When Filmmaker featured the startup film collective Omnes Films in our 2021 25 New Faces list, the L.A. outfit’s first two microbudget features — Jonathan Davies’ Topology of Sirens and Tyler Taormina’s Ham on Rye — had both premiered at festivals and received U.S. releases from Factory 25, its members had produced shorts and music videos, and new features were in the works. One of the few companies or collectives to land on our list over its history, Omnes impressed us with not only the quality of the films but the ambition — and optimism — evinced by a group […]

Whether the sprawling fantasia that is Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point proves heartwarmingly reflective or personally destabilizing in its near-ethnographic study of American holiday ritual will depend, largely, on the composition and size of your own Xmas memories. It’s a strength of the film, however, that Taormina’s expansive canvas allows for — and incorporates — the whole range of emotions that the theater of Christmas can produce, from the giddiness of an overstimulated child, stomach groaning from too much pumpkin pie, gazing at all those wrapped presents, to the wearied anxiety of an adult realizing that the holiday […]