SNOWDEN (Open Road – Sept 16):  Oliver Stone’s return to politically-charged biography is subdued by the standards of his Nixon or W.  It’s a hagiography that follows the character arc of his Born of the Fourth of July (true believer finds his ideals crushed by political reality and transforms into a revolutionary agent against […]

  LOVE LIES BLEEDING (A24 – March 8):  Rose Glass has followed her brilliant horror movie Saint Maud by exchanging austerity for pulp.  Love Lies Bleeding (co-written with Weronika Tofilska) is engulfed by the spirit of overripeness, to the point where it embraces the garish and even tbe flat-out ludicrous.  The film doesn’t entirely work, […]

  LOVE ME (no distrib):  A truly existential romance.  Many years after the end of the human race, seemingly due to a combination of nuclear war and a new ice age, the two remaining artifacts with any ability to communicate are a smart ocean buoy and a satellite assigned to make contact with any life […]

  TOUCHY FEELY offers the gifted writer/director Lynn Shelton taking herself very, very seriously for the most part.  It turns out to be a less effective mode for her than those of her recent small-scale comedies Humpday and Your Sister’s Sister, which had marvelously well-judged tones.  (In her more mainstream work, she recently directed a […]

  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 […]

>SHOWBUZZDAILY will be at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and today TIFF announced the first group of movies being screened (there are plenty more to come over the next few weeks).  Here’s the full list, and some titles worthy of initial enthusiasm: GALAS ALBERT NOBBS:  Oscar Bait Alert, with Glenn Close as a […]

>Benh Zeitlin’s BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD is the kind of movie that makes people wince when they hear “independent film”. A tale, with magical realist overtones, set in the mostly African-American poverty of the Louisiana bayous, it’s narrated by its precocious child protagonist, known as Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis). Hushpuppy lives with her father Wink […]

  MONSTER (no distrib):  There’s less than meets the eye in Anthony Mandler’s Monster.  Based by Colen C. Wiley, Radha Black and Janece Shaffer on Walter Dean Myers’ novel, it seems like it’s going to be a saga of social injustice, dealing as it does with a young black New York honor student (Steve Harmon, […]