“How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?” — Bob Dylan For many, playing a game of soccer on a Sunday afternoon is a pleasant way to spend time with friends before the next work week begins. For a group of undocumented workers living in the Sunset Park neighborhood…
The Rider is an unflinching tribute (and one that made me flinch) to those who fully inhabit the present and “live their lives 8 seconds at a time.” It’s this short term thinking that renders it impossible for rider Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) to dream of a life beyond those series of seconds at the…
I enjoyed writer/director Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits well enough at first. Yet as my chronological distance from the project increases, so too do my annoyances with its gender power dynamics. The film follows six very specific Brooklynites whose lives are vaguely intertwined and then thrown into further disarray when a young, beautiful Australian disrupts…
Like a lonely, mysterious gunslinger from the Old West, a tall, slender rugged-looking man with a thick mustache comes to a small Bulgarian village near the Grecian border as part of a German work crew in Valeska Grisebach’s (“Longing”) Western. The man is Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), in Bulgaria to work on a hydroelectric power station…
From Andrew Wiest, director of the Christian fable “The Adventures of Chris Fable” (no, really), a bargain bin supermarket exclusive from 2010, comes The Forlorned, an inept, micro-budget horror movie. It aims low and delivers; and although it fundamentally fails as a horror movie — or indeed any kind of a movie seeking to tell…
Political conspiracies are a serious matter, undoubtedly deserving of the attention they garner. That very attention, however, must then lead us somewhere — it must, in some way, expose the corruption of the political system in question. Without this exposure, our attention is left directionless; instead of being enlightened, we remain confused. Taking its inspiration…
The nervous hell of a new job interview is satirized, then sentimentalized, then psychologized in writer/director Anthony Garland’s tonally scattered short Ophelia. The titular character (played with fair restraint by Ali Mueller, “Category 5”) arrives on time in fancy business attire and has only a moment to size up her competition before being called in…
