot so it’s visually explorable. If he would’ve been able to dig deeper into key plot elements rather than expecting the audience to fill in the gaps for him, he would’ve had quite the noteworthy first feature.

During a time when most mainstream movies seem to run around thirty minutes too long, it’s refreshing to see features that can pack a full story into a brisk running time. Ted Fendt’s feature debut Short Stay clocks in at just over sixty minutes, and still manages to tell a complete—albeit somewhat lackadaisical—narrative about a generic guy living a generic life.

Similar to Kevin Smith’s famous debut Clerks, Short Stay is a slice-of-life character study about Mike (Mike MacCherone), a perpetually bored twentysomething whose job at a local pizzeria isn’t providing him with the excitement he desires out of life. When a friend of a friend offers him a job giving tours of Philadelphia, Mike reluctantly moves out of his Jersey apartment and takes the job, thus beginning a new chapter in his mundane life. Of course, the move doesn’t change the man’s outlook on life, and being a timid loser frequently results in Mike being walked all over by coworkers, roommates, and potential love interests. The feel-good movie of 2016 this certainly is not, but it’s still a film worth watching.

One of the more interesting plot points in the film revolves around Mike’s attraction to a girl who assures him that she’s in a relationship but values his friendship. It doesn’t take a sociologist to figure out exactly what’s going to happen next, and while the film doesn’t offer any significant swerves on that end, watching the whole uncomfortable disaster play out is quite entertaining. Mike’s troubles with the ladies are somewhat relatable, but mostly just sad. The scenes in which the poor bastard tries to overcome the problems in his love life evoke secondhand embarrassment in ways that very few films can.

It’s all photographed on grainy 35mm, mirroring the haziness of Mike’s life. Opting for a documentary-like aesthetic, Fendt and cinematographer Sage Einarsen seem determined to capture aspects of real life, and they frequently do so. Reminiscent of mumblecore films from the mid-2000s, Short Stay is comprised of long takes, what appears to be improvised dialogue, and consistent naturalism. There are no action-packed set pieces or larger than life plot points but the film still entertains in spite of this.

Some members of the supporting cast aren’t exactly convincing, delivering lines with little believability and the charisma of a wet sock. This is somewhat routine in these kinds of films, but it still detracts from the experience. Naturalism simply doesn’t work when those performing it don’t come across as natural. MacCherone, however, portrays the mousy protagonist in successful fashion. He’s a total loser, admittedly, but Mike is a generally easy guy to root for. It seems as though his entire goal in life is to not be a complete and utter failure, but he just doesn’t know how to succeed. In that regard, Fendt’s feature debut is thoroughly depressing, but the tone is actually comedic. There aren’t any “jokes,” per say, but the strange manner in which Mike handles all of his problems is laughable in the right way.

Films like Short Stay are an acquired taste, and can justifiably be viewed as both brilliant and lazy, depending on individual perspective. Evoking shades of the early works of Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, and the Duplass Brothers, there should be little doubt as to what kind of cinematic experience Short Stay provides. The film does exactly what it sets out to do, and that’s always something to be appreciated.

After its premiere at 2015’s SXSW Film Festival (where it won the Grand Jury and Audience awards), Trey Edward Shults’ Krisha received comparisons to the likes of John Cassavetes and Terrence Malick. Given that Shults has worked on several of Malick’s recent films—starting out as an intern on The Tree of Life—those comparisons feel obvious, even though they’re earned. The Cassavetes comparisons come from both Shults’ low-budget, indie origins and his close-knit cast (almost everyone in the film is a family member). These associations with such big names in American indie filmmaking have critics and audiences making their point clear: Krisha marks the arrival of a new, bold voice for indie films.

Then again, referring to Shults’ work as nothing but an amalgamation of potential influences only does a good job describing what Krisha is like, rather than what it actually is. There’s something here that sets Shults apart from every other up and coming American director getting their break at film festivals around the country, and it’s evident right from the beginning: a close-up of the title character (Krisha Fairchild, Shults’ real-life aunt) staring the camera down, with ominous strings surging on the soundtrack. That stark opening shot is followed by a complex long take, where Krisha walks around a suburban neighbourhood looking for a house, finds it after winding up at the wrong place, and then introduces herself to the guests inside. It’s soon revealed that the guests are Krisha’s own family, who she hasn’t seen in over a decade, and she’s arrived to celebrate Thanksgiving with them. Shults’ decision to film the sequence in one lengthy shot implies either a keen understanding of his own material—the high-wire act of pulling off such a sequence feeding into the awkward nature of the family reunion—or a showy stunt, the kind first-time directors like to make as a way to get noticed.

What differentiates Shults from the pack has less to do with story (he’s far from the first person to tackle a disastrous holiday reunion) and more to do with his execution. Krisha’s decade-long absence from her family’s lives is due in large part to her addictions and penchant for self-destructive behaviour, and Shults lets the film’s form act as a gateway into his lead character’s anxious perspective. Using quick cuts, whirling camera movements, an abrasive score (courtesy of Brian McOmber), shifting aspect ratios, and plenty of other tricks, the film becomes a cacophony that reflects Krisha’s immense, self-imposed stress. Despite the invite from her sister Robyn (Robyn Fairchild, Shults’ mother), Krisha senses the anger and resentment brewing just underneath her relatives’ friendly demeanor. She expects every interaction with one of her family members to turn confrontational at any second.

But how can Krisha work as an entrance into its protagonist’s mind when there’s no proper context for it? The bulk of Krisha’s concerns come from the fear of her family calling out her poor behaviour over the years, yet Shults cares little about establishing his other characters’ relationships to her. Beyond a basic establishing of her past issues and the uncomfortable nature of the reunion, Shults doesn’t bother trying to convey a full understanding of what brought Krisha and her family to their current emotional states. That makes the inevitable sour turn of events, culminating in Krisha’s relapse, unearned; her downward spiral feels manufactured for maximum melodrama, and her relatives the pawns designed to carry the story to its emotionally charged destination.

So if we want to find a different filmmaker to compare Shults to, one that helps explain his sensibilities rather than the conditions of his production, we just have to look north. Much like Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s work—more specifically Mommy and Tom at the Farm—Shults shows an interest in emotional intensity for its own sake. They prefer to let the visceral qualities of shouting matches and familial angst compensate for the lack of any weight behind these intense feelings, all while wrapping it up in superfluous or ineffective formal quirks that amplify the content, instead of complementing or supporting it. Granted, Shults’ approach is an effective one, even if it’s transparent; Fairchild gives a great performance, and there’s something inherently involving about watching this family fall apart. But it only works up to a certain point. As Krisha keeps going, it’s obvious that its director only knows how to operate in loud, shrill tones, and what the film amounts to is a fireworks show: loud, short bursts of excitement that fade fast and get old quick. It doesn’t come as a surprise when the film ends during its most heated moment, cutting off mid-scream to a dedication before the credits start rolling. With Krisha, Shults shows that he knows how to get people’s attention—figuring out what to do with it is another story altogether.

In his latest movie, Knight of Cups, Terrence Malick asks us to join him, for the third time in a row, on a journey through the meandering thoughts of people lost in life, confessing their innermost moral quandaries to the cosmos as they stumble and crawl across god’s green earth and bask in heavenly sunlight. This time, the setting is Los Angeles, photographed in all its concrete, Art-Deco grandeur by trusted Malick collaborator (and Oscar darling) Emmanuel Lubezki. We follow and listen in on the thoughts of fading movie star Rick (Christian Bale) and, occasionally, his famous friends, as Malick lays out another unbearably thin narrative that’s as deviously frustrating as a 500-piece puzzle with 450 pieces missing. The eminently respected auteur clearly has a firm grip on the art of filmmaking—at his best, he’s one of the greats—but with his work becoming increasingly nebulous and less inviting to audiences, it’s come to the point where patience for his vagaries grows dangerously thin.

In an almost wordless onscreen performance (we hear his voice, but mostly in the form of narration), Bale drifts down the streets of L.A., occasionally jumping in thought to memories from Las Vegas, Century City and Santa Monica. Rick is in a perpetual state of punch-drunk spiritual crisis, surrounded by gorgeous women who glom onto his status, wealth and handsome looks until his emotional ineptness becomes too much to bear, at which point they make way for the next batch of girls to grab at his pants.

Rick’s fleeting romantic partners are played by a dizzying crowd of famous faces: Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Imogen Poots, Teresa Palmer, Freida Pinto, Isabel Lucas and more can now add a Malick film to their resume. The roles are thin—Blanchett plays his ex-wife, Portman plays a fling—but isn’t every role thin in a Malick movie these days? Antonio Banderas makes an appearance a Hollywood playboy who throws a swanky house party littered with real-life celebrities playing themselves (“Look! It’s Joe Manganiello! Nick Kroll! Danny Strong! Wait…Danny Strong? Huh?”). Banderas takes over narration duties for a bit, spouting twisted, misogynist philosophy. “Women are like flavors,” he says in his sumptuous Spanish accent. “Sometimes you want raspberry, but then you get tired of it and you want strawberry.”

Malick does a good job of laying out the monstrous, indulgent allure of showbiz that pulled Rick in and broke him down into the wandering, pulp of a man he is. He’s become a phony, just like all the other soul-sapped leeches overpopulating the trashy town that bred them (to be clear, Angelenos, I mean Tinseltown, or the idea of it, not L.A.). Similarly swallowed by the city is Rick’s brother (Wes Bently), a non-famous drifter whose short temper is inherited from his and Rick’s late father. The particulars of the family drama (and, in fact, most of the particulars of Ricks life) are left for us to imagine on our own, but the quality of Bale and Bentley’s performances helps to form some semblance of an emotional arc.

Some (this writer included) would consider it a duty of a true movie lover to meet the filmmaker halfway when a film’s concepts or ideas are challenging or obscure. But with Malick’s recent work, it feels like he’s not meeting us halfway. We can only give so much of ourselves over to him before his movies start to feel like tedious chores. What’s so tragic about this is that, on a cinematic level, he’s phenomenal: he and Lubezki’s imagery is sweeping, evocative and immaculately conceived. Some moments—like a ground-level shot of Bale taking a knee on the concrete as an earthquake shakes the buildings and people around him—are so exquisite you could cry. But without a deeper sense of cohesion, these cinematic feats start to feel hollow as they pile on top of each other for two hours straight. As with Malick’s last movie, To The Wonder, Knight of Cups topples over, leaving us to sift through a mess of pretty pictures in a desperate search of some morsel of meaning. Like his characters, maybe it’s time for us to wake the hell up.

Five years after nabbing the Palme d’Or for his 2010 feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul, has crafted perhaps his most intimate work in over a decade. Instead of enchanting his audience with surrealist imagery, Joe chooses to mystify us by employing tools as transparent as implication and conversation. But he remains a master of controlling the frame, of capturing the unadulterated sounds of nature’s pumping heart, and he deliberately pulls us into a trance, into a world that exists aesthetically between sleep and dreams, but textually between history and the present moment. Bucolic environments throughout the film are observed in their most silent states, yet the sounds that remain despite the emptiness are amplified. Joe navigates spaces that initially appear slight, but focuses on them so intimately that they become wondrous.

Like fellow East Asian filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang, Joe constructs his takes and their geometry with obsessive deliberation. What sets the two filmmakers apart, at least in terms of what’s visually obvious, is that Joe shoots the majority of his films outdoors, while Tsai’s meditative tone poems are generally consigned to dark interiors. Nature has a constant presence in Cemetery of Splendour. The environments feel sentient, and when the human characters walk through or interact with them, the visible gestures carry the weight of dialogue even though no words are actually spoken. The goal of many filmmakers is to find material worth observing; Joe believes all material is worth observing, and he proves it.

Cemetery of Splendour is set in its director’s hometown of Khon Kaen and stars his frequent collaborator Jenjira Pongpas, whose character, apparently mirroring her director, returns to her childhood home as an adult. She seeks out the school she attended growing up only to find it’s now a makeshift hospital designed to treat a company of soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sickness. The location’s design is immaculate, conflating cloistered objects from its distant past with therapeutic technology that wouldn’t look awry in a modern science fiction film. Enamored by the events taking place in her prior schoolhouse, Jenjira begins tending to a young soldier named Itt (Banlop Lomnoi, co-star of Joe’s Tropical Malady). Itt occasionally breaks through into the waking world, but unless speaking through a telepathic woman named Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), he remains trapped in an unyielding slumber.

As the story progresses, we learn that the schoolyard turned hospital was built on a cemetery of kings, and that the restless spirits of these kings feed on the energy of these soldiers, ensnaring them in their own subconscious. Jenjira and the other characters occupying the present slowly begin to comprehend what exactly is going on, and as they do, history’s voice only grows louder. A pair of goddess statues take human form and begin to converse with Jenjira, telling her stories as though she were their contemporary. Viewing the film through western eyes, I can only assume the enigma of its mythology is exacerbated by cultural removal. But even taking this into account, I hesitate to wonder whether the extent of its message has failed to transcend that regional barrier. What Joe has to say seems like something people from all cultures could identify with.

The material in Cemetery of Splendour, while initially alien, is unpacked with grace and explicability. As ancient spirits contact those currently occupying physical bodies, a revelation about the confluence of souls begins to present itself. The high levels of cultural specificity the material appears to impose gets decimated by the universality of the ideology it harbors. Even referring to Joe’s philosophy as ideological seems reductive. He is merely enthralled by the relationships between conscious minds. It doesn’t matter that a hospital has been erected atop a cemetery, just like it doesn’t matter whether clouds look over a river or an ocean sits above the sky. All that matters is that these bodies and the minds that make them unique are in constant dialogue. Forgotten kings can chat with and advise millennial nurses and soldiers, because why wouldn’t they? Every tree, river, animal, and being that ever was and ever will be must rely on one another with the utmost compassion. Otherwise, how could we even bear to live?

It always feels important to rediscover an established filmmaker’s earliest work. There’s a unique artistic pleasure in dissecting the roots, looking for the under-developed thematic, narrative or formalistic signs of eventual greatness—almost as if we are over-analyzing a childhood to reconcile why someone became a serial killer. With its re-release at the IFC Center in New York on Friday, March 11th, our eyes fix on Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass. It’s difficult to find reviews of the film from its premiere at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival and its subsequent limited theatrical release, but by all accounts, it received solid buzz considering it was a debut film. River of Grass was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance when the festival was at the height of its grassroots independent glory. Interestingly, Tom Noonan’s directorial debut What Happened Was (a film by a notable filmmaker that has been similarly forgotten) won the prize, which competed in a lineup that included Clerks, Spanking the Monkey and Hoop Dreams—three films that cemented the cultural importance of Sundance at the time. Twelve years after River of Grass, Reichardt made her breakout film Old Joy and has been on an indie cred tear ever since.

River of Grass stars Lisa Bowman as Cozy, a bored wife and mother, stuck in a boring life with a boring family in a boring community. Restless, she decides to hit the bar one night, abandoning her motherly responsibilities in the process. She meets Lee Ray (Larry Fessenden), a young slacker who has recently come into the possession of a gun. They connect, leave the bar together and eventually get into some trouble because of that loaded gun. Cozy and Lee Ray are now tied together by murder, a bond which Cozy notes is stronger than the bond of marriage. The two leads give very fine, understated performances, with Bowman particularly good in the weirder and quieter moments. Fessenden, in one of his earliest performance, brings energy to the film.

