Without
Mark Jackson’s debut feature Without is the latest independent film to leave me excited by the work that young indie filmmakers are able to accomplish on very low budgets these days. Without tells the story of a 19-year-old young woman, Joslyn (Joslyn Jensen), who takes a temporary job as a live-in caretaker for an elderly […]
The Catechism Cataclysm
Todd Rohal’s richly inventive debut feature The Guatemalan Handshake (2006) was overlooked by the Sundance Film Festival at the time. In retrospect, this seems like an inexcusable oversight. Lacking a distribution deal after playing at Slamdance, Rohal took a single 35mm print on the road for two years. At the end of the journey, according […]
Terri
In Azazel Jacobs’s Momma's Man, there’s a scene toward the end where the mother of the protagonist, Mikey, gets him to sit on her lap and he looks like an overgrown baby, dwarfing her in size. The image serves as an apt metaphor. He’s not a momma’s boy, but a grown man – stuck in […]
Bellflower
In Bob Byington’s comedy Harmony and Me (2010), Harmony (Justin Rice) complains to an acupuncturist about his ex-girlfriend, “She broke my heart, but she’s still at it. She hasn’t finished the job. She’s breaking my heart.” He continues, “My heart is a snack. She’s like a bear with a fish in its paw.” Evan Glodell’s […]
Northeast
Gregory Kohn’s debut feature Northeast (2011) explores Brooklyn as a hub for immigration by young people who drift there from other parts of the country. There is a sense that most relationships are transitory. Because most young folks are recent transplants, everyday social interactions have an inherent awkwardness about them that stems from people not […]
Green
Sophia Takal’s Green delves into the lives of a young urban intellectual couple from New York. Sebastian (Lawrence Michael Levine) and his girlfriend, Genevieve (Kate Lynn Sheil), retreat into the country, presumably somewhere down south, for an extended period. Sebastian is a writer, whose project is improbably about sustainable farming, while Genevieve has tagged along […]
Martha Marcy May Marlene
The fragility of the human psyche seems especially pertinent at this particular moment, as evidenced by recent zeitgeist films such as Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter and Miranda July’s The Future. Sean Durkin suggests in an interview: “I guess I’m most afraid of conforming. Groups that conform in a blind way without understanding what’s happening to […]
The Future
The idea that things in the world are not quite right seems to be pervasive these days. Economic recessions and global crises will do that, but something much deeper appears to be at work. Jeff Nichols’s new film Take Shelter takes most people’s anxieties about health insurance, job loss, and climate change and turns them […]