Happiness
The strand of American independent cinema known as "underground film" often used explicit or provocative sexual material to push censorship boundaries in the 1960s. Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, for instance, became highly publicized censorship cases. Independent features, such as Shirley Clarke’s The Connection, also provoked court battles for other reasons. This […]
Gomorrah
Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (2008) has been available on VOD through IFC, but I had a chance to catch the film on the big screen at the Orpheum Theatre last weekend. Even if you’re not a fan of gangster films, you owe it to yourself to see this revisionist epic. Set largely in and around a […]
Silent Light
Seeing Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light (Stellet Licht) for a second time at the Wisconsin Film Festival yesterday morning only confirmed that it’s a truly great film. What surprised me, however, was how much more emotional this formal and austere film seemed on a second viewing. Reygadas somehow manages to imbue each scene with a sense […]
Tokyo Sonata
The Wisconsin Film Festival always has had a stellar lineup of outstanding films from around the world. This year is no exception. Two of the films from the 2008 festival – José Luis GuerÃn’s In the City of Sylvia and Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life – were among my favorites of last year. Carlos Reygadas’s austere […]
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 […]