The film is very much in line with the 1990s Sundance indie from which it came. The offbeat characters, loose narrative, crime elements and hushed voice-over are all trademarks of its time, which gives the film a bit of a time capsule feeling. It also has an up-front comedic sense that we don’t associate with most of Reichardt’s films, but was definitely a part of indie cinema at the time. From a recurring joke with a profane punchline and weird character moments, the film is consistently funny. Sometimes it’s absurd too, like when Cozy and Lee Roy are on the lam only to be revealed they are in the same city as where they started. It’s the standard couple-on-the-run plot through the ’90s slacker sensibility. They see themselves as dangerous bandits but are ultimately too chickenshit to run through a toll stop. When they do eventually try to leave southern Florida, they fail in about the most pathetic way possible. Even Cozy’s monotone voice-over becomes humorous in its super serious pseudo-philosophy: Cozy’s realization of “If we weren’t killers, we weren’t anything,” for example.

For Reichardt, River of Grass is very much in line with her look at small communities. The film’s title comes from a Native nickname for the Everglades, the Florida swampland only miles outside of Miami with the complete opposite aesthetic. Instead of the bright fluorescent lights, beaches and nightclubs, the “River of Grass” is rural with miles of flat land dissected by lonely highways. The inhabitants are working-class and semi-transient, similar to their Northwest counterparts in Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy.

At less than 80 minutes, the film reveals itself as more of a slice-of-life than it seemed. This is perhaps what makes River of Grass most like its auteur’s work. All of Reichardt’s films, no matter how profound, emotionally or thematically rich, are very much a moment in their characters’ lives. Like Meek’s Cutoff, River of Grass ends with a particular sense of dread, but just open-ended enough not to pin down. Certainly, Reichardt could have expanded Cozy and Lee Ray’s life, added more debauchery or heightened the stakes of their criminal fall-out, but she chose to keep the narrative shaggy and simple—sure, the ultra-strapped indie budget probably had a practical effect on the film’s length, but there is the beginning of a narrative line here.

I don’t know why River of Grass didn’t immediately achieve a cult reception similar to Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Clerks or other films similar in their time and space, but thankfully Kelly Reichardt persevered, allowing you to take a look back to over-analyze or simply discover the roots of one of today’s most important filmmakers. It shouldn’t be forgotten, however, that River of Grass is a very good debut in its own right. The film is often funny, often elusive, and very confident in its style and narrative presentation.

There are many stories a filmmaker could tell about the lives of Palestinians under occupation. Despite the news stories we may hear in the press, in the Western world we are so entirely disconnected from their life experiences that any insight is not only helpful but necessary. We need to hear their voices and, at the very least, witness their experiences, even if many of these are beyond our understanding. Speed Sisters provides such an educational insight without compromising its identity as a wholesome celebration of its subjects, a testament to both the subjects and to director/producer Amber Fares.

A Lebanese-Canadian woman who was raised in Northern Alberta, Fares travelled to the Middle East to better understand her heritage; it was this journey that led her to Palestine’s Speed Sisters, the first all-women race car driving team in the Middle East. We are introduced to five women, each with different backgrounds, different talents, and most importantly, different reasons for racing. One of the biggest strengths of this documentary is that it allows each of these women to accurately represent themselves—they are not forced into boxes or censored to fit the personality we might believe a female racer should have. They also have varying financial situations, which only serves to emphasise their single common trait: a dedication to racing. This is reinforced by the decision to include scenes from the women’s daily lives and interviews with their families. One of the most promising racers, Marah, is made all the more sympathetic through childhood stories and words of support by Khaled, her father and biggest fan.

Naturally, as explained by their manager Maysoon, the running of a female racing team in a country under occupation is not without its difficulties. While many of the local men state they are now used to seeing the women race, on the track there are still some clear prejudices to be tolerated; Maysoon herself admits to frequently diminishing her authority in order to make other men feel in charge. Because of a lack of provided training grounds, the team must train next to an Israeli detention site, which comes with its own hazards. This is all without even mentioning the multiple Israeli checkpoints the drivers must frequently pass through, and only a few of them have passes to do so. None of these women are willing to let this hold them back, however, and find their own ways to pursue their dreams. Mona, who races mostly for the fun of it, doesn’t want to let her personal life fall by the wayside. Noor, the wild drifter with the personality (and hair) to match, learns new techniques and pushes herself at every race. But Betty, who is determined to be the fastest woman on the track while maintaining her femininity off it, turns out to be Marah’s biggest competition within the group.

Speed Sisters is everything we would enjoy in a fast-paced racing film, along with the edge of a realistic political commentary and the introspection of a personal adventure. Perhaps its biggest aid in succeeding with such a high standard is its pacing—both Fares and editor Rabab Haj Yahya know exactly when to switch between fast-paced races, establishing shots of Palestinian life, and sit down interviews, never allowing one aspect to dominate too much screen time. Paired with a largely Middle Eastern soundtrack including Palestinian hip-hop and other tracks from the region’s indie music scenes, we are easily drawn into a world of which, in reality, we know nothing of. Yet Fares applies a simple but true formula to this film: when a narrative is so specific it cannot be anything but authentic, it becomes universal.

It would be difficult to improve upon the director’s own words when it comes to this documentary. It provides such a fascinating perspective, and each driver brings her own honest approach to both the track and to life. “Each one in her own way took me on a ride through Palestine that I will never forget,” Fares says. “They taught me to push boundaries, while still respecting your community. They taught me about resistance, about not giving up and what it means to stay true to your dreams despite endless obstacles.” This is exactly what Speed Sisters is about.

There are more worries that come with parenting than there’s space here to list, but one worth mentioning involves babysitters. A child is precious, so the care for that child must be handed to someone whose trust is irrefutable. A trustworthy sitter is a valuable commodity and can mean a stress-free (and well-deserved) night out for parents. A new sitter, though, is a different story. A new sitter invites questions, worries, and doubts until they can prove their worth. These are the sorts of doubts are at the center of Emelie, an effective thriller that taps into the fears of parents and children about strange sitters.

Dan and Joyce Thompson (Chris Beetem and Susan Pourfar) plan a night out without their three kids to celebrate their wedding anniversary. When their usual sitter can’t make it, they hire her friend, Anna. At first, Anna is everything the kids could want in a sitter because she lets them do whatever they please. But as the night progresses, Anna’s behavior grows darker. 11-year-old Jacob (Joshua Rush) learns this mysterious new sitter’s name isn’t actually Anna, but rather Emelie (Sarah Bolger). Once Emelie’s identity is compromised, her behavior grows even darker.

After a harrowing opening (the film’s one true, and earned, jump scare moment) that allows Emelie to assume the role of Anna, first-time feature writer/director Michael Thelin settles into an unsurprising, if not mostly predictable, first-act groove. He presents the serenity of suburbia to establish the juxtaposed backdrop of the impending terror. He portrays the chaos found in a house where parents scramble to get ready so they don’t miss their reservation while trying to wrangle their three young ones. While driving to the restaurant, natural parental worrying settles in but ultimately passes. As for that sitter, she curries favor with kids immediately by allowing them total freedom. This is where it gets interesting.

For the two younger kids it’s all about junk food and playtime, but for Jacob, Emelie is both attractive and a temporary mother-figure he wants to please. Emelie senses both of these things and exploits the former when, in a stunning scene, she asks Jacob to fetch her a tampon…while she’s on the toilet and he’s in the bathroom with her. This is the first in a collection of lapel-grabbing scenes that move the story away from that familiar groove while avoiding expected psycho-sitter moments.

Thelin draws Emelie as wickedly subversive and passive-aggressive in her cruelty to the children. Rather than overtly frighten them or physically abuse them, Emelie instead exposes them to things that are varying degrees of traumatic, including putting one child’s pet hamster into the tank of another child’s pet snake. Emelie is rich with other similar moments, which aren’t so much scary as they are discomforting.

Hampering the film, however, is the inclusion of a mysterious man spying on the parents while Emelie is watching the children, which stops the film in its tracks every time Thelin focuses on this subplot. Seeing the parents enjoying themselves while their children are going through this traumatic night is unnecessary; the addition of the spy tries to force some greater sense of doom on the evening and it never quite works.

The other big detriment to Emelie is its lack of momentum. While it fits the traditional three-act structure, Emelie never turns up the intensity. The film is essentially a collection of moments that never build up to something greater, but it’s a solid B-movie that Thelin doesn’t try to oversell. He makes some interesting creative choices that mostly work, like his creation of the title character and (especially) the decision to avoid turning the story into a straight cat-and-mouser. This is a taut thriller that finds its greatest effectiveness in its discomforting moments.

There’s a difference between “simple” and “simplistic” storytelling, and The Nightingale is a film that walks a fine line between the two terms. Director Philippe Muyl relies on an unfussy narrative, familiar character dynamics and placid visuals to make the sentiment of his tale resonate. The film is old-fashioned and contains a fair amount of charm, but it takes no risks (neither in the film’s aesthetic or its plot complications). Themes of reconciliation, youthful optimism and multigenerational bridge-building mosey on through, their potency limited by a lack of conflict and a penchant for easy answers.

Set in modern day China, The Nightingale finds a family suffering from disconnection. A married couple (portrayed by Xiaoran Li and Hao Qin) and their young daughter, Ren Xing (Xin Yi Yang), are living in a cold, sterile apartment in the city. The parents are preoccupied with their busy professions and the girl seems to be more endeared to the bright screen of her iPad than anything else. When a pair of important business trips send each of the parents away, the mother has no choice but to leave her daughter with her grandfather (Baotian Li). He lives a quiet life on the other side of town and has his own voyage in the works. The destination is his childhood village—a place nestled far away, deep in the Chinese countryside. A wealth of memories, both joyous and sad, await him there and whether the temperamental Ren Xing likes it or not (spoiler alert: she doesn’t), she’s coming along for the ride.

The bulk of the film follows the travels and interactions of this girl and her doting grandfather. Right away, it’s shown that he won’t get through to her easily. Ren Xing huffs about, making up complaints, willfully disobeying her grandfather and spurning any of his attempts to pick her brain. She’s clearly very independent, but her antics are unreasonable at times. Of course, the early friction transparently sets the relationship up for a tender reversal, as the more time the two spend in the countryside and amongst the smiling villagers, the more they bond and the better they understand each other. At the center of this is the titular nightingale that the grandfather carries around in a cage. Its meaning is gradually revealed and the bird eventually comes to be the film’s unifying emotional symbol.

From these descriptions, one might envision a gently affecting tale with low stakes and the potential for a hugely poignant takeaway. It is indeed gentle and the stakes are definitely low, but the execution is bland and conventional. The look of The Nightingale isn’t quite televisual, but the lighting and camerawork are so disappointingly unexpressive and flat. Even the sections in the countryside are—with all the gorgeous landscapes that are at the director’s disposal—generically “pretty” in the way the spaces are captured. Muyl is after a relaxed pace and ponderous tone here, but the imagery fails to provoke any thought.

As far as subtext goes, there’s plenty, but the motifs and messages are obvious. All throughout The Nightingale, there’s a running theme of dichotomies, the most prominent one being the unceasing movement and chaos of the city and the serene wisdom of the country. There’s something to be said about the divide between these two realms, but the film doesn’t do the topic justice, approaching it with a lack of nuance. The sprawling metropolis is repeatedly established with what appears to be slight variations of the same shot of sped-up traffic. By the third or fourth instance of this, we get idea. Meanwhile, the countryside is presented as a picture of paradise—accented by the perpetual laugh of children and shimmering, imperfect vistas.

This is where that “simplistic” sensibility comes in. The story is very straightforward and for a while, the absence of big, game-changing events is kind of nice. Baotian Li contributes a lot with his sweetly sympathetic performance and the sauntering nature of the tale is pleasant enough. But at some point, I began to hunger for something a little more substantial. Every little obstacle that comes up for the characters is very quickly dismissed or assuaged, and each beat of the characters’ individual developments falls into place, unearned. The countryside works like a magical sedative on Ren Xing’s sour mood and technological enslavement, and a previously strained relationship between the grandfather and the girl’s dad is quickly mended.

I’m assuming that The Nightingale’s target audience is children and easy-to-please families, as more cynical or discerning viewers may feel patronized by the easy sentiment and cookie-cutter storytelling. At the same time, there’s an oddly undercooked divorce subplot in the film that doesn’t fit the otherwise buoyant tone and feels out-of-place each time it’s brought up. Maybe this part is meant for adults seeking greater dramatic weight, but it isn’t thought out well enough to properly satisfy those needs, so I’m not sure what to make of it.

With all this negativity, it needs to be reinforced that The Nightingale is entirely harmless entertainment with, at the very least, a good heart and a nice message. It may be a fine choice for a casual afternoon viewing, but you probably won’t remember it the next day.

Teenagers can be incredibly frustrating, but maybe much of this frustration comes from knowing that we were once the same. Perhaps this is why Everlasting—a story centered around two teenagers—can be both relatable and compelling. It manages this in spite of our personal grievances and despite our insistence that we know better. There are certainly shortcomings to be found, but Everlasting is in itself a tale about remembering—and valuing—the positive over the negative, and perhaps it’s not a stretch for the film to ask the same of its critics.

At the very beginning, we are told by Matt (Adam David) that his girlfriend Jessie (Valentina de Angelis) has been murdered. The plot is straightforward enough from here, with a search for answers being the main driving force for our young protagonist. As Matt begins by providing their background story, we learn that he and Jessie are troubled high school students with only one source of true happiness: their love for each other. They spend their aesthetically gothic days fantasizing about death and throwing caution to the wind, and it’s only too obvious they believe themselves invincible, as teenagers often do. Jessie in particular is shown to be overly attracted to a darker lifestyle, intensely absorbed in the escape it offers her. When she decides to follow her dreams of becoming a model, Matt has no choice but to be supportive, reluctant as he is to lose her. The two drive to opportunity-laden L.A. from their hometown of Denver, with Matt using their trip as an opportunity to create a project for his film class. But after Jessie’s death, this project takes on a drastically different shape, thus becoming the story of Matt’s journey to find her killer. Told in a non-linear cumulation of his footage from both trips as well as moments of third party voyeurism, Everlasting works towards a resolution whilst keeping a strong footing on the subject of love.

Though the story may not be groundbreaking—and is undoubtedly a commentary on how such events happen all too often in real life—Everlasting manages to carve a space for itself by taking a more human approach than most. Matt states that he does not want Jessie to become just another name in a list, and the film tries its absolute hardest to ensure this doesn’t happen. Instead, Matt (as our main storyteller) painstakingly attempts to provide a complete picture of Jessie as he knew and loved her; while this does serve to create an emotional attachment for the audience, it also inadvertently highlights a lack of substance to Jessie’s character. We are provided with fleeting reasons for her often concerning behaviour and personality, such as being raised by a single mother whose own behaviour is far from perfect, but without delving into this relationship further it is hard to ascertain exactly why Jessie is so attracted to the darkness of life. As such, her “tortured soul” identity ends up feeling somewhat superficial. Matt, on the other hand, is clearly given more thought and nuance, and becomes much more cemented in our minds as a sympathetic figure.

Interestingly, many of the less central characters grab the audience’s attention and hold elements of intrigue, and this is largely due to sincere acting by more than a few cast members. Elizabeth Röhm must be mentioned for her heartbreakingly wonderful portrayal of Jessie’s flawed mother, and Pat Healy demonstrates once again that he knows all too well how to make an audience distinctly uncomfortable. As Jessie and Matt, both de Angelis and David provide solid turns in their roles, but at times present themselves underprepared to be the objects of such focus as the film provides. Director Anthony Stabley’s conviction to keep humanity at the center of Everlasting requires the beautiful, close shots of the equally attractive actors at work, but evidently proves challenging for both. However, any moments that may seem strained can be overlooked thanks to the stunning cinematography, which works not only to be visually pleasing, but more importantly, to thoroughly deliver an environment of everything the film is selling: youth, beauty and love.

