While most independent films are birthed out of personal necessity, a time-crunch, and readily available locations, Diana Peralta’s De Lo Mio may represent a pinnacle of can-do gumption. Shot on location in the city of Santiago in the Dominican Republic, Peralta’s debut feature uses her late grandmother’s home as its central location and its truer-than-fiction narrative—following her passing, two sisters return to their grandmother’s cozy property before it gets bulldozed and the land sold. Shot last fall but percolating in the director’s mind for years, De Lo Mio is as much about the sisters in front of the camera (performed by Sasha […]

A stranger in a foreign land, with a camera and a penchant for cheap beer: Andrew Hevia’s hyperdigital documentary Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window follows the Miami-bred filmmaker as he visits Hong Kong for the Chinese edition of Art Basel. At first determined to make a traditional documentary accessible for public television audiences, Hevia’s plans are quickly thwarted once he discovers the elusive intricacies of the region. He’s a Cuban-American who can’t understand the language of his new surroundings. Rather than view that as a hindrance, he takes to meeting artists and art collectors, attending art shows, wooing […]

If there’s one thing we can be sure of about Kathy Murphy, the middle-aged woman at the center of the moving debut feature, For the Birds, by director Richard Miron, it’s that she loves animals. Birds in general, ducks and turkeys in particular. Kathy has been “collecting” them for years now on her small makeshift farm in Upstate New York alongside her begrudging husband, Gary. Less an obsession than an inherent need, Kathy values her birds above all else, and as crowding and cleanliness prompt local animal sanctuaries to threaten legal action of behalf of the wellbeing of Kathy’s feathered […]

One of the most celebrated street artists of the 1980s, Richard Hambleton created a collection of equally eccentric and harrowing work that decorated the walls, alleyways and sidewalks of New York City. Along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hambleton was an unrivaled challenging artist and, as his contemporaries tragically died before middle age, one of its remaining beacons of inspiration. While known for his “murder art” — chalk outlines of fictitious crime scenes splattered with red paint resembling blood —  and his Marlboro Man paintings crafted from a thick tar-like substance, Hambleton’s most iconic pieces serve as the namesake of Oren Jacoby’s new documentary in theaters this week. Debuting […]

It takes a herculean effort to produce a first film that’s accepted to festivals and showered with praise (and prizes – SXSW handed it the Narrative Feature Grand Jury Award this past March), but first-time director Ana Asensio pulled it off in her debut Most Beautiful Island, a grounded-in-reality genre film following a Spanish immigrant who moves to New York City to start a new life. Emotionally distraught over the death of her child, Luciana (played by Asensio) works dead-end jobs—in one scene, dressing up as a chicken to promote a local poultry joint—trying to make ends meet and keep […]

Described at one point in the film as a community based on survivors of trauma, the Hasidic population of Brooklyn, New York is known for being a tight-knit religious group as private as it is self-dependent. Keeping to the strict customs inherited from their ancestors, the men and women separate themselves from the secular community by adhering to strict dress codes, luddite beliefs and a need to keep their families intact. Equally stringent and oppressive, the Hasidic faith — in the case of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s new investigative documentary, One of Us, Hasidic New Yorkers — are particularly firm […]

The St. Louis-set For Ahkeem’s central character, Daje Shelton, is on a path to avoid a life of poverty and disappointment. Having been suspended from her local high school for a number of petty offenses, Daje’s opportunities are narrowing by the season. Enlisting in a school for troubled youth as a last resort, her future is up in the air. While the documentary is centered around Daja, African-American teenage men are always present. Daja speaks of her many male friends who have been lost to gun violence, and her boyfriend Antonio (and their eventual son, the title character Ahkeem) will have […]

“Holy shit.” “George Romero just died.” “Wtf?!?!?!” “Did you see that?” Those frantic texts, sent in rapid succession by a friend on July 16th, days before I was to head to the Fantasia International Film Festival, hit hard. The legendary horror filmmaker had passed away from lung cancer at the age of 77; his death came as a shock, and not just due to the severity of his private illness. To the outside world, old George was still as productive as ever, and his new project, George A. Romero’s Road of the Dead, was to continue a restless franchise nearing its 50th year. Less than a […]

An iconic figure of brute force, wholesome values and exaggerated patriotism, the red-and-yellow bandana-wearing Hulk Hogan was a pop culture phenomenon throughout the’80s professional wrestling boom. The face of the World Wrestling Federation under Vince McMahon, Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) was a childhood hero for many children of a certain age, bodyslamming giants and providing leg-drops to bad guys who threatened to disrupt the concept of a wholesome America. Things have changed. Hogan left the company several times over rampant steroid abuse scandals and larger paydays for other promotions, but he always returned for one final run to pay […]

Sometimes the only way to escape an overprotective household is to resort to extreme measures. Erin Lee Carr’s latest documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, about a young girl raised from  birth by her mother to believe she was physically incapable of surviving on her own, is impressive in the way it caresses its true crime story into being a film about redemption through murder as the only means out. A victim of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, Gypsy Rose Blanchard spent much of her adolescent life in hospitals as a walking test tube, a medical experiment shopped around by a possessive mother desperate […]