For several years, writer/director Jennifer Reeder has been making a name for herself in the independent filmmaking community. Since 2006, she's produced a string of acclaimed short films, as well as a somewhat mysterious 2008 feature-length debut called Accidents at Home and How They Happen that doesn't seem to be available anywhere (there is also one short on her IMDb from 1995, but nothing between then and 2006). Her wonderful 2015 short, Blood Below the Skin (which evokes a mixture of surreal comedy and raw emotion that recalls Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know) scored a couple of big nominations: a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, and an AFI Fest Grand Jury Prize. Now, she's back with a second feature-length effort, Signature Move, which seems to be the first project she's taken on she didn't write herself.

Zaynab (Fawzia Mir...Read the entire review

Chris Menges is better known for his work as a cinematographer & director of photography than for his work as a director, but the list of films that he's been visually in charge of is pretty damn impressive. The Mission, Michael Collins, The Boxer, Dirty Pretty Things, North Country, Notes on a Scandal, The Reader, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; these are some stunning works of art, films with a lot of visual impact, so hats off to Menges for that. As far as directing goes though, he did a few movies in the 90s, but never really became successful, finding his niche in cinematography instead. With Second Best, we have one of...Read the entire review

An odd mix of Warm Summer Rain and The Last Five Years, Breaking Up is a two-man-show romance/drama that refuses to give love a chance. The film was adapted for the screen by Michael Cristofer, who also wrote the original theatrical material. A play first, the movie has an off-Broadway feel but translates well, showing early signs of Cristofer's talent for the big screen. He had already written a few movies (The Witches of Eastwick, The Bonfire of the Vanities) and would go on to write/dir...Read the entire review

The Movie:

It might suffer from one of those hacky 90s romcom stories, and the way it approaches race relations in America might be borderline embarrassing over twenty years after its release, but Made in America is still a charming and heartfelt little dramedy that draws pretty much all of its goodwill from a strong cast and the two leads sharing a kind of chemistry that comes once in a lifetime.

The premise is pure sitcom fodder: After a precautious black teenager named Zora (Nia Long) finds out that she's the result of a sperm donation instead of the biological child of her dead father, she tracks down the donor she thinks is a smart black man, only to end up with Hal (Ted Danson), a goofy car salesman who's also very, very white. While Zora attempts to build a relationship with this man she feels absolutely no cultural connection to, a relationship begins to develop between Te...Read the entire review

I don't want to speak for everyone, but I had never heard of this movie before deciding to watch & review it. On IMDb, The Power Of One has around 7,000 ratings, which pales in comparison to another Morgan Freeman film, The Dark Knight, which has about 1,600,000. So while I'm sure there is a select group who know & appreciate this movie, I think I'm safe in saying that your average audience member doesn't know that it exists. But the question is why not, given the solid cast, crew, and subject matter. Stephen Dorff as a youngster, Morgan Freeman as a prisoner a couple years before Shawshank, Daniel Craig i...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Growing up in Northern Virginia, across the bridge from Washington D.C., it seemed like I was a million miles away (and admittedly a few years behind) the punk and Go-Go music that was springing up all over the area. I was familiar with it, but not intimate. There are contemporaries in today's music scene like local boy made good Dave Grohl (of the Foo Fighters) who are champions of D.C. music, and with the release of this documentary, Salad Days attempts to bring even more light to the period.

The film was originally started as a Kickstarter effort in 2012 by Scott Crawford. Crawford is the writer/director of the film but he also was a journalist during the era in discussion, creating "Metrozine," a fanzine publication that chronicled much of what occurred in the punk scene in D.C. Jim Saah was the film's Director of Photography, but he also did much of the photogr...Read the entire review

The Movie

In 10 Words or Less
The rage of the middle-aged

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Stand-Up Comedy
Likes: Observational comedy
Dislikes: Traditional stand-up
Hates: Bare-bones releases, idiots who yell at comedy shows

The Show
In other stand-up reviews, I've made reference to the road comic, a tier of comedy act that is a regular at the Chuckle Huts and Laugh Cabanas across middle America, but who hasn't had that breakout in their career. So for every Bill Burr, there's a Greg Fitzsimmons, someone who isn't too different, but just didn't make that leap. Of course, in Fitzsimmons' case, that's probably not the biggest concern, as he can comfort himself with his four Emmys for his work on The Ellen Degeneres Show...Read the entire review

The Movie:

I think Brian Posehn is in the position of people knowing more about what he looks like than what he does. And to be fair, seeing a guy who is about six foot four, with a virtually nonexistent hairline and ample beard, he takes up a lot of space, as one who has walked behind him can attest. But Posehn has been doing comedy in various forms for two decades now, starting with the HBO series Mr. Show with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. Through all that time, he has not done a stand-up special that I know of. Thankfully, The Fartist rectifies that.

Recorded in the summer of 2012 at the Neptune Theater in Seattle, the hour-long set touches on a variety of topics near and dear to Posehn's heart. A self-identifying geek, thinks like Star Wars are among those for obvious reasons...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Gary Hustwit's movies, as a general rule, don't sound as interesting as they are. His latest documentary, Urbanized, is the third film in his "Design Trilogy"; the first (Helvetica) was about typefaces, and the second (Objectified) was about industrial design. Urbanized is about urban planning--understanding "the language of a city." Let's be honest: these pictures, by all rights, should be dull as toast. Yet Hustwit brings them to fascinating life, thanks to his impeccable eye and genuine curiosity. The focus of these films, he has said in interviews, is to make us think about things we take for granted. In Urbanized, as in its predecessors, he gets that job done.

