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Laugh-a-minute is a dreadful cliché, but Jonathan Lisecki’s Gayby made me laugh more than any other recent feature I can think of. 89 times? Quite possibly. Lisecki has a trick of presenting a gag, and then ratcheting it up until it becomes almost, but crucially not quite too camp. A terrific ensemble cast including Jenn […]

It’s tricky to discuss Amy Seimitz’s Sun Don’t Shine without spoilers: it both embraces and subverts traditions of the outlaw-lovers-on-the-run story in inventive and surprising ways. Leads Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley turn in nuanced and powerful performances. Seimitz’s blending of the internal mental landscapes of her characters and their objective environments is sly, […]

Gregory Crewdson has been my favorite photographer since I saw an exhibit of photographs from Twilight a decade ago. Perhaps my expectations of Ben Shapiro’s documentary were accordingly a bit too high. Certainly there’s much here that I loved: plenty of shots of Crewdson and his team of both dedicated professionals and random passers-by creating […]

This year’s animation package was marked by an extraordinary cohesiveness. Elements kept appearing in multiple films: whales, rabbits, briefcases, ominous low tones, visual and audio glitches. Oh, and darkness — this was an almost unrelievedly grim group of films.
Drew Christie’s “Song of the Spindle” is a short, pointed dialogue between a man and a sperm […]

The first program of documentary shorts are all character studies.
Helen Hood Scheer’s brief piece “Full-time Ministry” engaged me least. It depicts an art teacher who views his creation of ice sculptures as a form of worship. The black & white cinematography was pretty and the sculpture process was interesting, but not compelling.
Igor Drljaca’s “The Fuse: […]

In Nate Meyer’s anti-rom-com Emmie (Robin Tunney) and Jason (Adam Scott) are former high school sweethearts who never really got over each other. An encounter with a producer of a reality show about reuniting couples threatens to destabilize both of their current relationships. It’s a funny film, but also a bit subversive; it challenges the […]

Andrew Bird, if you’ve somehow missed hearing him, is a songwriter and singer who whistles, plays violin, guitar, and assorted other instruments. After early experiences with the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Andrew Bird’s Bowl of Fire, he reinvented himself as a solo performing musician, constructing elaborate stacks of sound with multiple delay pedals in the […]

I’d heard a few of (star/co-writer/co-director) Mike Birbiglia’s radio pieces for This American Life. They were hilarious, but since one of them centered around sleepwalking, I was a little worried that his movie might be disappointing because it would just rehash bits that I’d heard before. I should have had more faith.
Some elements of Birbiglia’s […]