Beyond Joker: Folie à Deux (October 4) and Smile 2 (October 18), this month is light on studio power. The indies are surely champing at the bit to fill the gap with a slew of festival darlings getting their limited releases in before Oscar voting. Searchlight, Focus Features, Neon, and A24 are all jockeying for […]
The post Posterized October 2024: Rumours, Woman of the Hour, La Cocina & More first appeared on The Film Stage.
Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here. Babes (Pamela Adlon) Transitioning the naturalistic comic sensibilities that made Better Things a success, Pamela Adlon’s feature debut Babes manages to co-opt the rhythms of a romantic comedy to explore the relationship between […]
The post New to Streaming: Evil Does Not Exist, Powell and Pressburger, Red Rooms, It’s What’s Inside & More first appeared on The Film Stage.
People and places can leave an impression on us. In absence of one thing, we might find ourselves returning to the other for traces. Sano (Hiroki Sano) sits in his minimally adorned hotel room, staring blankly towards the light from the window. He’s come with his friend Miyata to a seaside resort in Izu, where they first met Sano’s late wife, Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto), five years ago. Some things have changed, some things refuse to. What follows is a structurally ingenious, profoundly romantic film, a crisp sea breeze ode to the moments that we share and the sentimental significance that they carry in our lives. Super Happy Forever is a special film, to my mind the most exciting feature out of Japan so far this…
Iman (Misagh Zare) has just gotten the much-desired promotion, but asks his family to keep quiet about his new job: he is now an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran. So, while the very real protests against the state-enforced strict hijab laws roar on the streets, Iman’s new position requires him to sign off on death sentences in bulk, day after day. He’s got full support from his wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), who at first is quick to impose a regimen of obedience on their teenage daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). But the girls grow more and more sympathetic towards the protesters, and even Najmeh’s loyalty slowly turns away from her husband as he becomes increasingly paranoid and ruthless. Oh,…
Like waves that come crashing on the seashore, except they keep crashing. New Wave The film enjoyed its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival. The film opens Friday, October 4, at DCTV in New York, and October 25 at Laemmle Glendale in Los Angeles. Visit the official site for more information. During the late 1970s and early 80s, New Wave music that I heard in Los Angeles swept me into its post-punk, synth-heavy currents. As explained in director Elizabeth Ai’s documentary New Wave, though, it was much more meaningful for the Vietnamese-American community than a passing musical fad. The younger generation, brought to or born in the U.S., considered their New Wave music, featuring cover songs of popular tunes translated into and sung in Vietnamese,…
Quentin Dupieux directed. Anaïs Demoustier, Edouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen, Gilles Lellouche, Pio Marmaï, Didier Flamand, and Romain Duris star.
Irish documentarian Sinéad O’Shea (Pray for Our Sinners) has a new film out, Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, which just premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival—aka TIFF—where I reviewed it. As per the title, it offers a […]
The post A Conversation with Sinéad O’Shea (BLUE ROAD: THE EDNA O’BRIEN STORY) appeared first on Hammer to Nail.
A painfully bland office worker gets his world turned upside down by a trio of tiny cosmic weirdos in Steven Kostanski’s latest gonzo comedy, Frankie Freako. After he hit cult comedy gold with 2021’s Psycho Goreman, Kostanski and his usual bunch of misfit miscreant co-conspirators are back with their version of an 80s puppet adventure movie. He lovingly borrows from the greats in this long-thought extinct subgenre to create a gooey, chaotic, freaky family film with a twist. It’s everything you miss if you – like me – list Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College in your personal top ten of all time. Conor (Conor Sweeney) is the most boring, milquetoast man who ever lived. He spends his days at the office trying not to…
A pair of siblings on the run after a robbery take refuge in a house with mysterious time-warping qualities, only to find that the law isn’t the only thing they have to fear. Things Will Be Different, the latest from the Rustic Films roster (The Endless, Synchronic, Something in the Dirt) comes from longtime Benson & Morehead editor Michael Felker, who makes his feature writing and directing debut with this mind-bender that very much fits the mold of his frequent collaborators. Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and Sidney (Riley Dandy) have just pulled off a major heist and they have to lay low for a while. This sibling duo hasn’t always had the greatest relationship – there is a traumatic past that comes into play –…
The suffering of people in this film is staggering, but so is their resilience.
