“In a film where everything becomes a measuring contest, even the boys’ vape clouds are dicks. Hittman’s superlatively subjective camera sexualizes all in its path, damp with the New York City summer’s cruel humidity and a hazy, exhausted torpor. Beach Rats is the most evocative movie I’ve seen so far at the festival. It’s also the saddest.” – Boston Reel, 05/02/2017
“The bizarre, improbably moving Sylvio has moments of beauty that border on the sublime. There’s a yearning to the hairy guy’s amazingly uneventful puppet shows, a dream of sophistication that transcends his animal brutishness. The movie’s also funny as hell because, again, it’s about a gorilla wearing sunglasses and people clothes.” – Boston Reel, 04/28/2017
“The fifteenth annual Independent Film Festival Boston begins on Wednesday night, kicking off Holy Week for the city’s cinephiles. Unspooling at the Somerville, Brattle and Coolidge Corner Theatres, the non-profit IFFBoston and its all-volunteer staff showcase independent films at independent venues, far from the madding multiplexes.” – Metro, 04/26/2017
“There’s an atmosphere that fosters community. People who would never engage a stranger at the Kendall have no problem turning to a stranger in line and asking what they’ve seen that they liked. We have heard so many stories of people who met at the festival who went on to become best friends, and in a few cases, get married and start families.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 04/25/2017
“Set in a dystopian future where a peaceful socialist revolution did nothing to quell the battle of the sexes, Lizzie Borden’s notorious 1983 mock documentary Born In Flames follows a group of radical black lesbians forming a Women’s Army in the streets. Co-star Jeanne Satterfield will lead a discussion following the screening. You will have questions.” – Metro, 03/30/2017
“The Boston Underground Film Festival kicks off the season with its nineteenth annual celebration of the bizarre and insane. This year’s ‘Cinematic Sensory Onslaught on Cambridge’ begins at the Brattle with Prevenge, writer-director Alice Lowe’s pitch-black British comedy about a pregnant woman coached into a killing spree by her misanthropic unborn baby.” – Metro, 03/10/2017
My final dispatch from Park City ponders movies and meditations, thrilled by some philosophical sci-fi from an old pro and bored by more New York nattering from an up-and-comer. There’s also the festival’s most essential documentary and another Casey Affleck picture about death, this one so strange and wonderful I’m not quite sure how to describe it.
