Authors — Brandon Harris
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Strange Fruit: Jim Mickle on We Are What We Are
Jim Mickle, whose 2010 post-apocalyptic monster picture Stake Land launched him into the top tier of filmmakers making artfully rendered low-budget horror pictures, is back with a lyrically photographed, deeply felt family drama that also happens to be about people that eat other people. In his remake of Jorge Grau’s fabulous 2011 Mexican shocker/political satire/cannibalism-themed exercise in existential miserablism We Are What We Are, Mickle moves the action from a hideously corrupt Mexico City to the rainy forests of the rural Catskills. It opens with the sudden and distressing death of a mysteriously stricken woman, Emma Parker (Kassie DePaiva). Her family, […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 27, 2013 -
Critics Notebook: 2013 Urbanworld Film Festival
Among the winners at last weekend’s Urbanworld Film Festival, Yoruba Richen’s The New Black, which took home the competition prize for best documentary, was the standout of the festival’s largest slate in its 17-year history. A probing look in the mirror, it confronts homophobia in the black community and its most important institutions (the church) through the prism of Maryland’s landmark passage of gay marriage during last year’s election. Richen talks to black Marylanders from all walks of life and activists on both sides of the ballot issue, from Conservative clergyman to LGBT volunteers, coaxing incredible candor from most of […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 27, 2013 -
High in Bed-Stuy: Shaka King on Newlyweeds
The lovers at the center of Shaka King’s Newlyweeds are young Brooklynites whose romance more or less revolves around their love of marijuana. King’s often outrageously funny and wistfully bleak movie is a black stoner answer to James Ponsoldt’s Smashed; with genre-bending humor and style to burn, the movie asks delicate questions about the nature and sustainability of their relationship and fissures that may pull them apart. Amari Cheatom’s Lyle is a repo man for a rent-to-own electronics and appliance store while Trae Harris’ Nina is a museum tour guide. He’s a little angry and brighter than his job title would indicate […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 20, 2013 -
TIFF Critics Notebook: Artful Thrillers and Satisfying Biopics (Despite Themselves!) are All the Rage
The 38th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival is well past its halfway point. The big red-carpet premieres are fading into the distance. As all the hoopla dies down, little-known indies from all over the globe are jockeying for much desired attention amidst the fest’s sprawling slate. A festival for all tastes, Toronto’s lineup features a smorgasbord of world and North American premieres, many of them more or less shared with Venice and Telluride, on top of a smattering of films from earlier in the circuit calendar, across every conceivable discipline of modern filmmaking. Acquisitions so far have been […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 12, 2013 -
Blood on the Motorway: Alexandre Moors on Blue Caprice
The title character in Alexandre Moors’ frequently stunning feature debut Blue Caprice is a mid-sized sedan, the type used by police departments across America as the principle member of their fleet, its steely menace a constant presence as it winds its way through nondescript, wan-looking American streets. The sedan in question in Moors’ film was also a police car, at least before it was retrofitted for terror by John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who drilled a whole in the trunk from which the 17-year-old Malvo, at the ex-U.S. Army marksman Muhammad’s urging, shot 10 people to death during the […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 12, 2013 -
A Woman Under the Influence: Hannah Fidell on A Teacher
Hannah Fidell’s slow-burn character study A Teacher relies on a taut and unsettling performance by Lindsay Burdge in the title role to crawl deep under the skin of the viewer. Diana, a youthful and fetching as a high school teacher, is one of the year’s most fascinating indie film characters; a remote and somewhat coy woman who is nonetheless caught up in a forbidden sexual dalliance with a male student, one which grows from a delicate crush into a dangerous and foreboding full-blown obsession with alarming velocity. That we’re at turns sympathetic to, fascinated and repulsed by Diana is a testament to Burdge’s […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 5, 2013 -
All The King’s Men: Penny Lane on Our Nixon
In Our Nixon, director Penny Lane explores the Nixon administration by juxtaposing secret White House discussions from the infamous Nixon tapes with incredibly intimate Super 8 footage taken by avid amateur cineastes H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, John Ehrlichmann and Dwight Chapin. The fact that these men also happened to be the chief of staff, special advisor and assistant to our much maligned 37th President is one thing; that they were also three of Nixon’s closest aides and the key conspirators jailed during the aftermath of the Watergate scandal is another entirely. Despite what Ben Stein might say, Our Nixon has little to no polemical […]
by Brandon Harris on Aug 31, 2013 -
Lucy Mulloy on Una Noche
As sweltering as it is unforgiving, Havana is a tough place. Tourists rarely travel beyond the district that give the impression of faded tropical glory, but much of the city more or less resembles the Bronx or Newark of the ’80s. Black markets thrive and people have to hustle to survive; especially after their families have poured through there food rations. The nightclubs that fueled a vibrant Western tourist culture are a remnant of their former selves. Cigar salesmen keep busy, but like everyone else, they live with a thinly disguised fear. Lucy Mulloy’s magnificent debut film Una Noche, adapted […]
by Brandon Harris on Aug 23, 2013 -
Rodney Evans on The Happy Sad
An exploration of two couples — one black and gay, the other white and hetero — Rodney Evans’ The Happy Sad suggests with a light, deft touch the increasingly commonplace sexual fluidity that millennials are embracing as normative sexual categories fall away. Of course, there are difficulties. Partner swapping, open relationships, explorative homosexuality are nothing new, but even in the swingin’ hipster’d Brooklyn from which Evans tells his tale, complications arise, feelings are hurt, egos are shattered, these feelings only heightened by the ever present realities of race and class. A timely meditation on all of these things, the movie […]
by Brandon Harris on Aug 14, 2013 -
Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri on Off Label
The ubiquity of Big Pharma’s influence in modern medicine isn’t news and given the ever skyrocketing prices for many prescription medications, it’s ripe territory for outrage, but in their newest documentary, filmmaking team Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri aren’t out to stoke your anger, but engage your empathy and your intellect. Their new film, Off Label, follows the lives of eight Americans, most of whom exist on the margins of society, whose lives have been utterly transformed, usually for the worse, by prescription drugs. In places like Iowa City and Detroit, the duo find story after story of addiction and […]
by Brandon Harris on Aug 12, 2013