The film has done particularly well within the horror community—having even won the Jury Award at the Nevermore festival recently—but it would be disingenuous to actually call it horror. At most, it’s drama with an edge. This isn’t to detract from its quality, but more to suggest that it perhaps has a more fitting place outside of the genre it is marketed toward, particularly given the rather specific (and misleading) horror-centered focus of its trailer. And so, while Everlasting may at times be as naive as its two protagonists, it also manages to be just as intriguing.

Robert Eggers‘ The Witch gets under your skin and stays there, making you feel a certain kind of filthy for a good chunk of time (for me, a few days of looking over my shoulder at night and rubbing the back of my neck like a crazy person). Contributing to the film’s noxious effect on the psyche are a litany of major and minor details: the American-gothic allure of the 1630s New England setting; actor Ralph Ineson‘s incomparable, gravelly voice; a collection of the most sinister-looking animals you’ve ever laid your eyes on. (Away, evil bunny! Away!) But the real reason The Witch sticks so tightly to the back of the mind is that it leaves us lost in the fog, uninterested in demystifying the terrible, unsettling, supernatural events we bear witness to. Super-serious horror movies aren’t my preferred branch of the genre but when they work, as Eggers’ film does, I can’t help but bow down as I quiver in my 17th-century boots.

The backdrop of this “New-England Folktale” (as the movie is subtitled) is an isolated farm on the edge of a dark wood where a Puritan family resides and tends to crop. Why anyone would choose to live with an ominous ocean of decrepit-ass trees at their back I don’t know, but in this instance, it was the decision of the family’s patriarch, William (Ineson). After being banished from their plantation community (for unknown reasons), the family needed a new place to make a life for themselves, hence the lonely little farm at the foot of hell’s gates.

With a stern hand and a booming voice, William raises his litter alongside his wife, Katherine (Kate Dickie), who’s scary in a stoic, nun-like way. They’ve got an infant, Samuel, who one day disappears while under the watch of their eldest, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy). While the parents and Thomasin’s younger brother, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw, who has a shining moment that must be seen to be believed), are convinced the newborn to have been taken by wolves, young twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson) have a more twisted theory, that baby Sam was taken by the witch of the wood, who they believe to be none other than their dear older sister. The mischievous tykes’ tall tale would probably fall on deaf ears under normal circumstances, but Samuel’s vanishing has thrown the family into a state of panicked hysteria; suddenly, sweet, sensible Thomasin becomes the family scapegoat. Eggers gives us a glimpse of moldy corn, which may or may not effect your perception of the unfolding events. Curious.

Female repression emerges as the movie’s major theme as Thomasin is poked and prodded into a corner with dubious accusations slung at her by the twins and her own mother. The hatred mistrust spirals out of control when Caleb wanders into the forest and returns one night, naked and not quite himself. The blame’s heaped on Thomasin and even William begins to question his daughter’s virtue. One can only take so much abuse; if they want Thomasin to be the witch so desperately, maybe she should play along.

Eggers’ film is rife with Satanic imagery (the family’s goat is suggestively named “Black Philip”), but the real horror comes from the volcanic family tension and their religiously fueled motivations. The movie’s set in a time when things we now consider supernatural—witches, ghosts, demonic possessions—were strongly accepted part of the natural world. The Puritanical mindset of the time almost acts as a magnifying glass for the subconscious fears of moderns like us: Misogyny is disconcertingly prevalent in today’s society, but discrimination against women was even more extreme in the time of The Witch. Gender inequity is the source of myriad societal fears, anxieties, struggles, and conflicts, and at its core, Eggers’ story digs down to the roots of this enduring friction, particularly in this country. The fact that Thomasin is on the brink of sexual awakening just as her loved ones turn on her adds another layer of richness to the predominantly feminist narrative.

A jump-scare rollercoaster The Witch is not; it’s more like those dead-drop rides that crane you into the sky at an agonizingly slow clip and then plunge you toward the ground when you reach the apex. Moments of subtle, subconscious dread are stacked on top of each other carefully by Eggers until the overwhelmingly tense final act. I was relatively calm during the majority of the film, but I was absolutely frozen in fear for the last twenty minutes or so. The horror is cumulative, and the escalating, asymmetrical shape of Eggers’ story is a nice change of pace for the genre.

Take one look the detailed design of the family’s cabin and the period-accurate costuming and it becomes clear that Eggers’ background in theater production and scenic design is one of his most valuable assets. The textured, ashy, gothic imagery brings Bergman to mind, which speaks for itself. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, costume designer Emma Fryer and composer Mark Korven (whose wailing choral arrangements are absolutely blood-curdling) keep the movie’s production standards high on all fronts, working in concert to make The Witch one of the most put-together, elegant horror productions in recent memory.

It almost feels like a religious experience, watching a movie that’s as beautifully alien and removed from convention as Embrace of the Serpent. Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra‘s Amazon-set drama is an indignant lament on the devastating, festering effects of colonialism, but it’s more experiential and less studious than that sounds. The black-and-white river imagery is supple, hypnotic and frightening, in that startling way that most unfamiliar things are, at first, frightening. The scariest thing, though, is how vividly Guerra shows us—via two white men’s parallel river quests, separated by 40 years—the extent of the destruction pale-skinned conquerors wreaked on the indigenous cultures of the region. Even scarier: the realization that the eradication of our indigenous people, in our America, makes Guerra’s dark fable hit uncomfortably close to home.

Like the narrative (which is based on a pair of white explorer’s real-life journals), the production’s heroes are dual, with cinematographer David Gallego having as much influence on the film’s success as Guerra. With locations as lush as the ones we glide and trudge through on the winding South American riverways, it seems best, for a story this restrained and contemplative, for us to simply, respectfully bear witness to the indescribably beautiful surroundings. There’s no need to breathe life into what’s already teeming with overly stylized presentation, and thankfully, Gallego’s got taste. The choice to go monochrome supports the thrust of the story; what would have been about color and vibrancy is now all about light, darkness and shadow.

At the center of the first story is Theodor Koch-Grunberg (Jan Bijvoet), a German explorer in search of a rare, sacred flower called the “yakuna.” Theo’s fallen ill on his expedition, tended to by his local guide, Manduca (Miguel Dionisio Ramos). As they land their boat onto the riverbank, they’re met by Karamakate (Nilbio Torres), a shaman who doesn’t take kindly to white men, whose violent conquest has rendered him a companionless river dweller, the last of his tribe. Locals like Manduca, who cooperate with the whites and have adopted many of their Western customs are, to him, just as disgusting. Reluctantly, Karamakate agrees to be their guide (only he knows how to reach the yakuna), enticed by Theo’s promise to help him find the last remaining survivors of his tribe, who the German claims he’s seen with his own eyes.

On their journey, the cultural divide is slowly bridged: Karamakate keeps Theo’s illness at bay with herbal medicine; Theo shares some of the worldly belongings he’s hauling around in his clunky luggage box. (Meanwhile, Manduca straddles the cultural line.) Their bond is shaken to the core when they come across a grove of drained rubber trees and indigenous workers mutilated and enslaved by the invaders. Tensions are heightened again when they happen upon a Catholic mission where a mad Spanish priest rules over orphaned indigenous children, forcing them to abandon their old customs as he abuses them on a whim in a multitude of sickening ways. This portion of the film is almost unbearably awful to watch. It speaks to Guerra’s integrity, though, that he shows no measure of restraint in depicting something so horrible as cultural extermination. Again, the true horror is how easily linked the priest’s child abuse is to issues of our time (Spotlight comes to mind).

Theo has a mental breakdown when his compass is stolen by one of the locals, fearing the technological trinket will sully the purity of the tribes traditions. Karamakate takes the fit as a sign of ignorant condescension, and they’re back to square one. Our link to the second story, set in the 1940s, is Karamakate, the older version of whom is played by Antonio Bolivar. We flash over to this second journey intermittently, which sees the shaman in a sorry state of soullessness, numbed to nothing by the continuing white-man takeover. He meets a new, American explorer, Evans (Brionne Davis), who, like Theo, is trekking towards the yakuna wonder-plant. The tone’s much more pensive and dirge-like in this less-eventful second story, which is mostly about the sorrow that’s built up in Karamakate following decades of watching his home ravaged by Western “progress.”

As grim and yucky as this all sounds, the movie isn’t without a few moments of mirth. Evans blowing Karamakate’s goddamn mind with a phonograph under a starry night sky is heart-meltingly cute, and when young Karamakate and Theo exchange the occasional glance of recognition and acceptance at each other, it gives the story just the right amount of hopefulness it needs to avoid being completely depressing. What’ll be most challenging about the film for many is its pace, which is relatively lax and often stretches moments and shots longer than normal. Some would call this meandering; I’d call it glamorously introspective (I have no qualms about staring at Gallego’s images for an extra beat or two—or three). Guerra’s made a magical film in that it feels strangely organic and of the earth. The mechanisms we’re used to recognizing and latching on to—performances, camera moves, editing, sound design—flow together so naturally in Guerra and his team’s hands that Embrace of the Serpent feels of the earth, not of 35mm celluloid.

Filmmakers John Mitchell and Christina Zeidler are proud of their Canadian roots, wasting no opportunity to name drop neighborhoods to make it abundantly clear that Portrait of a Serial Monogamist takes place in Toronto. It’s something New Yorkers have been doing this for ages now with their city, so at least this film offers a perspective on a different area (though the proximity is fairly close). The film also presents a different take on the typical rom-com, as it features a middle-aged lesbian who’s a serial monogamist with a long history of broken hearts. Some of the gambles in the film don’t pan out, like needlessly breaking the fourth wall by speaking directly to the camera, but without risking failure, you’ll never attain success, a lesson that the central character soon learns the hard way.

Elsie (Diane Flacks) has been a serial monogamist since grade school. Now, as forty-something lesbian, she’s practically an expert at breaking up with existing girlfriends and starting new relationships. Yet when Elsie breaks up with her girlfriend Robyn (Carolyn Taylor) of five years, she uncharacteristically finds it difficult to move on. This is strange because Portrait of a Serial Monogamist opens with a monologue of Elsie confidently giving advice on how to properly break up with your partner, even ending her spiel with “after you’ve made your decision, never look back.”

Unable to take her own advice, Elsie seeks opinions from close friends on how to cope with being single again. Her first instinct is to listen to her friend who suggests she immediately start dating. In the best scene in the film, her friend Sarah (Sabrina Jalees) explains how the holy grail of the dating world is the dog park. Sarah insists that you can tell a lot about a potential partner by the breed of dog they own—she recommends staying away from owners of black labs and retrievers as they are loyalty breeds and stick to owners of more free-spirted breeds, like cocker spaniels and terriers. Due to Jalees’ comedic background, this scene plays out with a ton of laughs, but it’s also clever. In the same vein as the famous car door lock advice from A Bronx Tale, Sarah warns, “if anyone tells you their name before the dog’s name, run.”

But most of these shoddy suggestions just feed into her old ways of thinking. It becomes frustrating to watch her struggle between a younger new fling (who hardly seems promising) or her former long-standing lover Robyn. Several flashbacks throughout the film that indicate how much Elsie still thinks about Robyn, making it obvious to everyone except for Elsie that she should get back with her. Which leads to the biggest issue of the film—not getting a chance to properly value the relationship that the film is centered around. Because Portrait of a Serial Monogamist begins with Elsie immediately dumping Robyn, it’s difficult to feel the impact of why she was so important to Elsie.

Mitchell and Zeidler provide some valuable insight on how heartbreak and love go hand-in-hand, and how trying to avoid one will result in losing the other. But in the end, this light-hearted indie comedy suffers from stiff performances (aside from Jalees, who could have used some more screen time), and an abundance of subplots and clichés. At least Portrait of a Serial Monogamist follows the (eventual) advice of its characters by attempting to provide fresh ideas from a unique vantage point, even if it doesn’t completely succeed.

It feels like sibling filmmakers are becoming more of a thing lately. In the last two years, movies of all varieties have been made by the Coens (the musically-themed Inside Llewyn Davis), the Wachowskis (big-budget sci-fi Jupiter Ascending), the Farrellys (franchise comedy Dumb and Dumber To), and the Russos (superhero tentpole Captain America: The Winter Soldier). Even a foreign drama is represented by siblings, as evidenced by Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem.

This year, another pair of filmmaking siblings are introduced to the scene: Ben and Chris Blaine, with their first feature film Nina Forever.

Holly (Abigail Hardingham) has a romantic interest in Rob (Cian Barry), her coworker at a local grocery store. Her friends try to warn her away from him, though—he’s been suicidal since the accidental death of his girlfriend more than a year ago. Fate steps in when Rob is injured at work and Holly, who is studying to be a paramedic, offers to examine his wound. There’s a spark between them, and on their first date, that spark becomes a flame when they find their way to Rob’s bedroom. Their heat is quickly cooled, however, by the sudden appearance (in bed next to them, no less) of Rob’s ex-girlfriend—the very dead, very chatty Nina (Fiona O’Shaughnessy).

Nina, whose corpse is still bloodied and broken from the car accident that took her life, becomes a greater presence—and a greater nuisance—in the new couple’s life. As Rob struggles to figure out how to stop Nina’s appearances, Holly considers the opposite approach by embracing the decedent’s presence.

Who are these Blaine Brothers and where have they been hiding? Nina Forever is a sensational film, and while the presence of a talking corpse might tempt some to hang a horror tag on it, don’t take the bait. This is a deliciously dark comedy/psychological drama hybrid, using the horror device of Nina’s corpse as a symbol for guilt and loss, then doubling-down and using her unwillingness to leave Rob and Holly alone as a metaphor for the couple’s inability to properly deal with the loss (It also uses her wit for the funny bits—and there are plenty of those).

The film, co-written by the Blaines, has a strong foundation in the construct of its three lead characters. Rob is so burdened by loss and guilt (he was driving the car in the accident that killed Nina) that he has become mostly non-functioning. Holly is a wannabe paramedic—a healer, a rescuer, a fixer of things—and he is something she can fix. And Nina—poor, dead Nina—might be a symbol for something deeper, but on the surface she’s still the girlfriend who has been jilted, at least by circumstance (her insistence that Rob not refer to her as his “ex-girlfriend” because they never technically broke up is hysterically played).

O’Shaughnessy, Hardingham, and Barry all turn in solid performances, as do David Troughton and Elizabeth Elvin in key supporting turns as Nina’s parents.

As the story progresses, the characters evolve in a way that so many other writers struggle to make happen on the page. There is an organic fluidity to how the trio act, react, and interact throughout the length of the film. Also, Nina’s first reveal could have been treated as some type of singular moment that the rest of the film winds up tethered to until the end. Not so in the Blaines’ hands. That first reveal of Nina truly is the jumping-off point for a longer game with a wickedly smart ending I did not see coming. Sparkling dialogue that any actor would want to deliver tops off a script any director would want to helm.

There is a strong confidence to the Blaines’ direction, too. They are clearly not afraid to take creative chances, and this confidence results in that sweet spot between storytelling and artistry. This is an engaging story that is also great to look at. (Oh, and the fellas know how to film a scorching sex scene, too.) While they get key help from Oliver Russell’s gorgeous cinematography, their secret weapon is their editing. The Blaines join the growing list of filmmakers who edit their own work (a practice I’ve grown to appreciate). There are present-day moments in the film, such as Rob and Holly’s first date, that integrate glimpses from the past and teases from the future to offer a complete picture before the picture has even developed. Not only does that take confidence to attempt, it’s difficult to execute, but the directors make it work.

