Back in January, Sundance 2024 couldn’t have started on a stronger note for those of us who have kicked it off with Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan’s Ghostlight, a gentle tearjerker and a surprisingly tender comedy, marking the duo’s follow-up to their 2019 feature, Saint Frances. A film on the healing properties of a community of artists and a love letter to the joys of scrappy artmaking, Ghostlight set the right tone from the start for the indie festival with a story about grief, familial bonds and the therapeutic beauty of the artistic process. Written by O’Sullivan and co-directed by […]
“What lives outside of the frames of this camera and your own eyes?” is the question the poet/comedian/actor/public speaker Alok Vaid-Menon challenges the viewer to ponder at the very start of Alex Hedison’s Sundance-premiering short Alok. Currently on the Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour, and premiering at IFC Center on June 14th (with both the nonbinary star and Hedison, who also happens to be married to her EP Jodie Foster, in attendance), the doc is based on footage Hedison shot during the performer’s recent international tour and is supplemented with highly stylized interviews with the spiritually enlightened artist and […]
From Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons, to Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Union, to now Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s Emergent City (likewise EP’d by Stephen Maing), corporate takeovers of NYC and the inherent Gotham vs. Goliath battles they spawn seem to be in the documentary air this year. And while Flying Lessons and Union clearly cast entities like corrupt Croman Real Estate and anti-labor Amazon as the respective baddies, Emergent City is surprisingly not much interested in blaming Jamestown Properties, the conglomerate behind Industry City, the largest privately owned industrial property in New York, for the rapid gentrification of […]
Vulcanizadora, the latest film from Grand Rapids-based guerilla filmmaker Joel Potrykus, is predicated on a conceit that’s faithful to his overarching artistic interests. Two volatile buddies (Potrykus muse Joshua Burge and Potrykus himself) embark on an extended hike to a remote beach, where they plan to execute a plan fit for a Faces of Deathsequel (indeed, the film’s newly-released poster even emphasizes this parallel). While the complicated lives they’ve seemingly fled—a pending jail sentence and the crushing weight of having lost child custody—suggest warranted comeuppance, the men nevertheless retreat into childishness. They set off snake fireworks, gorge themselves on convenience […]
A recent addition to Airbnb is the “Host Passport,” an enhanced information panel for those who’d like to let those who rent rooms in their places know a little bit more about them. The host’s profile picture is placed more prominently, and, if you’re hosting, the site writes, “… new sections of your profile let you share things like where you live, your hobbies, pet’s name, fun facts, and what makes staying at your place special.” Finally, hosts taking advantage of the new profile category can let renters know “how much social interaction to expect.” “Guests often enjoy spending time […]
Unless you are buried too deep into the Plato’s Cave that UFO researchers and enthusiasts insist we are only now emerging from, it has been hard to miss that UFOs — or, as they are called now, UAPs — are having a moment. Interest in what’s out there has ebbed and flowed over the years, from speculation about Roswell, NM and Area 51, the Erich Von Daniken books of the 1970s, The X Files to, more recently, declassification of Navy videos and UAP government whistleblowers testifying before government committees. UAP sightings are increasing — partly due to Starlink — while […]
Biographies of artists have typical rises and falls, eddies into new enthusiasms and returns to consistent themes. But when it comes to musician, artist and cultural provocateur Genesis P-Orridge, such rhythms occur in truly outsized relief. In S/He Is Still Her/e — The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary, director Charles Rodrigues, whose previous Tribeca-premiering feature was Gay Chorus Deep South, proceeds biographically through P-Orridge’s life, from her childhood in Manchester through early assaultive work with the UK performance group COUM Transmission, industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle and finally the more beatific psych-rock outfit Psychic TV. P-Orridge’s ultimate destination was the body-morphing Pandrogyny […]
A real-life high stakes thriller from Emmy (and BAFTA and Cinema Eye)-winning filmmaker James Jones (Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, Wanted: The Escape Of Carlos Ghosn), Antidote follows a few brave men who have chosen to put their lives (and thus those of their families) on the line to bring down the Putin regime: a whistleblowing insider to Russia’s poison program; the twice-poisoned, Russian-British activist-journalist (and current political prisoner) Vladimir Kara-Murza; and Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev, last seen in Daniel Roher’s Oscar-winning Navalny exposing the murderers who unsuccessfully poisoned the late activist before confinement to a Siberian prison finished the job. Which, […]
While Max Duncan and Xinyan Yu’s Made in Ethiopia takes place in the titular country, it in many ways echoes last year’s Central African Republic-set Eat Bitter, co-directed by Ningyi Sun and Pascale Appora-Gnekindy, which similarly explored China’s capitalist push throughout the continent; and specifically from the POV of the shared personal toll it’s taking on individuals from very unalike cultures. In this case we’re introduced to an inexhaustibly optimistic woman named Motto, the upbeat Chinese head of a mega industrial park in a rural Ethiopian town. She’s also a true believer that the Chinese dream can be exported to […]
The New York City nightmare of giving up a rent-stabilized apartment inspires (literal) dramatic vengeance in The French Italian, writer-director Rachel Wolther’s feature debut. Long-term couple Doug (Aristotle Athari) and Valerie (Catherine Cohen) live in a gorgeous brownstone on the Upper West Side—that is, until they’ve had it with their raucous downstairs neighbors oscillating between screaming matches and belching off-key karaoke renditions of “La Bamba.” They move out after obsessively peeping and eavesdropping on their newfound enemies; their hatred drives them to Rye, New York, where they take over Doug’s parent’s house while they’re in Boca. Now forced to shuttle […]