Month: January 2016

Sometimes when watching a movie, you just want to have fun.  You don’t always need heavy drama or a great twist, you just want to laugh and have an enjoyable experience.  The Fundamentals of Caring is one of the most enjoyable screenings I have had at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.  It is a sweet, funny, quotable road movie with a ton of heart. Paul Rudd stars as Ben, a man dealing with incredible loss…

Kevin Smith has done it again.  Yoga Hosers is the second film in his True North Trilogy, following 2014’s unsettling yet brilliant Tusk, and it is a wildly inventive, insane, hilarious Canadian horror comedy that only Smith could come up with. Yoga Hosers tells the story of Colleen Collette and Colleen McKenzie (Lily-Rose Melody Depp and Harley Quinn Smith), two social-media obsessed Sophomores who work at a convenient store.  One night, the Colleen’s get invited to…

I liked The Free World as two separate films.  The first half of the movie is a love mystery where we find Bo (Boyd Holbrook), a recently released convict, getting involved with Doris (Kate Moss), a married woman with an abusive husband.  How those two meet and what transpires between them is interesting to watch.  Bo was known as an extremely violent inmate while in prison, so much so that he even put a cop into…

Let me give you a little insight into my festival life.  When I am at the Sundance Film Festival, sleep is a very rare, but treasured thing.  I think throughout the festival, I average four hours of sleep a night.  I volunteer until around 2:00am every night and occasionally party until the sun rises.  Movies here start screening as early as 8:30am, which means for me to get to a screening and get a ticket,…

In July of 1974, Florida news reporter Christine Chubbuck went live on the air and shot herself, marking the first suicide ever recorded on television.  Christine chronicles Chubbuck’s life the weeks leading up to her tragic end. Rebecca Hall plays Christine and she is unbelievable.  Hall gets lost in the role and gives the best performance of her career.  She becomes Christine by changing her voice and giving Christine mannerisms, like walking with her head down…

Nate Parker has been one of my favorite actors for a few years now.  I first saw him in 2012’s Red Hook Summer and he immediately stood out to me.  He really impressed me later that year in Arbitrage, where he gave the best performance in that entire film and that includes a never better Richard Gere.  And then, in 2013’s Beyond the Lights, Parker, much like the movie, was excellent but overlooked.  Parker is…

Michael Jackson, in my opinion, is the greatest showman ever to grace a stage.  He could sing like no one before or after him, his dance moves were effortlessly complex, and he knew how to put on a show.  In director Spike Lee’s documentary Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall, we get to see how brilliant Jackson was and a track by track look at one of his best albums. This isn’t…

In 2013, I was exposed to one of the most messed up, traumatizing movies I have ever seen.  The Richard Bates Jr. directed Excision is a vile and horrifying movie that takes suburban America ideals and flips them on their head.  This movie shocked me at the time and still shocks me today, especially the ending, which disturbed me for long after the screening. Well Bates Jr. is back with Trash Fire, another look at…

Sleight sounded like a coming of age urban tale that I’ve seen before.  Following a young street magician Bo (Jacob Latimore) who takes care of his sister after his mother dies.  In order to make enough money for him and his sister to survive, Bo does magic in the day and sells drugs at night for Angelo (Dule Hill).  But when he gets into trouble with Angelo, his life is thrown into turmoil and he…

The scariest movie of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival is not part of the midnight category.  Goat is a chilling and horrifying look at fraternity initiation at American colleges.  It is a shocking look  at the mindset of fraternities and what the lengths they go through for “brotherhood”. After a horrifying assault, 19 year old Brad (Ben Schetzer) enrolls in the same college as his brother Brett (Nick Jonas) and pledges the same fraternity. What…