Nina Forever is the film to follow, and with it, the Blaine Brothers have brought serious game to the screen. It’s clear the film world’s latest sibling tag-team has come to play.

A version of this review was originally published on March 15th, 2015, as part of our coverage of the SXSW film festival.

The news of yet another horror anthology coming out doesn’t inspire the same amount of excitement as it used to several years ago. The arrival of V/H/S, a fun blend of the anthology gimmick with found footage (the horror subgenre du jour), rejuvenated an interest in multiple directors collaborating on different, loosely connected short films. But now, after two V/H/S sequels, two ABCs of Death films, and with more “anthrillogies” on the way, the format is starting to get a bit tired again. That feeling must have been on the minds of the team behind Southbound, who also made V/H/S. They’ve gone in a different direction from their previous film, creating a more collaborative effort that intertwines Southbound’s five stories on both a narrative and thematic level. While the film can’t escape some of the inevitable issues that always plague these episodic movies, its consistency makes it the best horror anthology to come out since Trick ‘r Treat.

Things start with The Way Out directed by Radio Silence, who handle both the opening and closing stories. As an opening, the short really serves little purpose other than reeling viewers in with a deliberately hidden story that will be revealed in the concluding chapter (cleverly titled The Way In). Two men (Chad Villela & Matt Bettinelli-Olpin) are covered in blood and fleeing after escaping from someone (or something) that has them freaked out. After driving for a while, they notice a large, floating, skeletal demon following them, and despite their best efforts to escape they find themselves stuck in a sort of closed loop (also serving as a hint towards the film’s overall narrative structure). The purposefully vague plot makes this segment easy to forget, but it does a fine job establishing the major elements that run through the rest of the stories: the long stretch of highway in the Californian desert, and themes of regret, guilt and retribution.

Next up is Siren, Roxanne Benjamin’s directorial debut (she worked as a producer on V/H/S). Sadie (Fabianne Therese), Kim (Nathalie Love) and Ava (Hannah Marks) are a touring band whose van breaks down on the highway, and after getting offered a ride by a polite couple to stay at their house for the night Sadie begins noticing something seriously wrong with their hosts. Benjamin’s segment kicks off the strongest stretch of Southbound, with a fun little horror story that has a few devilish twists, along with a grim yet funny ending that segues into the film’s high point. David Bruckner’s Accident opens with Lucas (Mather Zickel) calling 911 to help someone injured in a car accident he caused. Bruckner hits a sort of twisted groove that none of the other films come close to reaching, and does a far better job at creating a sense of mystery that generates intrigue instead of frustration. And Brucker’s hook to the story is simple but effective: Lucas does the right thing, only to discover that he’s within a realm where morals don’t exist. It’s a brilliant short, with a low-key ending that provides the film’s best transition.

Unfortunately, the next story, Patrick Horvath’s Jailbreak, starts a slight downward trajectory due to its half-assed attempts to build out a mythology around the film’s location. Danny (David Yow) comes to one of the small towns along the highway in search of his missing sister, and it amounts to a lot of elements getting introduced without explanation as a way to imply some elaborate, complex supernatural society or system within this stretch of the desert. Horvath’s specificity only breaks the compelling illusion of something sinister in Bruckner’s previous short, suddenly showing there are weird back alleys and tattoo parlours all around. And the final short plays out as a riff on The Strangers before trying to explain what exactly was going on earlier in The Way Out.

But the less successful shorts in Southbound’s latter half don’t tank the film because of the overall thematic and visual through line. It’s hard to make desert locations look bad, and the film’s four directors of photography do a great job enhancing the isolated and dangerous qualities of the barren landscapes these characters can’t find their way out of. Southbound can act like an argument for why anthologies can benefit from a more collaborative effort, because even when one filmmaker might handle a theme or idea in a way that falters, the echoes of the stronger segments still ring through. It’s a big benefit in Southbound’s case, and helps make an increasingly stale format feel refreshing again.

A version of this review was originally published on September 18th, 2015, as part of our coverage of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

The Unity of All Things will screen in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series ‘Friends With Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers.’ To find out more about the series visit the ‘Friends With Benefits’ website.

The lines separating mainstream, independent, and arthouse films are often blurred (especially around awards season). But to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, I might not be able to definitively summarize each category, but I know what I’m watching when I see it. This is particularly true when it comes to arthouse films. As far from the mainstream as possible and certainly well-removed from the indie scene, an arthouse film can do more than challenge a viewer; it can defy basic understanding. Such is the case with The Unity of All Things, a film as arthouse as they come, from the writing/directing team of Alexander Carver and Daniel Schmidt.

There’s very little plot to speak of, but the film is no less dense. It begins on a scientific level, as its physicist protagonist/matriarch faces the inevitable shuttering of her particle accelerator and the quest to build another. Still keeping physics heavy in the forefront, but with philosophical musings injected (“Knowledge of the universe does not change reality. The pursuit of that knowledge does.”), the film then plays on relationships between and among the protagonist, two other female scientists who work for her, and her twin sons (the sons, meant to be portrayed as beautiful boys, are played by girls). Those sons begin an exploration of their own sexuality as they engage in an incestuous relationship with each other. Beautiful visuals (the film was shot on Super 8 and Super 16) get mixed with monotonous scenes (meant to be viewed as art rather than consumed as film, I suppose), and the title card appears halfway into picture.

The Unity of All Things not only refuses to be pigeonholed into a traditional genre, it defies even being called a film. Less a motion picture than a piece of moving art, Carver and Schmidt’s feature debut epitomizes the notion of something being an acquired taste.

Fort Buchanan will screen in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series ‘Friends With Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers.’  To find out more about the series visit the ‘Friends With Benefits’ website.

While I’ve never served in the military (and thus have never been deployed), my family’s history has loads of this experience. While I often think about the grandparents and uncles and in-laws who have served, I rarely consider that while they were gone, they were forced to leave people behind—people who had to tackle childrearing as de facto single parents, as well as managing their own loneliness. In Fort Buchanan, writer/director Benjamin Crotty focuses on a group of military spouses and how they cope with childrearing and loneliness. However, the first-time filmmaker does so in the most peculiar of ways.

When his husband is deployed to Djibouti, Roger Sherwood (Andy Gillet) finds himself left alone to raise their 18-year-old adopted daughter Roxy (Iliana Zabeth). The two live on-base at Fort Buchanan, where they befriend a collection of other military wives whose husbands have also been deployed. As time passes, Roger finds himself increasingly distraught by loneliness, frustrated by his own weakness, and vexed by his blossoming daughter’s growing rebelliousness. That Roxy has become the object of desire of the lonely wives who are helping to raise her escapes Roger entirely, and efforts to address the emotional distance that comes with the geographic separation between Roger and his husband only make matters worse.

There’s something quite hypnotic about Fort Buchanan, a lean 65-minute feature that’s an expansion of Crotty’s 13-minute short film Fort Buchanan: Hiver. The film’s titular military base setting is quite perfect for the story, allowing for spouses to be believably absent while creating a space where Roger’s pangs of loneliness can coexist with the raging libido of a collective of horny housewives. That said, it’s really a base in name only; nothing about the setting says “military base” apart from the sign out front, and the setting feels more like a secluded resort deep in the Pocono woods, complete with something of a strapping and handsome farmhand/groundskeeper. It’s at this base/resort where the denizens spend their days lounging about without worry, discussing, among other things, the nicknames they have for their private parts.

This conversation actually happens, and it’s an emblem of the open sexuality that flows throughout the film. These wives, apart from their husbands for an unknown length of time, are allowed to go on “playdates” while their husbands are away. Once they clearly define their meaning of the word for Roger (he hears “playdate” and thinks back to when Roxy was a little girl), the playdates are revealed to be (mostly) of the sapphic variety. It’s here where a subplot begins about a friendly competition among the women to see who can bed the nubile, barely-legal Roxy first. This openness of sexuality, combined with cinematographer Michaël Capron’s lush 16mm lens and Ragnar Árni Ágústsson’s era-reminiscent score, gives this slice of the film’s narrative a very ’70s European cinema feel, invoking memories of films about sexual awakening like Just Jaekin’s Emmanuelle (1974).

All of this goes on right in front of Roger, whose physical and emotional detachment from his husband, coupled with his frustration at Roxy’s age-appropriate defiance, makes him mostly oblivious to it. In the film’s second act, Roger is determined to make some kind of connection with his husband, Frank (David Baiot), so he travels, unannounced, to Djibouti. Everyone else (Roxy and the wives) goes with him, as if on a vacation away from their vacation. They lounge in the heat of the African Republic’s climes (lending again to the idea that the military aspect of the film is for narrative convenience only) while Roger changes his appearance in an effort to mend his fractured marriage. While there, Roxy makes a heterosexual connection.

Not to be limited to tales of heartache and carnal pleasures, Crotty infuses a humor in Fort Buchanan that is something akin to slapstick. Moments of physical comedy occur when least expected, at times happening in the background while a more serious moment happens in the foreground. These tonal shifts might not do their specific scenes any particular favors, but they are genuinely funny, and make considering the film as a greater whole a slightly different exercise.

The third act falters with the introduction of a new character who appears to have been added so Crotty can take the film down a darker path. I like the idea in general, and the ending fits with the film’s subtle theme of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but with only a 65-minute runtime, the character would have been better served being introduced and developed earlier. Still, the third act is a stunner on its own.

Fort Buchanan is a terrific first feature and with it, Crotty proves he is fearless in the face of defying conventional filmmaking. The film, while not perfect, is in that sweet spot of being both enjoyable on its own and an indicator of the kind of talent Crotty has. Given time to hone his skills and focus his creative efforts, Benjamin Crotty could be around for a long time.

If you took the guerilla-style shooting from Escape From Tomorrow and the faux-documentary approach from Computer Chess, you might have something close to what Matt Johnson creates in Operation Avalanche, a captivating film about faking the Apollo 11 mission. Shot illegally (though staying within Fair Rights), Johnson manages to film in NASA headquarters by pretending to be making a documentary. What better place to film a conspiracy film about the moon landing than NASA itself? It’s a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream.

There’s a meta element to Operation Avalanche because the characters in the story employ the same tactic as the real filmmakers. Set during the space race in the ‘60s, America was worried about the possibility of a Russian spy stealing their secrets to get to the moon first. Enter Operation Zipper, a small film crew assigned to pose as clueless documentarians to find the spy. They go around conducting interviews with NASA employees and tap the phone lines of the higher-ups, eventually learning that NASA is 5 years behind schedule because they haven’t figured out how to actually land their moon lander.

Once word spreads that the space program may be jeopardizing John F. Kennedy’s target date the commander wants to shut down Operation Zipper, but the filmmaking team comes up with a plan to save their jobs and fix NASA’s problem: dubbed Operation Avalanche, the team offers to fake the moon landing using the same special effects used in movies. Their first task is to visit the set of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; since Kubrick’s film involves landing on the moon, why not use his techniques to create their illusion?

Operation Avalanche wonderfully blurs the line between reality and fiction by splicing together new footage with archival footage, creating a similar effect famously used in Forrest Gump. Here, they insert themselves asking for an autograph with the real Stanley Kubrick that looks so authentic it’s scary. Even though the film was shot digitally, cinematographers Andrew Appelle and Jared Raab accurately replicate the visual look and feel of the era. One trick used to create that effect was grading the film, converting it to a 16mm print, and then converting it back to digital. They also film one of the best car chases scenes you’ll see in any film, independent or otherwise.

Most found footage and/or covertly shot films tend to rely on the gimmick of the filming technique, so their narrative takes a back seat. But with Operation Avalanche, the meta format fits effortlessly with the story. It’s an inventive film that works not just because Johnson managed to sneak into NASA and film, but because he crafts an enthralling story to go along with it. Operation Avalanche is an energetic film, filled with innovative tricks and provocative ideas to please anyone looking for an amusing ride, especially those obsessed with conspiracies.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that, given the word “diversity” dominating recent conversations around the film industry, a festival like Sundance can act an alternative to the homogeneity of the mainstream. By its very nature, independent filmmaking provides more diverse, unique and personal stories, and it’s only upon seeing these kinds of films that one can get a true sense of the importance of opening up to new perspectives. Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night, screening in Sundance’s Official U.S. Dramatic Competition, is a perfect example, a coming-of-age tale that’s refreshing just for the fact that it shines a light on an area of society that’s rarely put on film.

Taking place in Koreatown in Los Angeles, Spa Night follows David (Joe Seo), the son of Korean immigrants Soyoung (Haerry Kim) and Jin (Youn Ho Cho). David’s parents own a restaurant, and he’s been happy to forego attending college in order to help his family’s business. But once the restaurant shuts down, things change significantly for David and his family: Soyoung starts working as a waitress at a restaurant owned by one of her friends at church, Jin turns to drinking in order to cope with his inability to find work, and David starts becoming aware of his attraction towards men. Pushed by his parents to retake his SATs so he can go to college, David decides to find a job instead, working at a Korean spa that doubles as a site for discreet gay hook-ups. The spa serves as a heightened middle ground for David, providing an opportunity to explore his sexual identity while not straying too far from his own cultural comfort zone.

The film’s specificity, combined with Ahn’s sensitivity towards his own characters, go a long way to establishing Spa Night’s unique placement among US cinema, but those factors don’t change how inert the movie feels on an emotional level. David represses his homosexuality due to his religious upbringing and parents’ conservatism (when he asks how they’d feel about him dating a white woman, they stare at him with stunned, disapproving silence), which Ahn reflects through his rigid and detached form, making it hard to invest in David’s internal struggles. Beyond his attraction to men, it’s hard to pin down what exactly David might be feeling about his situation, shutting off any possibility of engaging with David’s story on a character level.

The same can’t be said for David’s parents, whose attempts to recover from losing their business help fill in the film’s emotional gaps. Haerry Kim and Youn Ho Cho both give great performances as David’s parents, but it’s Kim as Soyoung who steals the film from her co-stars. As her character transitions into the family breadwinner after the restaurant’s closure, Kim makes every aspect of Soyoung’s painful adjustment felt. The success of this subplot only makes Ahn’s issues with making David’s storyline resonate all the more frustrating.

Inspired by true events (or so the opening title card claims), The Tail Job is a comedy that’s high on energy but low on laughs, getting by on its committed cast and a Hollywood-friendly narrative. After a violent and pointless opening, the film cuts to Nicholas (Blair Dwyer) taking a cab driven by Trevor (Craig Anderson) to spy on a woman with his camera. When Trevor asks Nicholas what he’s doing, he says the woman is his fiancée Mona, and he’s trying to find evidence that she’s having an affair. Several days earlier, Nicholas looked at Mona’s phone and saw her exchanging flirty messages with a man named Sio Bohan, and Nicholas wants to catch them together. Trevor takes sympathy on Nicholas, deciding to help him tail Mona for the night in order to find out who the mysterious Sio Bohan really is.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Nicholas misread the name of Mona’s girlfriend Siobhan as Sio Bohan; in fact, it only takes someone smarter than Nicholas or Trevor to make that discovery. It’s a cute misunderstanding that makes for a funny anecdote, but as the foundation for a feature-length film it runs out of steam almost immediately. Either way, the mistake causes Trevor and Nicholas to follow a bunch of false leads and red herrings until they get the attention of a dangerous gangster who actually happens to be named Sio Bohan, who sends out his goons to take care of them for some reason or another.

