Krisha Fairchild is a 64-year-old actress who lives in Mexico and has four dogs. She’s named after a young Polish girl who saved her father’s life during the Invasion of Normandy in 1944. With an older sister named Vikki and a younger one called Robyn, Fairchild grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. Today, the three sisters take turns visiting their 91-year-old mother — who suffers from cognitive brain damage as a result of her late onset closet alcoholism — in an assisted living facility in Texas. Fairchild’s mother is remorseful about the addiction, and like her own alcoholic father, is charming […]
The Rome Film Festival had a striking fresh look this year under the direction of its new artistic director Antonio Monda. The redesigned fest had a slew of hot films and top-tier tributes. But at the core of the new “festa,” or celebration of cinema, was a series of high-profile conversations with leaders in the arts. One of the main highlights of the fest was a conversation with Wes Anderson and novelist Donna Tartt in which they discussed their love of Italian films. While Tartt went in depth on her love of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, Max Ophuls’ Everybody’s Woman, and Paolo Sorrentino’s […]
Blind, the feature directorial debut of Joachim Trier’s co-writer Eskil Vogt, is an aesthetically spick-and-span Nordic nightmare, a meditation on loneliness, illness and responsibility. If its effects are a bit sneakier than the wrecking ball to the chest approach of Oslo, August 31, it’s due to the meticulousness of its script, and the complex interplay among its many principal characters. Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) has recently lost her sight, and spends her days cooped up with her computer while her husband Morten (Henrik Rafaelsen) is at work. Unable to relate to the outside world, Ingrid retreats into her imagination, crafting an interwoven tale of […]
Hats off to director Zachary Treitz and co-writer Kate Lyn Sheil for sidestepping the more introspective, resource heavy trends of much contemporary independent filmmaking, and swinging for the fences with their Civil War period piece, Men Go To Battle. Set in 1861 Kentucky, the brothers Francis and Henry Mellon (Tim Morton and David Maloney) are desperate to scare up some funds for their overgrown farm before winter arrives, but the pair’s constant quarreling is a hindrance to much progress. Eventually fed up with Francis’ heavy drinking and general flippancy, Henry takes off to join a far more populated battle amidst the Confederate army. […]
For my money, Frank V. Ross is one of the most inventive, witty and honest low-budget filmmakers that major festival land has neglected to embrace. With the exception of the SXSW-premiering Audrey the Trainwreck, Ross’s films have toured the regional circuit like best kept secrets, with their structurally complex, yet casually rendered studies of modern relationships serving as any program’s unmitigated highpoint. His latest, Bloomin Mud Shuffle, which premieres tonight at the Wisconsin Film Festival, concerns Lonnie (James Ransone), a vaguely alcoholic house painter, and the object of his unsteady affection, Monica (Alexia Rasmussen). Such a distilled synopsis scarcely does justice to Ross’s execution, with its […]
Winner of the Best Narrative Feature award at the Atlanta Film Festival over the weekend, Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck’s God Bless the Child is a naturalistic, quotidian portrait of five children roaming the streets and marshes of Davis, California after their mother skips town. Machoian and Ojeda-Beck capture their characters with both formal remove and striking intimacy, as their interplay suggests the nature of young bodies left to their own devices. Though the Grahams — Harper, Elias, Arri, Ezra, and Jonah — exist in the film without any parental supervision, all five happen to belong to co-director Machoian, a relation which the pair were […]
A truly original oddity, Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan melds disparate tropes of American television, queer cinema, and French arthouse to comic and dazzling effect. Buchanan unfolds at the titular army base, where husbands and wives lay in waiting for their men overseas, though the wives tend to occupy their time by attempting to seduce the gay husbands, or the temperamental daughter of the film’s most lovelorn protagonist, Roger (Andy Gillet). If something is askew in the characters’ roving dialogue, that’s because the script is entirely adapted from American TV shows, an off-kilter choice that finds a counterpart in Crotty’s cinematic language, in which seasonal set changes are ushered in […]
Since taking home the Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance, most reviews have charged Britni West’s naturalistic narrative Tired Moonlight with the “documentary-like” or “hybrid” stamp of approval, but more than anything else, the film seems to suggest that such classifications were meant to be broken. An interwoven portrait of the inhabitants and topography of Kalispell, Montana, West collapses the conventions of an ensemble driven film by allowing her characters to roam free, presenting a beautiful, like-minded series of vignettes that form a cohesive whole. Recently back from Austin where she presented the film at RxSM (along with 7 Chinese Brothers at SXSW, on which she […]
Funny Bunny, Alison Bagnall’s third feature, opens with a man shuffling door to door in suburban, middle-class Philadelphia. He’s not pitching bibles, but rather, a means to an end of the childhood obesity epidemic. Gene (Kentucker Audley) is just one player in the off-kilter, quasi-love triangle that takes center stage in Bagnall’s idiosyncratic film, as he’s soon joined by a well-off man-child — the aptly named Titty (Olly Alexander) — and a reclusive, emotionally tenuous young woman named Ginger (Joslyn Jensen), who makes a living peddling her bunny’s ailments on the web. Much like her 2011 two-hander The Dish & The Spoon, Bagnall displays a deft touch for […]
Girl meets girl online. They fall in love from afar — Sandra in Montreal, Amina in Syria. The Arab uprising occurs and soon Amina, star blogger and creator of “A Gay Girl in Damascus” gets swept up in the chaos, then kidnapped, and then disappears. Her frantic paramour goes on a global quest to find her — only to discover that the game-changing World Wide Web is also a web of intrigue and deceit. Fortunately, Sophie Deraspe’s doc The Amina Profile is more than the sum of this now infamous hoax. By smartly training her lens on the unwitting victim […]