It’s a stretch of the Lower East Side like any other, with public housing towers looming unostentatiously overhead. One of these is the home of the Angulo brothers — six siblings confined for years (save sporadic supervised walks) to their apartment by their father, Oscar. Crystal Moselle’s first feature The Wolfpack — winner of the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — is the result of an accidental street meeting between the documentarian and her future subjects just as they were starting to regularly go outside in defiance of their dad. There are obvious questions of […]
by Amanda Wilder on Apr 28, 2015The word “bravura” gets thrown around all too often in the realm of ambitious filmmaking (perhaps in arts criticism in general?), but there is seemingly no other word to describe the colossal craft on display in Ukrainian helmer Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s Cannes 2014-premiering debut feature, The Tribe. The film’s narrative — which hews somewhat to the genre obligations of a Western, as Slaboshpitsky points out — concerns a young man, Sergey (Grigoriy Fesenko), who is a newcomer at a deaf boarding school in Ukraine. No sooner has Sergey arrived than he realizes that the school is run by its administration in […]
by Zachary Wigon on Apr 28, 2015