Tag: indie movies

Screening Room: Sundance Film Festival, 2022 Edition

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - NewLeave a comment

Once again, the Sundance Film Festival (still showing movies virtually) is spreading cheer in an otherwise gloomy month by giving us a glimpse of what is coming our way in the coming year, cinematically. I covered a few of the movies at this year’s festival for Slant here:

  • When You Finish Saving the World (pictured): Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut is a satire with Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard as monumentally clueless narcissists.
  • We Need to Talk About Cosby: W. Kamau Bell’s four-part docuseries digs into the comedic genius and criminal villainy of Bill Cosby and the toxic tangling of the two.
  • Sharp Stick: The latest comedy from Lena Dunham is about a young woman determined to lose her virginity by starting an affair with her older, married employer.
  • Call Jane: Phyllis Nagy’s drama stars Elizabeth Banks as a late-Sixties Chicago housewife who inadvertently becomes part of an underground abortion operation run by activist Sigourney Weaver.
  • 892: A true-life hostage drama starring John Boyega as an Iraq War veteran who threatens to set off a bomb in a bank if his demands against the VA are not met.

Screening Room: ‘She Dies Tomorrow’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

My review of the new atmospheric viral paranoia thriller She Dies Tomorrow ran at PopMatters:

It is possible that ten years from now, when COVID-19 cases have hopefully gone the way of the bubonic plague, people will say that films like Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow are emblematic of a certain strain of late-stage Trump Pandemic-era anxiety…

You can see the movie on VOD now. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘How to Build a Girl’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Film - NewLeave a comment

Caitlin Moran’s popular YA novel How to Build a Girl was about a geeky girl from the Midlands who takes a sharp left-turn into hipsterdom when she reinvents herself as a snarky music journalist in the 1990s. (You know, when Happy Mondays were a thing.)

The movie adaptation of How to Build a Girl, starring Booksmart‘s irrepressible Beanie Feldstein, opens this week. My review is at The Playlist:

At first, the gig is all champagne and caviar, despite the eye-rolling putdowns delivered by her editors, a posh band of professional haters who have a hard time taking a girl from the Midlands seriously. After giving herself a makeover (a sequence unimaginatively set to Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl”), Johanna charges into nightclubs sporting fire-engine-red hair, a top hat, and the nom de plume Dolly Wilde, wielding her pen and notebook with more moxie than Lester Bangs…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Still a Big World Out There

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

I reviewed two great new documentaries for Eyes Wide Open:

Good documentaries tell you a story; the great ones open your eyes. But even the most mediocre nonfiction movies serve a purpose: They provide a snapshot in time for what people in a particular place were doing, thinking, and planning. Or, to use another metaphor, they open a window into lives different than our own…

Screening Room: ‘First Reformed’

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Ethan Hawke in ‘First Reformed’ (A24)

In Paul Schrader’s latest, First Reformed, a minister finds more to believe in an eco-activist’s radicalism than his own pulpit.

My review is at PopMatters:

Ethan Hawke at his most pained plays the Reverend Toller. Minister for a tiny museum of a church in upstate New York that’s about to celebrate its 250th anniversary, he’s at the tail-end of a years-long spiritual crisis. By the time the movie catches up to this nearly cadaverous penitent, Toller has already lost his son to the Iraq War, his wife to divorce not long after that. He writes in a journal each night, bottle of whiskey at his side…

Screening Room: ’11/8/16′

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

Remember Election Day last year? Feel like living through it all again? If you have the constitution for it, check out the new documentary 11/8/16, opening this week in limited release.

My review is at Film Journal International:

The disputatious and fractured omnibus documentary 11/8/16 nibbles at too many stories in too short a time to make the one great American tale it seems to be aiming for. There are glimmers of larger import here, various signifiers of this or that impulse from a certain slice of the electorate. But much like the news media in its breathless coverage of the 2016 presidential election, its onslaught of 16 points of view creates more of a cacophony than anything else…

Here’s the trailer: