Tag: indie film

Screening Room: ‘Boorman and the Devil’

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I reviewed the new documentary Boorman and the Devil for The Playlist:

The columnist Murray Kempton had a secret for getting a great story: Always go to the loser’s locker room. That was where the real drama was. This is why stories about films that went disastrously wrong will almost always be more compelling than making-of accounts about a classic where everything came together perfectly. There is also more to learn in watching Francis Ford Coppola flail about in “Hearts of Darkness” or “Megadoc” than yet another story about the mastery of “The Godfather.” Witnessing how easy it is for an artist to crash and burn can make the great works resonate as even more rare and precious. “It’s a precarious business,” John Boorman says in David Kittredge’s “Boorman and the Devil,” quoting a producer who once told him that maybe five percent of films succeed. Kittredge’s fraught subject, the making of Boorman’s 1977 misfire “The Exorcist II: The Heretic,” was not among that five percent…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘It Ends’

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I reviewed the new horror film It Ends, which opens in theaters this Friday, for Slant Magazine:

Alex Ullom’s directorial debut, It Ends, is a neatly crafted, if somewhat under-imagined, inquiry into a Twilight Zone scenario, with a dash of Buddhist philosophy thrown in for good measure. Given the vogue for elaborate lore, backstories, and endlessly forking possibilities in fantastical films, from Backrooms to the MCU, Ullom shows an admirable preference for storytelling that’s tightly focused in scope and still leaves room for the unknown…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Fantasy Life’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New1 Comment

I reviewed Fantasy Life for Slant Magazine:

Writer-director Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life is an initially familiar-feeling rom-com about urbane yet nerve-rattled characters that eventually, but just barely, transcends expectations. A law school dropout who appears constantly shell-shocked by the concussions of everyday life, Sam (Shear) is first seen getting fired from his impossibly bleak office job before having a panic attack at a bookstore. With seemingly few prospects, he takes on a job as a manny for the children of a wealthy couple, Dianne (Amanda Peet) and David (Alessandro Nivola). Sam almost immediately falls headlong for Dianne, an ex-actor suffering from different but similarly debilitating and career-stifling mental health issues…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Nova ’78’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film - Festivals, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

One of the must-see documentaries at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival was Nova ’78.

My review ran in The Playlist:

Backstage at the Nova Convention, a three-day gathering in late 1978 ostensibly to celebrate the work of William S. Burroughs, an organizer worries that audience members will be upset by the news that Keith Richards has cancelled, as rock stars do. About to mount the stage, Patti Smith agrees to deliver the bad news, saying with the grinning nonchalance of a bohemian gunslinger (or neo-punk Bob Dylan), “if they’re going to give anybody shit, let them try to give me shit.” It’s a barely buffed-up little diamond of a moment in Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’ “Nova ’78,” a gratifyingly non-exhaustive documentary filled with them…

Screening Room: ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’

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(Courtesy of Neon)

I reviewed the new Matt Johnson film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie for PopMatters:

For those who enjoy or get past Johnson’s clowning, Nirvanna is a deftly intricate mockumentary about friendship, celebrity, and the trap of nostalgia shot like a sci-fi nerd’s YouTube paean to Back to the Future, all wrapped inside a love letter to Toronto. Johnson and co-writer Jay McCarroll play slightly tweaked versions of themselves, much like Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan self-spoofed themselves in The Trip series…

It opens tomorrow. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Fence’

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I reviewed the new Claire Denis film The Fence at this year’s New York Film Festival for PopMatters:

It is unclear where Alboury, the character played by the great Isaach De Bankolé in Claire Denis’ scorching, powerfully mythic new film The Fence, works or lives. It is not even clear if he is a corporeal person or some apparition generated by history and the murmurings of the unquiet dead…

The Fence does not have a U.S. release date set.