The film opens with a series of snazzy (and shocking) animations detailing the growth of cities over the past few decades--and the direction they're going. Overcrowding is a...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The Unforeseen sounds like it could be a horror movie, and, in a sense, the 2007 documentary boasts a number of spine-chilling moments. But its shudders come from the environmental nightmare created by urban development and suburban sprawl. Director Laura Dunn focuses on the microcosm of Barton Springs in Austin, Texas, and how the area's pristine beauty was severely compromised by residential and commercial developers.

At the center of the tale is Gary Bradley, a tight-lipped Texas farm boy who came to prominence in the 1980s as a key mover-and-shaker in Austin's development. In his quest to launch a $127 million housing addition, Bradley partnered with a strip mining company, Freeport McMoRan, that boasted a dubious environmental track record. That business union raised the hackles of local activists and nature lovers who feared what the explosion of development...Read the entire review

Filmmaker Margaret Brown (Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt) claims that she didn't set out to make a film about race, or at least not mainly about race, but rather that the story emerged in the editing. That may well be true, but The Order of Myths is the most poignant documentary I've seen about race relations in America in a long time.

The native of Mobile, Alabama set out to objectively document the pageantry of her hometown's Mardi Gras. Mobile's Mardi Gras dates back to 1703, making it the oldest in the United States, so naturally its citizenry is proud of its carnival, but there's also a sense of defensiveness about it. You see, long after most of America gave up on "separate but equal" as public policy, Mobile still maintains a racially-segregated Mardi Gras.

Though the product of a liberal arts education at Brown University and NYU, Filmmaker Margaret Br...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Based on the mega-popular line of dolls, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl is everything you want from a child-friendly flick. It's touching and positive, well-crafted and even bound to entertain parents. And now, several months after a commercially disappointing theatrical release in the summer of 2008, the current economic meltdown has made this Depression-era period film disconcertingly relevant. Timing is everything, as they say.

Abigail Breslin again shows that she is a supremely capable young actor. Her Margaret Mildred "Kit" Kittredge is smart and spunky, but not so much that you don't buy her as a 10-year-old girl. It is 1934 in Cincinnati, the height of the Great Depression, but the Kittredge family is faring better than many of its neighbors. Such affluence affords Kit the luxury of hanging out with pals in her treehouse and popping into the local n...Read the entire review

Milestone doesn't put out a lot of DVDs, but when they do release atitle it's usually something to take notice of. Two of their mostrecent titles have been Killer of Sheep and I am Cuba, bothof which earned the coveted DVDTalk Collector Series rating. Nowthey've released an important silent film that is both historic, in thatit's the first film to accurately present Japanese culture to Americanaudiences, and entertaining: The Dragon Painter.

TheDragon Painter was made in 1919 and stars a very young Sessue Hayakawawho would later go on to be nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe forhis magnificent portrayal as Col. Saito, the prisoner-of-war campcommandant, in The ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
It seems patently counter-intuitive, to say the least, to think of Sessue Hayakawa, the evil Col. Saito in David Lean's classic The Bridge on the River Kwai, as a matinee idol. And yet Hayakawa was one of the biggest stars of the silent era, so popular in fact that he was one of the few, like Chaplin and Pickford, able to start his own production company, Haworth Pictures, a collaboration with the director of The Dragon Painter, William Worthington. A beautiful evocation of Japanese culture and ambience, The Dragon Painter, long thought to be lost before a French print was discovered, is certainly a masterpiece of silent cinema and a worthy testament to Hayakawa's acting and production expertise in his relative youth.

The story of The Dragon Painter is disarmingly simple, almost reminiscent of some of Miyazaki's anime features. Hayakawa portrays Tat...Read the entire review

Movie: Over the years, I've enjoyed a lot of really bad movies and television shows. By really bad, I mean they broke no new ground, had budgets smaller than the catering bill at a decent party, acting that would feel right at home in a middle school, and direction that took all the right elements and turned them on their heads. Often enough, such releases are called "guilty pleasures" by those of us who can laugh at the ineptitude of their creators. When the cheese factor gets high enough, you can bet that a lot of marginally twisted folks (like me) will find it a hoot. Such is the case with a one season show, Black Scorpion.

The show started off as two made-for-Showtime movies that grew out of the Roger Corman factory of sleaze, starring Joan Severance, as a crime fighter in the vein of Batman (television Batman, not the movies). She hones her skills to fight a bunch of super-powered ...Read the entire review

I was in grade school the first time I saw Piranha (1978, 92 minutes) on television. For months, I just knew the little buggers would come up the bath tub drain and nibble my toes off. In 1978, it arrived on the heels of Jaws II and was an unapologetic ripoff of the original (and Jaws was a throwback to the '50s classic Creature from the Black Lagoon). Now, 20 years after its initial release, we have an extraordinary new DVD from the folks at New Horizons Home Video.

The movie: This young couple is hiking through the woods when they happen upon an abandoned facility with a great big swimming pool, so they decide to strip nekkid and go for a dip. Turns out there's something fishy ...Read the entire review