The Tail Job’s plot is deliberately silly, with co-directors/co-writers Bryan Moses and Daniel Millar using the standard formula for a Hollywood mystery/thriller and throwing in whatever absurdity they can. That approach can work, except the Siobhan/Sio Bohan mix-up is pretty much the height of what kind of comedy the film offers. Jokes constantly fall flat or go for the lowest common denominator, whether it’s a hacker insisting that only “full penetration” counts as cheating or a prostitute whose only purpose is to point out that she has a lot of sex. None of it works, and the poor treatment of the (very few) female characters only makes the comedy look worse.

But as problematic as The Tail Job’s script might be, it does inspire a few laughs when it skewers the kinds of familiar story beats and lines of dialogue we’re used to. Moses and Millar have a good understanding of how the genre they’re operating within works, along with a lot of ingenuity and technical skills that make good use of their small budget. That, combined with Dwyer and Anderson’s strong performances, gives The Tail Job a momentum that helps move things along, a quality that goes a long way when dealing with a comedy that just isn’t funny.

What would happen to humanity if everyone lost their ability to retain memories? That’s one of the questions Claire Carré explores with her debut feature Embers, which drops viewers into a world 10 years after a disease infects everyone with short-term and long-term memory loss. Carré splits her film up into five narrative strands, each one examining how an aspect intrinsic to our existence changes within her own dystopian vision; a couple (Jason Ritter & Iva Gocheva) wake up every day trying to remember how they know each other; a former intellectual (Tucker Smallwood) tries different ways to learn again so he can find a cure; a boy (Silvan Friedman) with no parents wanders around trying to survive on his own; a young man (Karl Glusman, credited as Chaos) filled with rage attacks everyone he encounters; and the young girl Miranda (Greta Fernandez) lives in an underground bunker with her father (Roberto Cots), safe from the disease but cut off from the world.

On the surface, Carré’s film looks like standard post-apocalyptic fare, but its tone is anything but. Shooting in Indiana, New York and Poland, Embers casts its urban decay in a bland, grey hue that should bring to mind Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, except Carré doesn’t provide her film with the same bleakness and nihilism. With no one connected to their past, the strong emotions connected to memories don’t exist anymore, leaving characters to constantly live in the moment in a somewhat peaceful state. The only exception to this is Chaos, whose violent acts take on a new meaning given they’re instinctual and without consequence. The somewhat tranquil mood amidst a dying world makes for a fascinating juxtaposition, allowing Carré the ability to weave in emotional and philosophical questions about identity and the human condition.

With a short runtime and several disconnected storylines, Embers only disappoints with its inability to coalesce on a thematic level (most segments just end abruptly). The only exception is Miranda’s storyline, as her near-decade of isolation makes her consider leaving the bunker to go live in the real world. Her father begs her not to go, telling her that once she’s infected she’ll lose everything that makes her who she is. For Miranda, it’s a complicated situation that directly addresses Carré’s question at the heart of the film, over whether or not memory is the source of our own individuality.

In the empty landscapes of rural Washington, a meeting is about to go down between two people: Abe (Conner Marx), a young journalist trying to make a name for himself, and Debra (Carol Roscoe), who works for the US government. Their meeting is the result of a series of back and forth communications, with Debra wanting to release sensitive information involving national security. From the moment they meet in person, the word “trust” gets thrown around more than once. For Abe, it’s making sure Debra’s a legitimate source while trying to stop her from being spooked so easily; for Debra, it’s a matter of not getting caught handing out classified information. They may be surrounded by vast flatlands, but their location exposes them just as much as it exposes anyone who might be watching them. Over the next hour and a half (shown almost entirely in real-time), Abe and Debra will try to trust each other in order to get what they want. On the other hand, viewers can place their full trust in writer/director Nathan Williams’ hands. If There’s a Hell Below is the kind of back to basics take on a conspiracy thriller that feels refreshing and riveting at the same time, with a confidence behind the camera that establishes a new name brimming with potential. Here’s a film where the word “Hitchcockian” is not just apt; it’s earned.

For its slim runtime, Williams goes against expectations by making as much empty space as possible. When it comes to story, it’s not about the specifics of why Abe and Debra get together. Her specific role in the government is never expanded on beyond a meaningless job title, and the information she has for Abe doesn’t get explained or broken down (all she has is a list of names on a flash drive). Williams’ deliberate avoidance of specifics helps make the situation easier to get pulled into, as it gives him the ability to hone in on the dramatic core: two people entering a possibly life or death situation, with no way of knowing they’re safe until they’re unsafe. Williams’ set-up doesn’t provide any evidence of Abe or Debra being who they say they are, and no knowledge of whether or not they’re being watched. They meet in the open countryside with no one else around them, but they act like they’re in an enclosed space with eyes all around them.

Initially, Abe and Debra’s characterizations come across as a little too familiar, with Abe’s ignorant cockiness making him look less like an opportunistic journalist and more like a victim in the first act of a slasher movie. But like everything else in Williams’ film, it’s a deliberate move. Abe turns out to be a small-time reporter desperately looking for a big break, and his behaviour comes from not realizing the stakes of the situation. Early on, when Debra gets scared once she sees a parked SUV in the distance, Abe decides to drive right up to the vehicle to show her she has nothing to worry about. It’s an annoying sequence until Williams throws in a nice punchline, one that’s predictable but pulled off with such aplomb it’s hard not to crack a smile.

The assured direction extends out to the film’s look, an aspect that’s vital to why If There’s a Hell Below works so effectively. Taking full advantage of the spacious locations, Williams and cinematographer Christopher Messina create one painterly image after another, at times evoking Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World but with a more sinister edge. It’s an impressive control over mood and atmosphere that heightens the intensity, especially in the latter half when the film closes on a terrific, wordless epilogue, a mini-narrative that drops just enough information for viewers to piece everything together. It’s that kind of cool, confident filmmaking that makes If There’s a Hell Below a highly entertaining shock to the system, a thriller that shows how a skillful hand can make all the difference between a good film and a great one.

In 2014, Robert Greene premiered his documentary Actress, about his neighbour and former TV star who, after leaving the entertainment industry to become a stay-at-home mom, tries to get back into acting again. On paper, Actress looked like a story of someone pursuing their passion again and facing the greater obstacles that come with time, but Greene had bigger ideas in mind than a simple portrait of his neighbour’s rebooting of her career. The film explored the conflict between performance and nonfiction, and as Actress’ authenticity came into question, so did the preconceived notion of documentary filmmaking as inherently objective or truthful. Compared to the glut of modern documentaries constructed as passive, information-based experiences, Actress was a difficult—and memorable—piece of “non-fiction.”

In some ways, Kate Plays Christine extends the ideas and themes of Actress, albeit through a more ambitious and provocative lens, traversing through darker subject matter in its quest to confront the thorny issues of ethics and responsibility most documentarians would prefer to ignore. The object of Greene’s fascination is Christine Chubbuck, a news reporter in Sarasota, Florida who hosted the local talk show Suncoast Digest. On a Monday morning in 1974 during a live broadcast, Chubbuck made a statement about her station providing “blood and guts” television before shooting herself in the head with a revolver. Not many people outside of a few Sarasotans caught Chubbuck’s suicide, and any tapes of the incident have long been destroyed, but news of her death made national news, even inspiring screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky to write the script for Network.

Now, with the four-decade anniversary of Chubbuck’s death approaching, Greene enlisted actress Kate Lyn Sheil (Sun Don’t Shine, Green) to play Christine in a film about her death. This gives Kate Plays Christine a set-up that operates like a strange, closed loop; the film documents Sheil preparing for her role, but the film within the film doesn’t actually exist. The only purpose of the Christine Chubbuck “biopic” is for Greene to document Sheil’s preparation, an indirect statement by Greene on how pointless he finds the endeavor of trying to fictionalize this sort of material.

That’s only the start of Greene’s deliberate clashes with what one might expect from a documentary of a tragic figure like Chubbuck, removing any clarity or explanation on what might have driven her to perform such a dramatic act. It’s a radical approach because of Greene’s refusal to provide any sense of solid ground, putting viewers right beside him and Sheil as they try to navigate the situation he’s put themselves in. The film exists within an uncertain present tense, avoiding direct messages or an editing style that suggests some sort of hindsight. It’s that lack of guidance, the feeling of actively engaging ideas and themes on the same level as the filmmakers rather than being dictated to, that can make Kate Plays Christine as exciting as it is frustrating.

Naturally, all of this uncertainty wreaks havoc on Sheil’s ability to prepare and perform for her role. Her goal is to give a performance that’s respectful and accurate in its portrayal of Chubbuck, but Greene stacks the deck against her. Aside from Sheil being unable to find any footage of Chubbuck to study, the film she’s acting in is done in a cheap, melodramatic style with no real connection outside of re-enacting known information about Chubbuck weeks before her death. Greene provides a perfect symbol for Sheil’s frustration when he tries shooting a scene of Christine going for a swim in the ocean, with Sheil’s wig falling off the entire time. It’s one thing for Sheil to look the part, but she will never embody or become Chubbuck.

The ambiguous space Kate Plays Christine occupies, while making it impossible not to have the film rattle around in the brain long after it ends, brings up a nagging question over whether or not Greene’s process shields him from criticism. There are moments where the film can feel aimless or messy, but it’s difficult to criticize an inherently flawed design. Greene himself has said that he wanted Kate Plays Christine to be a film that “almost falls apart as you watch,” and it’s hard not to feel that way during the (seemingly) scattershot final act.

Eventually, the film works towards a conclusion: the filming of Chubbuck’s suicide, which Sheil begins feeling hesitant about as she weighs the moral implications of tackling the role she’s signed on for. It’s in these final minutes, where Sheil begins acting out Chubbuck’s final news broadcast, that Greene acknowledges the corner he’s backed himself into. At this point, taking a moralistic route with filming the death would be hypocritical, but showing it would indulge in the same “blood and guts” entertainment Chubbuck called out before shooting herself. Amazingly, Greene gets himself out of this corner by playing out both scenarios in purposely unsatisfying ways. It’s an ending that will please no one—although the idea of wanting to walk away “pleased” by someone tragically taking their own life sounds a bit strange. Greene’s direction and Sheil’s performance help tackle the complexity of documenting Chubbuck’s life, along with interrogating the accepted methods documentaries use to explore these sorts of tragic profiles. Perhaps it’s best to take a page from Greene’s book and approach the conflicting elements with the kind of acute awareness he uses with his films: creating these kinds of clashes and juxtapositions shouldn’t make for easy viewing, and the fact that Kate Plays Christine remains so difficult to shake off should speak for itself.

First-time writer/director Paul Taylor wants you to know that Driftwood is, in his words, “a reaction to contemporary cinema.” Citing excessive exposition and the old adage of style over substance, Taylor intends to make a film that breaks things down to cinema’s purest form as a visual medium. What that translates to is, in a literal sense, nothing: Driftwood doesn’t have a single word of dialogue in it, strictly relying on actions to communicate themes and plot. It’s a bold move for Taylor or any new director, but it’s hard not to feel a little hesitant about the move given its origins. Could Taylor’s eschewing of dialogue be an opportunity to provide a breath of fresh air from more standard indie fare, or is it merely a reactionary gimmick whose purpose is to stand out for the sake of it? Driftwood luckily doesn’t fall into the latter category, with Taylor sincerely trying to break from the norm to explore different ways of keeping viewers engaged, even if his methods might have their own shortcomings.

Opening with the arresting image of a Woman (Joslyn Jensen) possibly suffering from some sort of amnesia wandering out of a beach, Driftwood cuts to a Man (Paul C. Kelly) taking the Woman back to his house. There’s no relation between them from the looks of it—he more or less found her on the beach and decided to take her home—and the Woman is so far gone she doesn’t even know how to go to the bathroom. Is she suffering from amnesia, or is this something supernatural or stranger? That’s left up to interpretation, but when the camera lingers on a shot of the Man touching his new “friend” a little too affectionately, there’s no need to guess his intentions with her.

Without dialogue, Driftwood’s narrative keeps things basic. What the film boils down to is the Woman trying to escape from the Man, as her growing independence is met with harsher treatment by her captor. An unwarranted trip outside prompts the Man to lock the Woman in her bedroom when he’s at work, and her successive acts of rebellion lead to stricter living conditions. The Man’s motives for his behaviour get an explanation from Taylor early on, a bit of development that highlights the benefits of Taylor’s approach. With all the emphasis on visuals and sound, there’s more room for Taylor’s themes to take centre stage.

Aside from the more ambiguous questions surrounding the set-up, Driftwood’s straightforward storyline also means there’s just a lot more room altogether, and that space starts getting felt as the plot becomes repetitive. Later in the film, the arrival of a Young Man (Michael Fentin) threatens to shake things up, except it plays out more or less as expected, eventually falling back into the routine established earlier. That’s not to say Driftwood is a stale film by any means, though. It’s an inherently active viewing experience, with Taylor’s cinematography and the two lead performances keeping things both dynamic and engaging. But with more attention paid to what’s on screen, the patterns and repetitions inevitably become more noticeable as well.

So while there’s plenty of room to chew on Driftwood’s ideas of loneliness, grief and trying to rebuild the past, the comparably lacking story means more attention winds up being paid on filling in the background information, theorizing on the origins of the Woman and how she wound up rising out of the beach like a newborn. Those mystery elements make Driftwood a fun curiosity and Taylor’s refusal to give context is more than welcome, but it can only take the film so far. Nonetheless, Taylor can easily rest his film on its own ambitions. Driftwood showcases the good and bad of making a dialogue-free film, but it also shows the kind of riskiness that more indies should attempt.

Following in the footsteps of Alex Ross Perry’s comedies and 2014 SXSW winner Fort Tilden (whose co-lead Clare McNulty shows up here in a small role), Robert Putka’s MAD deals almost exclusively with watching selfish, heinous people behave in selfish, heinous ways, with Putka setting his sights on a dysfunctional family and their bipolar mother. Mel (Maryann Plunkett) suffers a breakdown after her husband leaves her, winding up in the hospital when she’s found uncontrollably sobbing by her neighbours. Mel’s daughters Connie (Jennifer Lafleur), a successful corporate worker with a husband and two kids, and Casey (Eilis Cahill), unemployed and trying to figure out her life, convince her to commit herself to a psych ward in order to rehabilitate herself, a choice fueled more by selfishness than a sincere desire to help their mom.

Of course, being a family with its fair share of relationship issues, every interaction ends up devolving into a brutal war of words between mother and daughter(s). Putka, who also wrote the screenplay, knows how to write some great passive-aggressive barbs (when a dejected Mel tells Connie that her daughters hate her, Connie calmly responds with “Casey doesn’t hate you”), and his game cast do a great job making their arguments crackle until the acid-tongued screenplay gets the better of everyone. For the most part, Putka’s tonal balance between sweet and bitter works (largely because of Plunkett’s performance), but the constant repetition of Connie or other characters lashing out at one another takes its toll, eventually making scenes feel like Putka trying to constantly one-up his own insults. That makes MAD work against itself when it tries to humanize its three leads, resulting in a rocky ending when the film goes for an emotionally satisfying payoff. Fans of extremely caustic humour should get their fill with MAD, and while Putka’s attempt to find a middle ground between the sincere and cynical doesn’t entirely work (a hard task for anyone to accomplish, let alone a first feature), he shows enough wit to make MAD’s ambitions worthwhile.

It’s hard not be drawn to a film whose hook focuses on a day in the life of a pair of closeted gay Muslim teens living in New York. The combination has serious potential as it sets up for things like the awkwardness of a blossoming teen love, the fear of being discovered by family and friends who might not understand, the conflict of being an active member in a religious community whose tenets negatively view homosexuality, and the constant hum of suspicion that comes with being part of the Muslim community in post-9/11 New York. All of this potential exists in writer/director Jay Dockendorf’s debut feature, Naz & Maalik.

Maalik (Curtiss Cook Jr.) and Naz (Kerwin Johnson Jr.) are two teens who make money by purchasing lottery tickets, prayer cards, oils, and other small items, and then sell them at a markup to passersby on the sidewalks of Brooklyn. They are also best friends who have recently discovered deeper emotions for each other. Throughout the course of the day, the young men roam the streets selling their trinkets, make time for prayer, and discuss greater social and spiritual issues as well as wrestle with the spiritual and familial ramifications of their relationship. All the while, they are under surveillance by an FBI agent (Annie Grier) who thinks the Muslim boys could be a greater threat.

Yes, all of the potential is there in Naz & Maalik, but it’s potential that is never fully realized. Rather than use weighty issues as something the leads can wrestle with, Dockendorf relies on the leads’ charm to carry the film while peppering the story with only weighty suggestions. The young men spend a fair amount of time walking and talking about heavy topics, but their conversations never delve deep enough to elicit considerable thought from the viewer. It’s as if their conflicts and musings exist solely as some philosophical or intellectual exercise, not discussions that will result in decisions that will have real consequences.

Once the pattern is established that their conversations exist only on a surface level, each subsequent walk and talk become that much more tedious. Dockendorf also spends far too much time showing the boys shopping for their items and then selling them on the street. An 86-minute film has no time to waste on such frivolity, but the endless presentation of meaningless moments suggests the writer/director didn’t know how to properly flesh-out his ideas, leading to stretched out scenes that pad the film.

This shallowness extends to other areas. The boys’ families, the most significant people in their lives (with the exception of each other) and those with a vested interest in what happens, are almost nonexistent. As for the boys’ onscreen spiritual involvement, it’s relegated to one visit to a mosque, a reading from the Quran, and some handwringing about the conflict between sexuality and their faith. I’m not one who needs everything explained, but I do need some ideas to be developed if they are to be believed.

The film also struggles with the entire FBI angle. I understand persons of interest, and I’m willing to go so far as to accept that the FBI agent caught the scent of the two boys based on a mostly bogus (and very racist) tip by a cop early in the film. What rings unbelievable is the subsequent (slow-speed) pursuit of the boys by the agent. She’s more private eye than Fed, and a bad one at that. Again, Dockendorf doggie-paddles on the creative surface instead of deep-diving, this time asking viewers to fill in the FBI blanks based on what Hollywood has taught them about law enforcement, rather than exploring issues like profiling and being profiled.

By the third act, there is trouble in paradise, both between the boys and with the film. For the former, distrust and suspicion begin to fester over the oddest of things. For the latter, the film winds down with a bizarre circumstance involving a live chicken. By the credits, the film has worn out its welcome.

It’s a shame. Jay Dockendorf has a refreshing premise and his stars have charm for days. But all of that quickly fades when nothing of substance develops from the premise, and nothing of consequence leverages that charm. Naz & Maalik is the kind of idea the indie scene wants, but it’s not the kind of film the indie scene needs.

Naz & Maalik opens Friday, January 22nd in New York City. It will be released on DVD & VOD on Tuesday, January 26th.

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since the New French Extremity—a group of French genre films united by, to put it simply, a lot of disgusting gore—exploded with titles like Frontier(s), Inside, and Sheitan coming out over a short time span. In 2008, the movement reached its peak with Martyrs, Pascal Laugier’s controversial take on martyrdom that had people fleeing for the exits. Martyrs has gained a strong following since it came out, partly because of how it transcends the expectations of an exploitation film. It’s a film that shows women being systematically tortured, but labeling it as “torture porn” would be wrong. Laugier examined the meaning of being a martyr, along with the connection between immense suffering and transcendence through pain. Martyrs stuck out not just because of its gore; it was a philosophical horror film, one with significant ambitions that combined intellectual themes and the kind of horrifying content associated with the lowest common denominator. Even the film’s harshest critics couldn’t deny that Laugier, despite his methods, was trying to say something.

So what happens when US filmmakers take Laugier’s work and adapt it for English-speaking audiences? After several false starts, this new Martyrs has finally come to fruition via the help of directors Kevin and Michael Goetz, The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith, and horror “it” producer Jason Blum. Blumhouse, the production company responsible for the Paranormal Activity and Insidious franchises, is known for its successful approach to making horror films: make a film for a low budget, then have major studios pick up and release them. It’s a successful model because it takes advantage of horror’s self-generating interest (genre films don’t need big stars to attract moviegoers) while providing big profits given the low production cost. That is, in a nutshell, the model behind multiple horror success stories over the past several years, including films like The Purge and Sinister.

Blumhouse has tweaked and perfected a micro-budget machine, and as much as the company can tout its increased creative control or ability to produce outside of the studio system, it’s still a machine. Laugier handled writing and directing duties on the original Martyrs, and it’s obvious that it’s a film with his individual stamp on it. With the remake, the Goetz brothers and Smith transplant Laugier’s work to a format more focused on quick returns and basic thrills, a change that’s like shoving a square peg into a round hole. The set-up is more or less identical to Laugier’s film: Lucie (Troian Bellisario) claims she was kidnapped and tortured by a group of people as a child before escaping, although police found no evidence backing up her story. Fifteen years after escaping, Lucie finally tracks down her kidnappers—a seemingly ordinary couple with two teenage children—and ruthlessly slaughters them in their own home. She calls on Anna (Bailey Noble), her best friend growing up at the orphanage, to help her remove the bodies, although Anna starts doubting Lucie’s sanity given she just gunned down a family without remorse (fair warning: those unfamiliar with either version of Martyrs should stop reading here unless they want to be spoiled).

Since this is a horror movie, Lucie’s claims turn out to be true. The people she killed did, in fact, torture her as a child, and Anna soon discovers they were part of a cult dedicated to creating martyrs in an attempt to understand what lies in the afterlife. Smith’s screenplay, in what some might point to as a true example of what “Americanizing” something means, dumbs things down to make the religious themes impossible to miss, whether it’s having the cult’s leader (Kate Burton) spell everything out or using the image of a woman burning at the stake. At the very least, Smith does try to change things up from Laugier’s original screenplay in the latter half, honing in on Anna and Lucie’s friendship instead of the barbaric plot they’ve become a part of. But that focus only muddles the thematic content that made up the backbone of Laugier’s film, and Smith makes no efforts to adjust the rest of the source material to his changes.

What Martyrs amounts to is a cheap mess, an attempt to adapt a work more focused on ideas into something designed to provide thrills and action, and the clash between the two modes is an ugly one. The Goetz brothers, try as they might to claim they’re doing their own spin on the original, settle into what feels like a shot for shot remake; the punishing final act of Laugier’s film, designed to make its climactic moment of transcendence all the more powerful, gets replaced by a vengeance-fueled firefight instead; the violence gets toned down significantly, a choice that could have worked had it not reeked of the producers trying to ensure they’d get an R rating; and the ending tries to maintain the original’s ambiguity while tying up Anna and Lucie’s storyline in a way that betrays the film’s own themes. Martyrs is nothing more than a complete waste of time, a remake whose own irrelevance dominates every frame. Rather than try to respect the original content beyond its gory surface, Martyrs prefers to trace over its more violent moments, cherry picking what it needs to make something more inclined to entertain than provoke. Unlike Laugier’s unforgettable film, it’s best to forget this version of Martyrs ever happened.

One of the more awkward topics in the early points of a romantic relationship involves the discussion of past loves. The reality is most people are not their current love’s first love, and yet some struggle to admit there was someone before them. This topic can be most sensitive in the early months of a relationship, especially if there is a concern that feelings for an ex might still exist. Fear about this isn’t exclusive to new relationships, however. In Andrew Haigh’s sublime 45 Years, a couple who has been together for nearly half a century finds their relationship suddenly tested by a voice from the past.

That couple is the Mercers: Kate (Charlotte Rampling), a retired teacher, and Geoff (Tom Courtenay), a retired plant worker. They live a quiet life in the British countryside where they go about their business the ways most retired couples do: walking the dog, puttering about the house, running errands in town, etc. Those halcyon days of their golden years take a sharp turn just a week before their 45th wedding anniversary, when Geoff receives a letter that the body of a long-deceased former love has been found. “My Katya,” as Geoff refers to her when he breaks the news to his wife, was the love he knew before Kate. The discovery of Katya, whose body was frozen solid and lost for half a century in the mountains of Switzerland, changes Geoff. That change, along with the subsequent discovery of other information, changes Kate.

There’s a high degree of difficulty in properly presenting 45 Years without it devolving into some mawkish soap about old age and young love and regret and whatnot. Fortunately, it’s a challenge Andrew Haigh (who adapted the screenplay from David Constantine‘s short story In Another Country) more than rises to. The filmmaker has a keen awareness that a 45-year marriage is simultaneously strong and vulnerable, and he has a clear understanding that the frailty of the human ego is something that doesn’t fade with age.

The strength of the Mercers’ relationship is the most obvious aspect of the film. A couple doesn’t get to its 45th wedding anniversary on cruise control. Marriages take work to get that far, and the Mercers have put in that work, but their success is measured by more than just a number. It’s also measured by their contentment and ease with each other. It’s a subtle but important thing. This is an elderly couple not portrayed as bitter or cantankerous or even slyly dismissive of each other; they love each other and have for a long time. The fact that they are planning a 45th-anniversary party is a great example of that. They had planned a party for their 40th—a more logical milestone—but illness got in the way. They didn’t reschedule it for as soon as possible, nor did they clamor to try again at 41. They shrugged their shoulders, knew in their hearts they’d be together no matter what the year, and rounded to the next 5-year marker to throw a replacement party.

The part that’s less obvious, the part that’s more important, is the vulnerability of a relationship that has lasted so long. It isn’t a vulnerability that comes with boredom or complacency because these aren’t people looking for something new. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. These are people who are comfortable with, perhaps subconsciously cling to, the familiarities and rituals they have built up over 45 years. The film is rich with little suggestions of this. So when something like the unexpected reemergence of the corpse of a past love enters this familiar space, it might not crumble the house, but it chips the paint, and chipped paint is the kind of thing that gnaws at someone because they know it’s there and they can’t leave it alone.

And therein lies the never-aging frailty of the human ego that Haigh gets so right. With the reemergence of Katya’s body, Geoff is whisked back to the past and once again reminded of a love realized and yet left incomplete by tragedy. If he were a 40-something who had run into a high school flame at a reunion, he might buy a flashy car. He’s not that guy. Instead, he starts smoking again. He tries reading Kierkegaard again. He moves a little closer to being that irritable old man who wonders if he did it right. He worries that his old love’s frozen body has not aged a day while his has aged thousands. These little changes, these little comments, this renewed interest in a time he long filed away keeps the paint chipping and threatens to crack a wall.

Kate is in tune with it all. Acutely.

At first, it’s not that big a deal. Sure, it’s an old love, but it’s a dead love. However, as Geoff’s interest in Kierkegaard and finding old mementos increases, and as those moments when the couple would share quiet small talk turn into a discussion about Katya (again), Kate wears down. She asks questions—little ones—that illustrate the stoic and supportive face she wears on the outside hides an unraveling self-confidence on the inside. Learning something new and unexpected only exacerbates the problem because now it feels like Geoff is hiding something. When she starts poking around in the attic, her disbelief is crippling. The stakes are immeasurable because it’s not as if she might lose her husband to some fling the way a 40-year-old might; she might lose her husband to a ghost, and there’s no fighting that.

Rampling plays her incredibly deep and complex role to perfection. There is no scenery to chew, no impassioned speech to make, no confrontation to be had with “the other woman,” so in the absence of that, Rampling wields subtlety like a surgeon with a scalpel: precise, efficient, effective. It’s an amazing performance, and one made greater by the fact that Haigh keeps her the focus of almost every scene. But Courtenay is no slouch either, and it takes a real actor to be convincing in his late-life change and give Rampling everything she needs to shine.

Love does not have a finish line. There is no point along the timeline of a relationship where someone can say, “We made it this far; nothing can come between us now.” A relationship is like any other living thing: it needs constant care and attention, and it is always susceptible to damage, whether it’s a budding flower of romance or a mighty oak of marriage. With 45 Years, Andrew Haigh and his pair of stars prove this to be true, and they do so in the most well-measured yet mesmerizing of ways.

For Henry Gamble (Cole Doman), his 17^th birthday is a big turning point. He’s first seen lying in bed the night before his birthday with best friend Gabe (Joe Keery), talking about sex before the two of them mutually masturbate over Gabe’s fantasy involving a female classmate. It’s plain to see from Henry’s behaviour that he has a crush on Gabe, but before Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party becomes a story of a secret crush, writer/director Stephen Cone shows Henry praying before he goes to sleep, establishing both the film’s prevailing theme of religion and an ambition to deal with ideas that go well beyond the intimacy of the opening scene.

Indeed, Henry isn’t the only person dealing with internal conflicts at his party, although his own situation is complicated given his father Bob (the undervalued and always reliable Pat Healy) is a pastor. As the guests arrive one by one, Cone establishes his ensemble cast while gradually revealing information about the various dramas lurking underneath the surface. Henry’s mom Kat (Elizabeth Laidlaw) can barely hide that her marriage is going through hard times; sister Autumn (Nina Ganet) is visiting from college and trying to get over a breakup; the death of a prevalent member of the congregation hangs over the proceedings; and Henry tries to avoid his gay classmate Logan (Daniel Kyri), who has a crush on Henry and doesn’t hide it around him.

That’s only a small chunk of the many subplots swirling around Henry’s home, and as the day goes on many of the various crises going on between friends and family come to a head. Taking place over one day at the house, Cone’s skillful balancing of the large cast and multiple narrative strands is so impressive it’s easy to forget that it’s all an elaborate juggling act. Part of that has to do with the ensemble, a combination of amateurs and professionals that work together naturally (it’s worth singling out Healy and Laidlaw as Henry’s parents, who are so good it feels like there could be a film just about them), but it’s largely due to the thematic tissue connecting everyone’s stories. Almost everyone faces a similar dilemma involving their faith, finding themselves face to face with a desire that goes against what they’ve been taught. And as much as their community promotes a friendliness and openness with each other, the fact that their feelings and/or actions would be categorized as sinful means their issues stay buried.

Cone’s ability to extend his story beyond Henry’s own struggle with his queer identity is what helps give Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party an empathetic quality that’s rarely seen in US indies. Whether it’s Kat trying to fight against her feelings of leaving her marriage or someone wanting to break away from their overbearing mother, Cone approaches each character in a way that distinguishes them and respects their own inner conflicts. Granted, this isn’t the case for every character, and when Cone’s characterizations turn broad—like one woman who spends her time at the party ranting about pornography, or a minor character whose story takes a grisly turn at the climax—there’s a brief clash with the naturalistic mood. But the fact that there are no heroes or villains in a film dealing with homosexuality and Christianity is a rare and welcome sight, one that highlights the complexity of everyone’s situations without casting judgment on whatever they believe in public or private. It’s a film that’s not without its issues, but it displays a sensitivity that more films (indie and otherwise) should try to emulate.

Charlie Kaufman’s inventive, solipsistic narratives have consistently left cinephiles spellbound since he collaborated with Spike Jonze to reify Being John Malkovich in 1999. Through his screenplays for both Jonze and French filmmaker Michel Gondry, Kaufman earned a reputation few screenwriters attain. His distinct voice leapt off the page and manifested itself as a palpable entity onscreen. It has been seven years since Kaufman tried his hand at directing with Synecdoche, New York, and now he has discovered yet another fresh method through which to present his meditations on the intricacies and significance of human interaction.