Screening Room: ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’

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I reviewed Father Mother Sister Brother‘s U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival for PopMatters:

If there is a lesson Jim Jarmusch is trying to impart in his latest feature, Father Mother Sister Brother (and dear Lord, let’s hope he is not), it is this: Nobody knows anybody. Even when you are related. Maybe especially when you are related…

Father Mother Sister Brother should be opening in December. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Orwell: 2+2=5’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

The new documentary from Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) just had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

I reviewed the film for The Playlist:

Everyone has their own George Orwell and tends to think everyone else gets him wrong. As such, making a sprawling quasi-biographical documentary like “Orwell: 2+2=5” is a brave effort bound to exasperate people across the political spectrum. Even so, Raoul Peck’s repeated usage of the author’s words to buttress his own hazily presented view of current events makes this a less rigorous and engaging work than anything about Orwell should be…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley’

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My review of the documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley was published at Slant Magazine:

…relates Jeff Buckley’s meteoric rise and early death in the 1990s through the adoring and wounded voices of his family, friends, and bandmates. Berg leavens their wistful memories with personal and concert footage, along with Buckley’s notebook jottings, ramblingly funny and emotional voicemails, and jagged animations that are meant to simulate his manic and at times self-destructive mindset…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Meeting with Pol Pot’

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My review of this new film from Rithy Panh ran at Slant Magazine:

In Rithy Panh’s Meeting with Pol Pot, three French journalists are invited to meet with Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in 1978. Looking to discover the truth, they find themselves made accomplices of an elaborate public relations effort meant to hide the regime’s atrocities from the outside world. Loosely based on Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over, the film is hard-hitting yet illusive, much like the story its characters are hunting…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Gazer’

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My review of the new film Gazer is at Slant Magazine:

Located somewhere near the intersection of The Conversation and Memento, Sloan’s feature-length directorial debut marries the former’s obsession with watching to the latter’s meditations on the nature of perception. Like both films, it jolts the wandering, obsessive nature of its main characters with an interruption of violence and sews confusion throughout…

The trailer is here:

Screening Room: 2025 Sundance Film Festival

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - FestivalsLeave a comment

This year’s Sundance Film Festival just concluded. Your fearless correspondent delivered a roundup of the tensions roiling the festival at the moment, not to mention the films worth seeking out and the ones best avoided. That is available for your reading pleasure at PopMatters:

There seemed to be two questions on everyone’s mind at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The first was the same as ever at this festival or any other: “What have you seen?” This question is often academic because there aren’t many available tickets left to get by the time it’s asked – usually by a stranger in line for another film…

I also contributed some full-length reviews to Slant Magazine:

Screening Room: Best Movies of 2014 – ‘Boyhood’

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Boyhood (IFC Films)

Now that it’s been 10 years since the first Eyes Wide Open annual movie guide came out, it seemed a good time to look back on what were the most memorable movies of 2014.

My article on Richard Linklater’s achingly poignant Boyhood was published at Eyes Wide Open:

… wobbly at times but still magical in an everyday way. The film follows a quiet and daydream-prone boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane, likable if sometimes stiff), growing up in Texas with a snarky older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) and divorced parents (Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke). There’s no story, per se, it’s just his life from about age 7 to 18. Linklater’s visual scheme is straightforward and shorn of obvious flair; the often affectless dialogue even more so. But that deceptively simple framework is rich with accrued detail and insight…

More pieces on the best of 2014 to follow.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Dahomey’

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My review of Mati Diop’s new documentary Dahomey ran at PopMatters:

Looking back at the 19th century, when European powers rampaged across Africa and cut apart kingdoms to plunder resources and kidnap millions for the slave trade, it would be understandable to argue that stolen artifacts were not top of mind for those being colonized. To its credit, Mati Diop’s lovely yet fractious documentary Dahomey does not try to make that argument. What she does attempt is a deeper story about the loss that lingers from colonial conquest and the uncertainty about how to move forward…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Look Into My Eyes’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

My review of the documentary Look Into My Eyes ran at PopMatters:

It shouldn’t be a shock that many of the New York psychics profiled by Lana Wilson in her fascinating and, at times, maddening documentary Look Into My Eyes are actors, writers, or artists. At the very least, they are fascinated by invented worlds. Mediums and other people who have claimed to communicate with the spirits of the dead have historically relied on a bit of theater. Thus, the seances are conducted with heavy drapes, dark shadows, and guttering candles rather than in a fluorescent-lit WeWork space…

Here’s the trailer: