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What if Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven, Knight of Cups) took on Friday the 13th? That conceit is the backbone of Chris Nash’s In A Violent Nature, which on paper comes across as a spiritual sequel to that one Saturday Night Live sketch of Wes Anderson making a home invasion horror movie. Pairing wistfully beautiful shots of the Canadian wilderness with over-the-top violence and gore, In A Violent Nature becomes just a bit more than Mad Libs creation.
Read MoreBaby Blood transgressively counters the ever so nauseating idealized, kitsch aesthetic of pregnancy that we are accustomed to. The kitsch aesthetic of pregnancy arises out of societal expectations of what a mother should be, transforming what is a neutral occurrence into a moral imperative. The horror aesthetic in Baby Blood turns these expectations on their head, creating a narrative that encourages the pregnant character to refuse all repressive expectations of motherhood and pregnancy she encounters.
Read MoreTime Passages is a deftly woven scrapbook and an act of mourning.
Read MoreEmily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat’s Sugarcane, which had its Texas premiere at the Austin Film Society’s Doc Days festival, takes a deeply personal approach to what could be a sensationalistic true-crime story.
Read MoreThe performances in The Fall Guy are great, but the real star of the show are the stunts.
Read MoreFollowing the breakout success of his Oscar-winning Drive My Car, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi gained a larger audience: a Western one that was primed to see his vision expand, perhaps beyond the borders of his native Japan. But his followup, Evil Does Not Exist, instead remains within his present field of vision and becomes his most contained film to date.
Read MoreLynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar is only the director’s second feature film, but crystallizes a style that she’s honed over two decades.
Read MoreSeeking Mavis Beacon is inventive and powerful, playful and thoughtful in turn.
Read MoreUnion, which had its Texas premiere at the Austin Film Society’s Doc Days festival on May Day, takes us back to one of the first beacons of hope in the current unionizing moment.
Read MoreTold exclusively through iPhone footage, laptop cameras, and text exchanges, Patricia Franquesa’s My Sextortion Diary plays out more like a thriller more akin to films like Missing, Searching, and UnFriended than the traditional talking head documentary.
Read MoreThe first feature-length film from Rocket Jump (Freddie Wong and Matthew Arnold), We’re All Gonna Die has some rough edges but is at its greatest when it finds the balance between emotional and comedic.
Read MoreSing Sing is a magician’s best trick from a filmmaker still early in his career.
Read MoreIn La Chimera, Rohrwacher delicately crafts a moving romantic tale of magical realism, entwining the immortal and mortal spheres, and those who find themselves stuck on either side.
Read MoreIt is all the more surprising then, when Sam and Mark stumble upon an empty amphitheater in Los Santos. Almost certainly, the game designers were thinking of a concert space in this moment of world building, but Sam and Mark immediately see it for its theatrical potential. They hop their Ed Hardy-clothed avatars upon the stage and begin reciting Shakespeare. It doesn’t take long for one of them to suggest the loftiest of side missions: staging a production of Hamlet within the world of Grand Theft Auto.
Read MoreSecret Mall Apartment could easily have been a straightforward hagiography of a generous, interesting artist who also lived in the walls of a mall, but director Jeremy Workman never lets the catchy hook get in the way of the larger story.
Read MoreMade by anarchist gay author James Robert Baker (as James Dillinger) for less than $2,000 as part of the EZTV collective—a digital art and video collective based in Los Angeles since 1983—Blonde Death follows innocent Mississippi teen Tammy Lynn Beaudorf on a journey of bisexual corruption and violent rampage.
Read MoreCivil War proves that Alex Garland still has some gas in the tank, exploring the morality of the media’s relationship with war while still holding the press in deep reverence.
Read MoreBloodSisters is even more appreciable as a portrait of queer identity, diving deep into the intricacies of solidarity and sexual pleasure simply by allowing its subjects to speak for themselves.
Read MoreYou can feel the passion oozing off of Monkey Man. Patel went away to iron out every detail, to the point where it feels like you can see the movie playing in his head. The stylish action sequences are bolstered by a killer score from Jed Kurzel that thumps along to each and every hit.
Read MoreHead takes the silliness of The Monkees sitcom and dials it up to surrealist heights.
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