HORSE GIRL (Netflix – February 7):  Every one of the four films Jeff Baena has directed had its premiere at Sundance, with Horse Girl following Life After Beth, Joshy and The Little Hours.  It’s an impressive accomplishment for a filmmaker who hasn’t made a particular commercial or critical breakout hit.  Horse Girl may have […]

  NANNY (no distrib):  Think Netflix’s Maid, but as a (sort of) horror movie.  Aisha (Anna Diop) is an undocumented Senegalese immigrant in New York who works as a nanny for the daughter of a well-off couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector), in order to earn money she can send to her young […]

  THE PERSIAN VERSION (Sony Classics):  Maryam Keshavarz’s dramedy won the Sundance Audience Award in the US Dramatic Competition, and it’s a smart mixture of broad comedy and family drama.  The comedy is mostly set in the present day, where aspiring filmmaker Leila (Layla Mohammadi), tries to keep her distance from her mother Shireen (Niousha […]

  THE ASSESSMENT (no distrib);  It seems initially as though Fleur Fortune’s feature directing debut The Assessment will be easy to peg.  The script, by John Donnelly and the duo credited as “Mrs and Mr Thomas”, appears to fall neatly into the subcategory of sci-fi as social commentary a la The Handmaid’s Tale.  In a […]

> At 7AM today (East Coast time), the Toronto International Film Festival opened its boxoffice for single ticket sales, package orders having been filled a couple of days ago.  As usual, the result was chaos:  if you were lucky enough to get onto the screen where selections could be made, hitting “Send” froze that page; […]

> SHOWBUZZDAILY is only 2 weeks away from traveling to Park City, Utah for the 2012 Sundance Filim Festival, so the time seems right for a rant about the nightmare that is obtaining tickets for Sundance screenings.  Every festival has its quirks, and all cater especially to wealthy contributors who can afford to pay thousands […]

  ANNA KARENINA – Watch It At Home – Beautiful But Overconceptualized Version of the Tolstoy Classic Joe Wright was introduced to the world with his film of Pride and Prejudice, and it seems like he’s been trying to escape the pigeonhole of staid Literary Classics director ever since. His Atonement, while based on another celebrated novel, […]

  VERY GOOD GIRLS is set in contemporary Brooklyn, but it’s shot (by Bobby Bukowski) with the kind of gauzy glow that suggests a European perfume commercial.  It’s lovely to look at, but also mystifying and ultimately annoying, and that describes the movie too. Naomi Foner, who wrote and directed the film, makes her directing debut […]