Anomalisa is a claustrophobic stop-motion adventure that echoes much of the text present in Synecdoche, but funnels it through a decidedly less convoluted portal of expression. The great majority of the film takes place in a hotel, cleverly and relevantly titled “The Fregoli,” in which businessman Michael Stone (exceptionally voiced by David Thewlis) spends the night before giving a speech about the customer service industry. Like all of Kaufman’s protagonists, he is insatiably dissatisfied with his life, which he feels is despairingly mundane. The city of Cincinnati, in which the imaginary hotel is located, reverberates with blandness. Everyone Michael encounters seems to be repeating the same tired taglines. They insist he try the famous chili and proclaim he absolutely must see the zoo. Unsurprisingly, Michael has zero interest in either suggestion.

In terms of design, Kaufman, in collaboration with Duke Johnson, has cultivated an ability to frame his material so it’s both creative and digestible. With Anomalisa, Kaufman finds inspiration on a smaller scale, but manages to maintain an active imagination within the boundaries of his aesthetic. He and Johnson meticulously craft the architecture of The Fregoli to sculpt the oppressive impression of isolation in the mind of their audience. One paranoid dream sequence in the film’s second half is particularly impressive. Like past projects, his recent venture into animation once again ruminates on how banal and unfulfilling our lives are. Anomalisa, perhaps even more so than Synecdoche, is obsessed with the idea that nothing in life is truly concrete outside of one’s intrinsic awareness of the self. Nothing occurring within our lives is obtainable outside of the fact that we are able to think and perceive. Labeling Kaufman as a nihilist would be inaccurate. He affirms that life can be meaningful, but only in fleeting moments. If anything, he’s a miserablist, creatively trapped in his bleak interpretation of human existence.

Many viewers will relate to his desolate conclusion and find solace in his art, but the thesis that long-term happiness is essentially unachievable registers as unforgiving as opposed to illuminating. The brief moment of joy shared between Michael and a woman he encounters at the hotel, Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is undermined by a final lament that deconstructs the daunting image of its true value. These fleeting moments Kaufman illustrates become memories, and they, in navigating a dark and inhospitable world, are what we must cling to. Our survival is ensured not by genuine satisfaction, but by an image of it. After all, isn’t a memory just an image of a prior experience? According to Anomalisa, the experiences that form these memories are few and far between, and the majority of days we walk the earth, we will inevitably fail to encounter such happiness. In a world where aging couples can maintain a romance that began a half-century earlier, and where parents can lovingly watch their children develop into young men and women, the ideas underneath Michael’s existential crisis register as possessing little truth in the grand scheme of things. It’s not times of happiness that are ephemeral, but times of sorrow. Kaufman does sporadically use dry wit to assuage the misery of his conceit, and the intricacies of his aesthetic exhibit remarkable craftsmanship. But anyone with a generally positive disposition toward life will find very little insight in Anomalisa’s pervasive cloud of existential darkness.

Originally published on November 17th, 2015 as part of our AFI Festival coverage.

Directed and written by newcomer Morgan Knibbe, Those Who Feel the Fire Burning is an unusual and powerful documentary about the lives of immigrants stuck in Europe.

Those Who Feel the Fire Burning opens strongly with a man drowning at sea, having fallen from a boat taking him into a port. This drowning is shown from his perspective, with the darkness slowly filling the screen as he sinks down into the ocean. The ghost of this man then serves as our narrator and guide through the streets of Europe’s coastal towns and ports.

Whilst the narrator wonders philosophically about paradise and the failed hopes and dreams of himself and the others who managed to make it to Europe, the camera glides over and through towns and cities on Europe’s coast, focusing on several immigrants struggling to stay alive. We follow one man filling a pram with iron desperate for money. We also follow a Senegalese man living in an old disused house in dreadful condition, telling his wife on the phone about all the shoes and lipstick he can afford to buy and bring home to her. In particularly distressing scenes we also encounter a woman using an old phone charger tied around her arm to help her inject heroin, along with several immigrants mourning the loss of family members and friends who died at sea trying to get into the port.

Knibbe’s voyeuristic approach compounds the sense of unease, grief and isolation of the immigrants. The camera can get uncomfortably close to its subjects, so we can see the pain in their eyes whilst a relentless haunting soundtrack plays in the background. Knibbe conveys Europe as an unwelcoming world for immigrants as the camera lingers over dark streets filled with tension and police. The world these immigrants have entered is alien, isolating and disorienting. Those Who Feel the Fire Burning is not an easy watch. There is no sense of detachment and distance that would have come from a film with facts and statistics. Knibbe does not give the film any political context. This is not a film inclined to provoke a detailed discussion of the complex geo-political circumstances behind immigration. Instead, Knibbe gives a visceral and emotional portrayal of life as an immigrant. He conveys immigrants as trapped in a nightmarish purgatory, unable to move further on through Europe for a more prosperous life, yet also unable to return home to their families. When the narrator ponders his life as a ghost, of “existing and not existing,” the comparison with immigrants feeling a lack of identity is obvious, and serves to emphasize this point further.

Yet Knibbe is not always subtle, and Those Who Feel the Fire Burning does possess a fault—the film’s narration, which can occasionally be a little simplistic. In one scene the narrator asks “Are you an angel?” as the camera looks upon a little girl, obviously hammering home the heaven and purgatory theme. Knibbe has created such a powerful atmosphere with the cinematography and score alone that Those Who Feel the Fire Burning arguably does not need the voice-over and ghost character in order to elicit an emotional response. This scene feels manufactured, and is clumsy given the rest of the film’s subtlety. Thankfully, these missteps from Knibbe are infrequent. Those Who Feel the Fire Burning is a provocative, hypnotic film that draws you into a frightening world of uncertainty and hopelessness. It is a unique, intelligent film from Knibbe that deserves all the praise it can get.

Originally published on April 24, 2015, as part of our Hot Docs 2015 coverage.

The rhythm of the third and final chapter in Miguel Gomes‘ Arabian Nights shifts gears to the point of bewildering (as opposed to enchanting) those who are already done digesting The Desolate One. The Enchanted One is difficult (I’d even go as far as to say impossible) to fully appreciate as a standalone piece, considerably moreso than the two previous volumes. Its parts are divided up in the most irregular of ways. It begins with a prologue, before morphing almost entirely into something like a documentary about bird-trappers in Portugal. Stylistically, Gomes opts for the written word over Scheherazade’s (Crista Alfaiate) voice-over, asking his audience to literally read (a lot), or get lost. Then, suddenly, a Chinese girl (Jing Jing Guo) narrates her life-changing experience as a foreigner in Portugal, while images of people protesting fill the screen. The method in the meandering and meditative madness of Volume 3 is a mystery solved long ago, leaving the final chapter of Gomes’ masterwork somewhat disarmed of direct excitement.

While it’s considerably tougher to engage with the action here, in the bigger picture The Enchanted One is still a vital piece. For one thing, it feels important to spend a bit of intimate time with Alfaiate’s Scheherazade, even if that time ends up being somewhat disappointing. Her doubts over the effects her stories are having on the king, her sense of imprisonment, and her yearning to experience all the wonders of life outside the castle’s walls; all of these bring her character down to earth and, magically, enhance every story she told in The Restless One and The Desolate One. Once she starts roaming Baghdad’s archipelago, some of her encounters are decadent to an off-putting degree, but all it takes is one conversation with her father, the Grand-Vizier (Américo Silva), and we’re immersed again. Perhaps it’s because he reminds her of the importance of stories, and where they come from.

Scheherazade returns to her king, and begins the story about the songs of chaffinches. While it certainly looks labored, the choice of going with title passages over narration to tell this story must’ve really been no choice at all. As beautiful as Alfaiate’s voice is, it would only serve to disrupt the birds’ stirring songs and the bird-trappers’ silence in attending to their beloved passion. For The Enchanted One is at its most entrancing when it follows Chico Chapas (yep, Simao ‘Without Bowels’ from Volume 2) and other bird-trappers in Portugal—unemployed men, lonely men, men hardened by the harshness of life—in their efforts to find, nurture, and teach new songs to the little feathered crooners.

For the first time in Gomes’ Arabian Nights, Scheherazade breaks from a story and concludes it at a later point. In between, we get a brief, wholly captivating, rendition of Ling’s experience in Portugal. Her voice-over narration (in Mandarin)—as she recounts her experience with falling in love and living with a Countess, told over images of Portuguese demonstrations—is beautiful stuff. The fact that it’s so brief, and that Scheherazade returns to the chaffinches right after it, marries the incantations of the human voice with the musical chirps of the birds in a deeply profound way.

As fitting of an ending to Arabian Nights as it is—with a wondrous cover of Klatuu’s ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ to send us off—The Enchanted One is considerably less powerful than the previous two chapters in this unforgettable saga. It would be an interesting experiment to see if its effects would be any different in a single sitting of all three volumes. Viewed as a single entity, though, it’s the least accessible piece of work Miguel Gomes—occupant of interplanetary craft—that he has ever done. In this way, it also feels like the most personal section of Arabian Nights; an impression that’s supported by a final, heartfelt, message from the director himself. As strong a case The Restless One and The Desolate One make as stand-alone films, The Enchanted One embraces all three into one inseparable whole. A whole suffused with a singular poetic imagination, confirming—as all great pieces of film art do—the powerful storytelling medium in cinema.

Originally published on October 2nd, 2015 as part of our coverage for the New York Film Festival.

We plunge into the second volume of Miguel Gomes‘ Arabian Nights without the introductory support of prologues. Only the familiar yellow titles remind us that what we’re about to see is not an adaptation, but an inspiration. Told through fictionalized accounts of actual events that occurred in Portugal between 2013 and 2014, events which left many citizens even more impoverished than before. As soon as The Desolate One ended, only a few fully formed thoughts rose out of the rubble left of my mind. Namely, I silently thanked the director for dividing Arabian Nights into three volumes, for it would be highly detrimental to the overall experience if the audience were tasked with watching all six hours in one sitting.

Partitioned into individual stories—some with multiple narrative tangents of their own—the cinematic wealth of information in Arabian Nights is best digested in fragmented doses. The Desolate One, with its three vastly varied reflections of soul-squeezing desolation, might turn out to be the most emblematic of this richness. A point which—unless I find Volume 3 to be some otherworldly masterpiece—no doubt played a part in selecting this particular volume as Portugal’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film. For even the most emotionally barren tale here, about a reclusive villager of ill-repute on the run from local authorities, is draped in pensive mystery and fried in sun-dried humor. Simao (Chico Chapas) is a son of a bitch, and part of a population of people who are rarely represented on screen. Throughout his story, Gomes constantly pits our perceptions of him and his actions (often bizarre but harmless) with legendary rumors of evil and violence about him, including the reason why the authorities are hounding him. It’s a story of evil full of curiosities, imbued in the kind of lonesomeness found under the surface of so many Westerns.

The second story, with a Judge (Luísa Cruz, pulling off the most memorable performance in Arabian Nights so far) presiding over a case that gets ridiculously out of hand is, in all respects, an intense masterpiece of imagination. Arabian Nights hits the peak of its seductive powers in ‘The Tears of the Judge’ from the increasingly bizarre buildup of crimes and passive-aggressive blame-avoidance and Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s purplish tinctures cinematography which adds to the phantasmagoria in the air. This chapter is the epicenter of the entire piece. The Portuguese court system gets a fantastical make-over in this story; a smorgasbord of cultures, traditions, time periods, and social classes. It’s bonkers magic realism with an endless lifespan, peppered with mercurial humor, and momentous beyond words.

The third and final tale in The Desolate One immediately recalls Gomes’ beautiful Tabu, thanks to the familiar faces of Isabel Muñoz Cardoso and Teresa Madruga. Centered around a block of apartments, ‘The Owners of Dixie’ is in the lonely spirit of Simao’s story, yet it borrows heavily from the imaginative streak from in the previous chapter. A woman finds a mysterious dog which uncannily resembles her old one, and gives it to her friends in an effort to add some joy into their depressing lives. The dog goes from owner to owner, and is the adorable witness to a perceptible sense of nostalgia and dilapidated human spirit, held delicately together by that strange little thing called love.

My mind turned to rubble by the end because it completely succumbed to the film’s undeniable charms. The Desolate One continues where The Restless One left off, building a bridge from literature to cinema. And in more ways than one, this chapter of Scheherazade’s storytelling edges closer to the cinematic end of that bridge. As an art form that envelops all others unto itself. It’s similar to a piece of classical music; here’s the midsection that’s more abstract, more contemplative, and slower in sinking in, but only because it’s slightly more profound in execution and style than what came before. With its mesmeric mixture of genres and moods, a superb screenplay and inspirational camera work and composition (naked Brazilian ladies sunbathing on the rooftop, in one jaw-dropping shot), The Desolate One may just be the most haunting movement of Gomes’ glorious, deeply melancholic, symphony. The Enchanted One is the next and final volume, but it’s already clear that we’re in the midst of the director’s magnum opus.

Originally published on October 1st, 2015 as part of our coverage for the New York Film Festival.

It takes 20 or so minutes before we see the vibrantly playful title of the first chapter in Miguel Gomes‘ latest project, all bedecked in gold; Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One. Before it; a prologue interweaves three narrative threads in a hypnotically potent way, gluing the intended audience to the screen. First-person accounts of Portugal’s declining shipbuilding industry, a wasp epidemic, and a film director (Gomes himself) who is plagued by the apparent stupidity of his own idea for his next film. That is, a metaphorical linkage of the infamous “One Thousand And One Nights” fairytale structure to his interpretation of Portugal’s economic crisis. This meta-documentary approach with the prologue is odd and endearing, but it resonates, above all else, because of its raw honesty.

A single shot stands a cut above the rest from this introduction. A wonderfully long wide shot of a large group of people seeing off a ship from Viana’s seaport, as the voice(s)-over swing between shipyard employees and a self-made wasp exterminator. It’s pregnant with a kind of romanticized melancholia that has become one of Gomes’ signature traits, and augurs—before we’re even introduced to Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate)—how the director might just pull off his “stupid” idea in remarkable fashion. Indeed, from the moment we delve into the first story about ‘The Men With Hard-Ons,’ to the emotional precipice we’re left with by the end of ‘The Swim of the Magnificent,’ Gomes proves The Restless One is everything under the sun, but never, ever, stupid.

Scheherazade’s unique way of avoiding imminent death at the hands of her mad king husband has attracted Gomes to use her method in order to create a work of surreal, humorous, and vigorously compelling cinematic art. For those unaware of the Arabian Nights premise, a quick brief: the beautiful Scheherazade takes it upon herself to stop her Persian king’s violent ways, a man with a reputation for murdering his wives after taking their virginity. Each night, right before he’s about to sentence her to death, his new wife starts telling him a story, only to stop it halfway. The king, unable to bear the thought of not knowing how the story ends, spares her life for another day so that she may finish recounting it the next night. This surrender to the power of storytelling courses through Gomes’ entire filmography, so it’s easy to see why he’s so attracted to Scheherazade’s method.

Getting into too much detail about the first three stories in The Relentless One would be the equivalent of spoiling the twist in a Shyamalan movie, so I’m not doing it. Suffice it to say that, through finespun camera work, unostentatious cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s DP), and Gomes’ screenplay (written with Telmo Churro and Mariana Ricardo), the allegories of Portugal’s unemployment crisis and her government’s negotiations with the European troika are generated with an insoluble type of electric charge. Though not an actor’s showcase by any means, Adriano Luz (who plays the “haggard romantic” Luis in the third story) and Dinarte Branco (who delivers the greatest monologue of the entire chapter as Lopes in the first story) are vital to The Restless One‘s emotional undercurrent. One that’s in constant flux between love for a country and rage at the state it’s in.

Through all the Luis Buñuel-esque hijinks and splashes of sheer brilliance, moments stick out. An intensely languid tracking shot of a man describing his experience as someone “unemployed by circumstance”. A preadolescent love triangle composed in a humorously exaggerated version of Generation Y SMS language. A man remembering the time he got his finger stuck in Biology class—a memory orchestrated by the most effective shot transition in the whole film. Moments of joy, devastation, despair, love, acceptance, and washed-up whales that explosively birth mermaids. You don’t need to see all three volumes to understand that Arabian Nights sees Miguel Gomes at his most ambitious, exposing his artistic soul in the most honest way he knows how. The realism of the film’s prologue is contrasted with the surrealism of everything that comes after it, but both share Gomes’ impulse to lure the viewer in through the power of story, intimate and epic alike.

The second story, ‘The Cockerel And The Fire,’ is decidedly weaker than the others, or at least the first half of it is, which impacts the glorious momentum of The Relentless One. Anticipation for the second volume, The Desolate One, is no less palpable for it. Even more significantly, the emotions evoked by watching how low fantasy embraces socioeconomics in one of the year’s boldest cinematic events, remain none the wiser.

Originally published on September 30th, 2015.

The title Christmas, Again says it all, really. In Charles Poekel’s directorial debut, Christmas is less of a joyous holiday and more of a hurdle to jump over. At least that’s what it’s like for Noel (Kentucker Audley), a Christmas tree salesman in New York City working the night shift. Poekel isn’t cheery or sentimental in his approach, but he also doesn’t make his film an exercise in misery. With a low-key, melancholy tone throughout, Christmas, Again pleasantly goes against expectations, winding up as a minor, well-observed character study.

Poekel, who also wrote and produced, actually spent several years working the same dead-end job as Noel, living in a trailer during the Christmas season in the middle of New York. Poekel’s own experiences add an autobiographical element to the film, giving it a specificity that picks up the narrative slack. Most of Christmas, Again unfolds with very little plot, opting to follow Noel around as he sells trees, goes swimming at the YMCA and makes tree deliveries across the city. Little is known about Noel aside from a few key details: he lives upstate, coming into the city every Christmas to work, and he’s still getting over a recent break-up (his ex-girlfriend would work with him every year, making this Christmas an especially lonely one). To make matters worse, a young couple works the day shift, their presence a constant reminder to Noel of what he used to have.

The monotony of Noel’s job takes a turn for him when he finds Lydia (Hannah Gross) passed out on a bench near his work. After letting her sleep in his trailer, she vanishes the next morning, only to return again days later. Noel and Lydia strike up a sort of casual friendship, one more out of necessity than by choice. Both of them have similar issues, and their isolation only draws them closer together. Poekel ends up taking their relationship in an unexpected direction by the end, one that’s surprisingly satisfying considering its lack of a clear resolution.

And while Poekel’s naturalistic, semi-adapted experiences help him get away with making such a plotless film (some scenes feel like they must have been lifted directly from Poekel’s life), it’s Kentucker Audley’s performance that keeps everything in place. Audley gives the kind of performance bound to get unfairly ignored. Noel barely says a word unless he has to, so Audley must express everything through mannerisms and expressions. Audley perfectly balances the distanced, solitary traits of Noel with the sense of a deep inner turmoil lurking right underneath the surface. It’s the kind of performance that never calls attention to itself, yet remains a captivating force throughout.

By the end of Christmas, Again’s brief runtime, Poekel’s preference of little to no narrative momentum begins to wear things down, but not enough to cause any serious damage. For the most part, the listless tone helps establish the film as a refreshing take on the Christmas movie. It doesn’t like to think big or provide a neat character arc, preferring to act as a brief snapshot into one person’s wistful existence during the holidays. It may not be the most exciting thing to watch, but it provides something unique, relatable and ultimately worthwhile.

This review was originally published as part of our coverage for the 2015 New Directors/New Films festival.

In The Sinking of Sozopol, a middle-aged man returns to his childhood home with ten full bottles of vodka and a determination to empty each one. In his younger years, the formerly vibrant coastal town was the site of many poignant events, the bad seemingly outnumbering the good. Upon revisiting, the man’s emotional pilgrimage of sorts yields a plethora of tenderly recalled memories and the image of an ancient hamlet that is now cold and empty.

A torrential rain falls without pause, the waves hungrily lapping at the rocks as the waters rise; a collection of dogs without masters mournfully skulk about, their eyes on the sea and the depressed man who might be causing this steady engulfment. Before half the bottles are gone, familiar faces begin to arrive in Sozopol, all of them sent by a mysterious woman, and all of them curious about just what their friend expects to happen when the last drop of vodka is gone.

Director Kostadin Bonev tells this somber tale through an alternating structure of flashbacks and modern day conversations that unexpectedly dip into the metaphysical on occasion. Quasi-dreams and a couple of surreal moments are sprinkled throughout, and the use of editing to intermingle past and present furthers the somewhat playful approach.

But ultimately this is a largely straight-faced portrait of conflicted self-destruction, and the capacity that friendship and community have to help quell the inevitable storms of a troubled mind. It’s slightly monotonous in places and not as stirring in its thematic impetus as the premise promises, but the thoughtful script and frequently beautiful compositions pull it through.

Going into Magnetic, I had no idea that the husband and wife duo Michael J. Epstein and Sophia Cacciola had experience directing music videos, but within the first 10 minutes of this indie sci-fi it’s easy to recognize their background. That’s because Magnetic is essentially a series of music videos that are interrupted by brief scenes of robotic-like dialogue in an attempt to establish its futuristic atmosphere. For instance, our heroine Alice (Allix Mortis) gets into a car, inserts a cassette tape (yes, this is supposed to be the future, but it’s…magnetic) and pulsating ’80s inspired synth music plays as she drives. And drives. And drives. In an effort to fill time while the entire song plays, we see every side of Alice from every angle as she drives to a remote pay phone (yeap, still supposedly in the future). The music is temporarily suspended when the phone rings and a monotoned voice on the other end gives a cryptic message only the character understands. This lasts for less than a minute before she drives off and the music starts back up again.

It’s difficult to make sense of what the film is actually about, but that’s mostly by design. Obscure lines like “initiating electromagnetic brain link” and “solar flare activity within normal parameters” mean very little without explanation. But unfortunately, the directors’ hold useful exposition until the very last scene. This doesn’t result in a rewarding final reveal, it just makes watching everything before it frustrating and incohesive. There’s no question the filmmakers recognize catchy beats, or that they can create a stylish, moody atmosphere. But constructing complex sci-fi ideas into an engaging low-budget thriller may have been a little too ambitious.

Once a director gets classified as a provocateur, it’s a label that can be hard to shake off. Rick Alverson earned that title three years ago with The Comedy, his extremely uncomfortable (and funny) takedown of ironic detachment. In that film, Tim Heidecker played someone who thrived on being repulsive and confrontational, and it was easy to treat his character as a symbol for a specific, rotting part of today’s culture. Entertainment, Alverson’s follow-up, is another piece of provocation that will naturally get compared and contrasted with The Comedy; Heidecker returns to co-write the screenplay (and show up in a cameo), and Alverson continues showing off his knack for creating interactions that can have people crawling in agony towards the exits. But Entertainment provokes in a more insidious manner than The Comedy. If Alverson’s previous film focused on attacking character, stretching a protagonist’s “likability” to the breaking point and beyond (think of Heidecker’s character as less of an anti-hero and more of an asshole), then his latest work sets its sights on dismantling structure and narrative. That makes Entertainment feel more specific and less like a commentary or something symbolic, so it can be harder to glean what Alverson’s real intent might be with his increasingly surreal story. The results are murkier, for better and worse.

So it makes sense to cast someone like Gregg Turkington in the central role, a person whose career involves blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Turkington is known best as Neil Hamburger, a comedian who specializes in antihumour, taking familiar aspects of stand-up comedy and performance and aggressively going against expectations. But in recent years he’s also played “Gregg Turkington,” a version of himself that co-hosts the web series On Cinema, along with being involved in its spinoff Decker. In Entertainment, Turkington plays “The Comedian,” a stand-up travelling across the Mojave Desert with his act (an exact version of Turkington’s Neil Hamburger character). A young clown (Tye Sheridan) appears from time to time as an opener with his own baffling act, but The Comedian travels alone, making pit stops in between his performances to indifferent crowds. Alverson expectedly basks in every millisecond of painful silence that comes after Turkington/Hamburger barks out another one of his offensive jokes. Enjoying these scenes, and enjoying Entertainment as a whole, is largely a make or break affair; either you like Turkington’s brand of comedy or you don’t.

The majority of Entertainment plays out as a portrait of one man’s loneliness, with Turkington usually framed in a way that makes him look swallowed up by the desert landscapes (Lorenzo Hagerman’s cinematography is one of, if not the best parts of the film). His interactions with people are usually brief, except for a sequence where he visits a cousin (John C. Reilly) who’s too business-minded to comprehend what The Comedian’s purpose really is. A series of voicemails The Comedian makes to his daughter (who’s never seen or heard) throughout also provides a little bit of characterization, even if it feels like it’s there to make the character look like more of a desperate sad sack. It’s only until a meeting with a chromotherapist (Lotte Verbeek), followed by a brutal encounter with a drunk heckler (Amy Seimetz) that Alverson starts letting go of his formal grip on the film, providing one surreal encounter after another that escorts The Comedian from the purgatory of his desert tour to some sort of deranged, Lynchian hell. Levels of discomfort get ratcheted up considerably as The Comedian’s disdain of others, along with accepting his own pitiful existence, reach a fever pitch when he makes it to the final stop on his trip. Entertainment ends with the image of The Comedian laughing hysterically, which is both the character’s most expressive moment in the film and the point where Alverson lets go of the film’s connection to any form of reality. The Comedian’s eventual acceptance of his own existence as a punchline doesn’t land as strongly as it should, a result of Alverson’s tendency to create compelling scenes that stand on their own yet link together in an aimless fashion, but there’s something powerful in Entertainment’s ability to push down into the darkest depths without any hesitation. Alverson, whose singular style makes him one of US indie’s most important voices right now, confirms what The Comedy established three years ago: he’s a filmmaker brimming with potential, but for the time being someone to watch rather than behold.

Movies are sometimes easiest to explain in terms of personality. You have your strong, silent types. Your deep and profound types. Your clever and witty types. And of course, unfortunately, the excruciatingly socially awkward types. If Funny Bunny were a person they’d be that guy you avoid desperately at parties. They’d be the person you’d be incredibly tempted to be pulled into an argument with, but know that it’s a fruitless endeavor. Funny Bunny is that person who prides themselves on being as idiosyncratic as possible while simultaneously believing they stand for deep and moral issues. Funny Bunny thinks it’s both complex and interesting. Spoiler alert: it’s neither.

Alison Bagnall now has three films under her directorial belt with Funny Bunny, and having written all three herself—not to mention a fourth, her screenwriting debut Buffalo ’66—it’s easy to decipher her preferred storytelling technique. Which is to create the most unusual people possible, throw them together, add a dash of drama and see what happens. It may boil down to how much weird you can personally handle, or finding bits and pieces of these strange characters to identify with, but, at least in the case of Funny Bunny, it all forms a rather frustrating, incomplete, and just plain gawky viewing experience.

The film begins with quirky character #1, Gene (Kentucker Audley), a divorcee and door-to-door activist raising awareness of the childhood obesity epidemic. During his daily crusading he comes to the house/mini-mansion of quirky character #2, Titty (Olly Alexander), who invites Gene in, runs away giggling and then awkwardly invites him to a sleepover. Gene has enough sense to find that strange, but when his ex-wife and her new man kick Gene out of their house for good, Gene decides to take Titty up on that sleepover offer. Titty is happy to take him in with nary a word about being complete strangers to one another. Titty shows Gene his computer where a girl in a wig, holding a bunny, cries into the camera that she doesn’t have the funds to cover medical expenses for her poor rabbit. Titty eagerly pulls out his credit card and types in the numbers. The girl perks up, thanking him over and over.

Turns out Titty is a trust fund kid who sued his parents and now lives alone, emotionally stunted and harboring some blatant mommy-issues. The girl on the computer screen is quirky character #3, Ginger (Joslyn Jensen), an animal rights activist who spends quite a bit of time in front of her online audience. Titty has developed quite the crush on Ginger and when he tells Gene about his feelings they decide the only logical thing to do is go see her. The two of them jump into Gene’s beat up old van the next day, buy Ginger a new bike, and show up at her back door bright-eyed and eager to make friends. She threatens them with a knife, declaring how creepy their actions are. It’s probably the most true-to-life reaction of the entire film.

Soon enough she comes around and invites the two of them to camp out in her backyard. She introduces them to the animal rights activist she follows and Gene and Titty are privy to a plan to set pigs free from a local farm in protest—though before that a member of the activist group did oddly offer to murder a toddler in the name of the cause. Afterward, Titty, Gene, and Ginger get drunk together and Ginger dances for them in what is a painfully long and puzzling scene.

From here out the script tries to develop some sort of love triangle between Titty, Gene, and Ginger. Each guy gets some alone time with Ginger, and each time she portrays intense signs of trauma and possible former physical abuse when she rejects their physical advances. The film seems as though it may pick up speed when the pig-freeing caper goes wrong for one of the group, but it figures itself out easily enough and the film ends almost without notice.

Bagnall makes some interesting artistic decisions with Funny Bunny, choosing to linger quite long on her subjects. She seems to pride herself on what most would consider painfully extensive scenes of emotional reactions. With so little backstory and such eccentric characteristics defining these characters, it’s almost impossible to understand the depth of these emotional reactions and feel any sympathy. Combined with the in-and-out of focus panning of the camera lens, dark lighting, and lack of music the film is mostly baffling with hardly much to commend it. Jensen is put on the line most, acting Ginger’s passionate and troubled outbursts for extended periods and maintaining the most credibility of these three excessively strange characters.

It isn’t necessarily Bagnall’s attraction to outliers and weirdos in her stories that ultimately hinders Funny Bunny, it’s the alienation that occurs when viewers are asked to empathize and care about the emotional bursts of these strange people simply because they are dramatic. The people of this film may be outlandish, but its plot is so thin that the overall effect is distinctly dull. Somehow, I think even animal rights activists, rich teenagers, and childhood obesity advocates would balk at the proceedings of Funny Bunny, which makes one wonder who out there is this film intended for?

Reveries of a Solitary Walker begins with an appropriate title card quoting gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, “When the going gets weird, the weird turns professional,” before diving into its own weird fantasy world built from various types of mixed-media. In this first full-length film from Italian director Paolo Gaudio, elements of live-action and claymation are mixed together to form a unique illustration. The story follows three different characters, each in different time periods and media type, as they encounter the unfinished work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Gaudio begins mixing visual styles early on, when an absinthe drinking poet (presumably hallucinating) flips out when the paper he’s writing on comes to life and slithers into the desk drawer in stop-motion fashion. Capping off this reverie scene, the poet dives headfirst into the bottomless drawer and gets swallowed up by it, which highlights Gaudio’s nifty visual techniques and reveals the surrealism style found in these stories.

While Reveries of a Solitary Walker is without a doubt an impressive visual feat, the film lacks steady pacing and tone. This is most noticeable in the storyline involving two modern-day students working a thesis on Rousseau unfinished work. When compared to the other two tales, this section contains nearly all of the dialogue and very little of the whimsical creativity found in the other areas. Gaudio demonstrates his gift for creating magical set pieces, but it’s difficult to admire anything beyond the visuals and good intentions of this uneven film.