Butter on the Latch
Josephine Decker’s evocative feature Butter on the Latch (2013) manages to create and sustain a palpable sense of anxiety, dread, and foreboding throughout its riveting 72 minutes. Using a five-page treatment rather than a traditional script and employing improvised dialogue from its three main characters, Decker’s film probes the psyche of a young woman who […]
Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
Sam Fleischner’s Stand Clear of the Closing Doors (2014) tells the story of a thirteen-year-old autistic boy who gets lost in the New York subways in the period leading up to Hurricane Sandy. Although the film employs a dramatic framework – a family’s search for a lost child with a disability – the film is […]
See You Next Tuesday
In Richard Linklater’s recent runaway indie hit, Boyhood (2014), it is the parents who make a mess of their lives while the two children suffer quietly but somehow grow wiser from the experience. In his debut feature, See You Next Tuesday (2013), Drew Tobia presents a much different spin on the dynamics of a dysfunctional […]
Night Moves
After a slow start to her career, Kelly Reichardt has gradually emerged as one of the very best American filmmakers. Her trajectory has been a consistent upward slope since Old Joy (2006) brought her back into the limelight twelve years after her debut feature River of Grass (1994). None of her films has been a […]
Memphis
Tim Sutton’s sophomore feature, Memphis (2014), is neither a character study nor a city portrait. Although there’s a sliver of narrative, Memphis is more akin to a haunting visual poem – a kind of ghost story, in which the ghosts never quite become fully manifest. Yet we feel their traces in virtually every shot of […]
Something, Anything
Paul Harrill’s debut feature, Something, Anything (2014), seems like an unlikely independent film. For one thing, it is shot in a fairly conventional style. In addition, it doesn’t deal with either hip or edgy subject matter. Instead, the film is set in the American South – Knoxville, Tennessee, to be exact – and concerns a […]
It Felt Like Love
Like Daniel Patrick Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces (2014), Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love (2014) feels like a memory piece. Fourteen-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti) lives with her dad (Kevin Anthony Ryan) in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, but hangs out at Rockaway Beach over the course of a summer. In the opening shot, her […]
Hide Your Smiling Faces
The specter of death casts a mysterious spell over Daniel Patrick Carbone’s mesmerizing debut feature, Hide Your Smiling Faces (2014). Set in rural northwestern New Jersey, the film deals with young kids trying to come to terms with the kinds of heavy issues for which they lack either the experience or vocabulary. In its emphasis […]