I Carry it well

The Devil’s Tongue is a low-budget work that occasionally gets lost in its own lofty ambitions. There’s a crude, unsettling terror in the grainy VHS-style film-within-a-film sequences that recall the V/H/S series. In the meta-narrative, director Julian Gowdy plays a director named Julian who is struggling to complete his film but is torn between his idealistic visions and the practicality of…

While Stay Awake treads familiar territory, writer and director Jamie Sisley brings a gentle authenticity that keeps his story of opioid addiction from descending into melodrama or poverty porn. It’s painful without searing and hopeful without sentimentality. Based on his own experiences, Stay Awake centers on teenage brothers Ethan and Derek (Wyatt Oleff and Fin Argus) who are parentified as…

Boonie Bears: Back to Earth is a Chinese animated children’s film based on the popular television series. Joseph S Lambert gives a delightfully goofy vocal performance as Bramble, a bumbling bear with a ravenous appetite for snacks and a secret wish to become a superhero.  Bramble discovers an alien artifact that gives him special powers. The owner, a slinky blue cat with six ears named Avi,…

The hallucinatory opening of Wild Fire immediately captivates the viewer. Director and writer Jennifer Cooney conveys middle-aged Elliana’s overwhelming grief for her husband through the canted images of her disorderly room. The widow sits alone in her large, empty, and white modernist home. This is the setting of her 50th birthday party, a crowded, raucous celebration that turns into an intimate…

Indie Rooftop is a vibrant celebration of music. In this seven-episode series, director Jasmine Allen showcases various musicians against Chicago’s dazzling architecture and cotton-candy-colored sky. The singers perform multiple songs and share details about their life, musical inspirations, and how they balance their artistic craft with business. Allen presents a diverse collage of independent…

Jack is an eccentric teen sex comedy that relies on a crude gag: the story is told from the perspective of the main character’s penis. Charlie’s appendage named Jack narrates the trials and tribulations of being a teenage boy. Charlie, played by Luke Rollason, is a rubbery-faced, bug-eyed version of Robert Pattinson who still lives at home with his parents in the suburbs of London.  Charlie has…

BRTLI Still Burt Reynolds: The Last Interview sheds new light on the famous actor Burt Reynolds, but the way the documentary came together was happenstance. Director Rick Pamplin originally interviewed Burt Reynolds for another documentary focused on independent film financing called Movie Money CONFIDENTIAL. Once it turned out that the footage was Burt Reynolds’ last on-camera interview,…

Rickshaw Girl echoes Mulan as the story of a young girl who, because of her patriarchal culture’s traditions, must disguise herself as a boy to support her family after her father falls ill. Naima becomes a rickshaw driver in the chaotic city of Dhaka. Director Amitabh Reza Chowdhury frames the city with an exciting, pulsating energy pace, making the environment an important part of the film. The…

There is a trend in contemporary films, such as Triangle of Sadness and The Menu, to critique the rich and their capitalistic greed. In the short film Day9 written by Damion Stephens and directed by Dastan Khalili, Charles Maze plays an aging millionaire named J.D. Dorboth who hires four people (played by Will Lupardus, Eric McIntire, Kelcey Watson, and Johanna Watts in taut performances) to dig…

Writer-director Kyle Schadt‘s neo-noir Toxic Impulses opens with a bang. The frenzied close-ups of a screaming man threatening to shoot his captive immediately seize the audience and never lets go. Toxic Impulses is a high-energy film that centers on ex-police officer Mosley (Benedikt Sebastian) who has become a lonely couch potato. His overprotective neighbor Liz (Helene Udy) is his only…

An American Ballet Story

An American Ballet Story raises important questions about the relationship between money and art. It asks audiences to consider the impact wealthy patrons have on artistic institutions. The engaging documentary follows the Harkness Ballet, a short-lived but subversive New York ballet school founded in 1964. Filmmaker Leslie Streit elegantly interweaves lengthy, eye-opening interviews with former…

From the title, Arranged Marriage sounds as if it will be a feel-good romantic comedy, but Anoop Rangi’s incisive film is the complete opposite. After the opening of Arranged Marriage ends in an unexpected bloodbath, it becomes clear that Rangi has a bold vision and something important to say. His strange horror comedy satirizes patriarchal and cultural South Asian traditions that prevent a woman…

You Resemble Me from the award-winning journalist Dina Amer is split into two disparate halves: a meditative childhood drama and a gritty documentary-esque investigation of ISIS indoctrination. Written by Amer and the film’s cinematographer, Omar Mullick, the potent film draws from the life of suicide bomber Hasna Aït Boulahcen, killed in the aftermath of Paris’ 2015 Bataclan attacks. Using hours…

I’ll Find You

A tale of star-crossed lovers across war-torn countries, I’ll Find You is a throwback to the romantic epics that once dominated the box office such as Titanic or The English Patient. Martha Coolidge’s flagrantly old-fashioned romance opens in a Polish music school where the talented violinists Rachel Rubin and Robert Pulaski turn from rivals to lovers as they grow up together. When they are…

At the heart of Seth McTigue’s (writer/director/producer/star) taut thriller Take the Night is strife between two brothers. They have been torn apart by the overpowering presence of their (recently deceased) father who had a clear favorite son. The young and playful Robert Chang (Sam Song Li) surpassed his resentful and irresponsible brother William (Roy Huang) for a pivotal role in their…

Forbearance is a typical weepie plot — a couple grappling with a cancer diagnosis — with a different spin on it because the main couple is on the verge of divorce. How can they reconcile the news of this sickness and the marital tension they are experiencing? These two devastating crises test the lead characters, Josh and Callie Sunbury, as they must confront painful truths. All of this makes for…

Love in Kilnerry

Love in Kilnerry has all the elements of classic British comedies that juxtapose quaint conservative settings with something risque (The Full Monty, Kinky Boots, Calendar Girls, etc.). The film trades an England locale for a sleepy New England town that looks like it belongs in a snow globe, populated with close-knit residents who live quiet and repressed lives. The gorgeous landscape shots are…