WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY (Roku – November 4):  A comic book fantasia of a celebrity “biography,” Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (co-written with Yankovic himself, who’s also one of the producers), takes some fragments about the parody musician’s life and work, and transforms them into a nonstop array of gags that […]

  THE INSPECTION (A24 – November 14):  Back in 1983, Robert Altman directed the film version of David Rabe’s play Streamers, about a Vietnam-era boot camp that turned even more violent and vicious with the catalyst of one recruit’s closeted homosexuality.  Elegance Bratton’s The Inspection tells a similar story for the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” […]

  EMILY THE CRIMINAL (no distrib):  John Patton Ford’s feature debut is a lean, gritty, accomplished thriller with a smashing star performance from Aubrey Plaza.  Plaza (who also produced) plays the titular Emily, an aspiring artist whose career got derailed due to a violent incident in college, giving her a record that’s preventing her from […]

  GOD’S COUNTRY (no distrib):  A deliberative character study that’s also a thriller of sorts, anchored by one of the best performances of Thandiwe Newton’s career.  When two hunters (Joris Jarsky and Yellowstone‘s Jefferson White) park their pick-up on college professor Sandra Guidry’s (Newton) land for their convenience, they’re messing with the wrong person.  Sandra’s […]

  SHARP STICK (no distrib):  Lena Dunham is certainly no stranger to the concept of art as provocation, but it’s difficult to understand what Sharp Stick, her first feature film in a dozen years, and her first solo venture since Girls, is even seeking to provoke.  It centers on Sara Jo (Kristine Froseth), a bubbly […]

  892 (no distrib):  John Boyega’s turbo-charged performance fuels this true story.  In 2017, when Brian Brown-Easley (Boyega) entered a Wells Fargo branch in a suburb of Atlanta and informed the teller that his backpack contained a bomb, he wasn’t trying to hold up the bank.  Rather, it was his desperate attempt to get enough […]

  MY OLD SCHOOL (no distrib):  Although the story is apparently well-known in the UK, here the twisty tale that Jono McLeod unfurls in his documentary would constitute a spoiler, so we’ll leave things vague here.  This much is fair:  in the early 1990s, a 16-year old student named Brandon Lee arrived at a Glasgow […]

  PALM TREES AND POWER LINES (no distrib):  Jamie Dack’s first feature film (from a script written with Audrey Findlay) means to unsettle, and it does.  17-year old Lea (Lily McInerny) is stuck in a dead-end Southern California beach town at the end of summer with a distracted single mom (Gretchen Mol) and friends whose […]