Indie Reviews
RIFF RAFF Review: Spewing Hostility and Bloody Comedy
Dito Montiel's film stars Jennifer Coolidge, Ed Harris, Gabrielle Union, Lewis Pullman, Miles J. Harvey, Emanuela Postacchini, Michael Angelo Corvino, with Pete Davidson, and Bill Murray.
RATS! Review: Uproariously Funny Cringe Comedy
Raphael (Luke Wilcox) is a a typical 2007 teenage dirtbag who gets wrangles into working as an informant for a local lunatic cop in directors Carl Fry and Maxwell Nalevansky’s uproariously funny cringe comedy, Rats! When Rafi is picked up for...
THE BUILDOUT Review: Friendship, Grief and Self-Narratives Collide
Writer/director Zeshaan Younus' feature debut flirts with genre in the same way Tarkovsky and Malick flirt with genre. The film follows two friends as they venture into the mysterious remote area in a vast Southern California desert that a religious...
CLEANER Review: DIE HARD Meets VERTICAL LIMIT. It's Not a Match Made in Heaven.
This is a film about a bad day – you know, the kind you cannot help but think you should’ve just stayed at home. That’s exactly the case for Joey Locke (Daisy Ridley), who tries to ignore her alarm at...
Berlinale 2025 Review: ISLANDS, Tennis Pro Finds Himself a Murder Suspect
Dawn in a desert. A body in the sand. Is it a corpse? No, it's Tom, a tennis bum recovering from another night of debauchery. The Canary Islands resort where he gives lessons gleams in the distance. The clever opening...
Sundance 2025 Review: PREDATORS Unveils a Dark Legacy
David Osit's documentary revisits 'To Catch a Predator,' a popular television show with a controversial legacy.
SLY LIVES! (AKA THE BURDEN OF BLACK GENIUS) Review: Sly Stone Doc Enlightens, Entertains
Win on Academy Award on your first try and chances are, you’d be tempted to quit while you were ahead. For Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, however, winning a Best Documentary Oscar for Summer of Soul four years ago made a...
Sundance 2025 Review: RAINS OVER BABEL, Singularly Enthralling Retro-Futuristic Queer Fantasy
In the retro-futuristic, pop-punk imagination of Spanish Columbian writer-director Gala del Sol (Natalia Hermida) and her unmissable, queer-coded feature-length debut, Rains Over Babel (Llueve Sobre Babel), Cali, Colombia exists in a sublime liminal space, at the crossroads between the real...
Sundance 2025 Review: THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR Looks at Stand Your Ground Laws
Elections have consequences, as pundits keep reminding us. One of those is Florida's "stand your ground" legislation, which allows the use of deadly force if people feel they are in imminent danger. Composed almost entirely of bodycam and surveillance video,...
Sundance 2025 Review: OH, HI!, Anti-Rom-Com Promises Much, Delivers Less
The title of writer-director Sophie Brooks’s feature-length debut, Oh, Hi!, an anti-rom-com, appears almost immediately in an exchange between longtime best friends, Iris (Molly Gordon) and Max (Geraldine Viswanathan). Usually saved for a moment combining surprise and levity, here...
Sundance 2025 Review: DIDN'T DIE, Post-Apocalyptic Zom-Com, Short on Zombies, Short on Comedy
In co-writer/director Meera Menon’s (Equity, Farah Goes Bang) post-apocalyptic zombie tale, Didn’t Die, the zombie-filled life is barely worth living. As always, staying alive means not just dodging the unwashed walking dead and their insatiable appetite for tender human...
Sundance 2025 Review: BUNNYLOVR, Gen Z Cam-Girl Faces Existential Crisis
Pace everyone’s favorite Greek philosopher, Socrates, if the unexamined life isn’t worth living, then the unexamined cam life — as in cam-girl life — is probably a close second or even a distant third. That lack of self-exploration, of...
THE DEAD THING Review: Sexy, Sad, Spooky, Unnerving
Blu Hunt and Ben Smith-Petersen star in Elric Kane's erotic thriller, making its streaming debut on Shudder.
Sundance 2025 Review: OBEX, Oddball Lo-Fi Sci-Fi/Fantasy Redefines Vibe Flick
Writer-director Albert Birney’s (Strawberry Mansion, Tux and Fanny, Sylvio) latest film, OBEX, an almost non-categorizable sci-fi/fantasy/comedy-drama, stands out as a vibe film through and through. If you’re on OBEX’s wavelength or frequency, i.e., attuned to its oddball charms, quirky humor,...
Sundance 2025 Review: REBUILDING, Loss, Grief, and Rediscovering Family
Despite the contrarian, anti-science protestations of some on the right, climate change is real. The effects thereof have been and will be felt in the years to come, including extreme weather events, such as the recent devastating wildfires that tore...
Sundance 2025 Review: LOVE, BROOKLYN, Performance-Led Romantic Triangle Engages, Enthralls, Entertains
A catch-all phrase popularized over a decade ago by Meta (formerly Facebook), “It’s complicated,” meant to describe romantic relationships that didn’t fall into one particular category or another, finds its clearest, nearest, and obviously it’s most recent application in director...
Sundance 2025 Review: THE THINGS YOU KILL, A Professor, the Patriarchy, and a Psychological Breakdown
Ali (Ekin Koç), the professor-protagonist in Iranian-born, Canada-residing writer-director Alireza Khatami’s (Terrestrial Verses, Oblivion Verses) perception- and consciousness-bending film, The Things You Kill, suffers from a debilitating existential/spiritual crisis. After returning to Turkey after more than a decade in...
Sundance 2025 Review: OMAHA, Poignant Character- and Performance-Driven Family Drama
For the disheveled, unnamed father (John Magaro, September 5, Past Lives, First Cow) in first-time feature-length director Cole Webley and writer Robert Machoian’s (The Killing of Two Lovers) poignant family drama, Omaha, a new dawn brings a new, ominous day....
Sundance 2025 Review: SPEAK, Heartfelt, Hopeful, Uplifting Doc
Every year, approximately 6,700 high-school students from 1,500 schools around the country participate in the National Speech and Debate Tournament (NSDT) in 42 distinct categories. Chief among them is the Original Oratory category, the subject of the captivating documentary...
Sundance 2025 Review: SUNFISH (& OTHER STORIES ON GREEN LAKE), Underachieving Lake Michigan Drama
Quartet of stories unfolding during a summer on Lake Michigan makes for an underachieving drama.
