The New Year Parade
This year’s Wisconsin Film Festival features its strongest-ever lineup of independent narrative features. The most notable ones include Ronnie Bronstein’s late-addition Frownland (the director will be here in person), Antonio Campos’s Afterschool – both of which I’ve written about previously and made my list of best indie films of 2008 – Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo, Azazel […]
Best Independent Films of 2008
A colleague recently suggested that last year hadn’t been a very good year for independent films, but I beg to disagree – 2008 was a great year for independent films. The problem is that if you live outside one of the major urban centers, most likely, you haven’t seen the best of them. Chris Smith’s […]
Ballast
Lance Hammer’s first feature Ballast (2008), set in the Mississippi Delta, generated a great deal of critical buzz when it screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and Hammer wound up winning the Best Director award. Like the very best and most distinctive independent films being made today, Ballast represents a hard-sell in a glutted […]
The Pool
Maybe because two of Chris Smith’s earlier films have had the word "American" in their titles – American Job (1996) and American Movie (1999) – there seems to be something incongruous about the fact that his latest film, The Pool (2007), is an American independent film that takes place in Goa, India. If regionalism has been […]