REVIEW: Skin [2018]

Truly dedicated. How deep does hate go? Is it something with meaning that burns within every cell of your body or a desperate ploy to be included, feel superior, and feign importance? And how much of it is based in fear of the unknown, fear of being exposed, fear of being left behind? Or is it born out of a warped conflation of bigotry with culture and a projection of that which you are onto another in order to trick yourself into believing you aren’t the worthless one? These are…

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REVIEW: Period. End of Sentence. [2018]

This is something only God knows. The patriarchy in India is real. I went there a few years ago for a week with a friend of mine—a trip she organized and therefore had all our local reservations under her name. Regardless of whether they knew hers was a woman’s name or not, you can’t diminish the fact that almost every single person we met from tour guides to drivers to hotel employees made the assumption to come to me and call me by her name. It didn’t matter when we…

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REVIEW: Outlaws [2019]

You’re not the sort of man that walks away from anything. I told myself not to mention “Sons of Anarchy” in my review for Outlaws before sitting down to watch. My reasoning came out of a desire to judge Stephen McCallum‘s film on its own merits without trying to compare to something as zeitgeist-y as Kurt Sutter‘s tragic downfall of a “good” man forced to do bad things in order to achieve salvation. What’s ironic, though, is that you don’t have to get too far into Matt Nable‘s script to…

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SUNDANCE19 REVIEW: Esto no es Berlín [This Is Not Berlin] [2019]

You’re not your parents. It opens in slomotion with teenage bodies wrestling and punching inside chaotic dust swirls, one boy (Xabiani Ponce de León‘s Carlos) caught isolated in the middle of the frame. He’s not looking to hit any of the others. In fact he’s barely dodging out of the way when they come too close. It’s almost as though Carlos isn’t even there, his mind and body separated as two halves of the same conflicted whole. He knows he should be present with his friends to show his machismo…

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REVIEW: Then Came You [2019]

Friends don’t wait to be asked. The premise behind Then Came You is a tough sell. A hypochondriac attends a support group for people dying of cancer, befriends one said person, and helps her fulfill a demented bucket list while allowing her lack of boundaries to shove him into the arms of the woman he’s been too afraid to ask out. It’s a sort of rom-com spin on Fight Club‘s Jack and Marla getting off on others’ sorrow for the tween sect. There will be initial confusion at the film…

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SUNDANCE19 REVIEW: Dirty God [2019]

I thought it was love. How do you cope after an attack that leaves you visibly scarred for the rest of your life? This is the difficult question that director Sacha Polak looks to delve into with Dirty God. She (alongside cowriter Susie Farrell) crafts a scenario wherein the victim of such horror is a pretty young woman in South London who’s done nothing to deserve a fate she cannot outrun. She can’t even isolate herself with friends and family until ready for public re-assimilation since there’s a toddler involved…

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SUNDANCE19 REVIEW: The Last Tree [2019]

You want to be free? A child too young to understand the complexities of adulthood or desire to ask questions when the pain of their ramifications is still raw. A mother too proud to excuse the situation she created with the all too justifiable reasons able to imbue her with the strength necessary to offset a self-hatred fostering her projection of abusive anger. These two archetypes are intertwined within Shola Amoo‘s The Last Tree as though an ouroboros damning each other to the suffering their silence creates, the hindsight necessary…

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REVIEW: Black Sheep [2018]

That could have been one of you guys. You hear it often: “Just fit in.” Parents say it to their children while friends wield peer pressure for similar goals. But those sentiments move beyond words when it comes to a world so ingrained with racism that some are deluded enough to believe it doesn’t exist. Actions begin portraying this mantra as a byproduct of those who deem to call others inferior. Racism at its core is a philosophy wherein a people demean “others” via violent, political, and/or psychological actions simply…

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REVIEW: Fauve [2018]

First one to laugh is dead. Youthful thoughts of immortality have a way of getting children into trouble as well as teaching them lessons able to scar them for life. For Tyler (Félix Grenier) and Benjamin (Alexandre Perreault) it’s a seemingly innocent game of one-upmanship wherein an indefinable state of superiority earns each a point on their way to a winning total of six. So if one feigns an injury and the other is gullible (read compassionate) enough to help, the trickster adds to his total. If one is in…

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REVIEW: End Game [2018]

I feel better more than I feel bad. Two-time Oscar winner Rob Epstein and directing partner Jeffrey Friedman‘s short End Game bills itself as an intimate document of medical practitioners on the cutting edge of palliative care. Despite my believing the doctors onscreen are exactly that via trust, the film as presented doesn’t do this thesis justice. Rather than focus upon these men and women (the head of the Zen Hospice Project is allowed a brief interview to share his own brush with death) or the new wave treatments they’re…

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REVIEW: A Night at the Garden [2017]

You all have heard of me. On February 20, 1939, Fritz Kuhn—a naturalized American citizen of German heritage who would later be deported—held a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden under the auspices of “pro-America” sentiments for Gentile-Americans looking to escape the Jewish-led media and Jewish Moscow-directed domination of labor unions. Twenty thousand white men and women attended with arms raised in Adolf Hitler’s salute towards this German American Bund leader against a backdrop of George Washington next to swastikas, stars, and stripes. Children cheered as twenty-plus police officers accosted…

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