In a generally depressed indie film market, Netflix shelled out a reported $20M at Sundance for Chloe Domont’s feature writing/directing debut FAIR PLAY.  The splurge made sense:  Fair Play has that combination of strong storytelling and hot-button ideas on its mind that should allow it to temporarily take over the internet when it launches […]

  OMAHA (no distrib):  A tiny tragedy that doesn’t reveal the true depths of its sadness until the very end.  One morning, a widowed father (John Magaro) hurries his children, 9-year old Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and 6-year old Charlie (Wyatt Solis), out of their house as it’s being foreclosed, and tells them to pack […]

> Sundance has a thriving Park City At Midnight program that features plenty of high-octane horror movies, but the most unnerving and disturbing film of this year’s festival may have been Craig Zobel’s COMPLIANCE, a low-key drama based (apparently rather closely) on a true story without any hacked-off limbs or hint of the supernatural. In […]

  It just wouldn’t be a film festival without something from Michael Winterbottom.  Winterbottom isn’t at the very top of the film director pantheon, but he’s respected enough that his projects have been in near-constant festival demand for most of his two decade-long career, and one way or another they tend to be included in […]

  SIDNEY HALL (no distrib):  Shawn Christensen’s literary drama (written with Jason Dolan) is initially engaging as a modern-day sort of J.D. Salinger story, told simultaneously across three time periods, with Sidney Hall (Logan Lerman throughout) presented as an arrogant but troubled teen, an acclaimed novelist, and a middle-aged man who’s run away from the […]

  COME SUNDAY (Netflix):  American films that feature religious figures tend to come in two varieties:  the cloying “faith-based” dramas that play quite literally to the choir, and the “edgy” films in which the supposedly pious are revealed to be hypocritical and often evil frauds.  Joshua Marston’s Come Sunday is a rarity, a film that […]

  PASSING:  The actress Rebecca Hall has taken a big swing in her writing/directing debut.  Her film Passing, based on the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, embraces ambitious, difficult themes with sensitivity and expertise.  The story concerns Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), one-time teen friends who run into each other after several years […]

  THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES (Focus/Universal – March 15):  The title of Kobi Libii’s first feature refers to the unfortunately well-established movie trope where a noble Black character exists only as a catalyst to make the white protagonist a better person.  (Think of everything from Driving Miss Daisy to The Green Mile, The Legend of Bagger Vance to Green […]