David A. Flores’s 15-minute Likeness depicts a woman’s search for her missing mother using AI, combining mystery with interiorised drama that looks and feels more novel than it should. Oddly (or perhaps fittingly), the film seems to mirror its own subject in terms of uncanniness. The AI version of Kaitlyn’s mom, Fiona, is shockingly human… Continue reading Likeness: Mystery, Grief and Multiple Existential Crises
Category: Reviews
Just a Broadway Baby: Vivacious Mary Ellen Ashley in Career Documentary
Patrick Riviere’s 24-minute documentary Just a Broadway Baby: Mary Ellen Ashley opens by hinging itself on the wise old lady charm of its subject through a line of voiceover, beckoning the story to begin at the beginning. The narrative takes us to the WWII era: grainy footage, retro instrumentals and the cherubic face of child… Continue reading Just a Broadway Baby: Vivacious Mary Ellen Ashley in Career Documentary
The Watcher: A Silent Wrangling with Failure
When viewing Nathan Sellers’ The Watcher it is hard to really be taken in by its serenity. On the contrary, its effect is immediately unsettling, accompanied as it is by a recording of a cultish sermon. But that is only the beginning. There is a pronounced attention to textural and sensory detail, from a closeup… Continue reading The Watcher: A Silent Wrangling with Failure
Dragon Fruit: Astute Sci-fi That Shows the Tiredness of It All
J.Brown’s Dragon Fruit runs to nearly half an hour, longer than your average short, but it makes the minutes count. A film set in a dystopia (it becomes less and less meaningful to point out how well they increasingly resemble reality, but there we are) about a single mother with a necessary and ridiculously distant… Continue reading Dragon Fruit: Astute Sci-fi That Shows the Tiredness of It All
The Scene: Self-Referential Comedy At Its Most Non-Fictional
Connor Morley’s 6-minute comedy The Scene takes a nightmare that almost every director is painfully familiar with and turns the frustration into comedy: the lead actor cannot remember their lines. The words marine life scientist find themselves twisted beyond recognition in the hands of lead actor, Edward Vanterbus (Samson Zilic); zoologist is the least atrocious… Continue reading The Scene: Self-Referential Comedy At Its Most Non-Fictional
The Sum of Several Sticky Situations involving Salami Sticks: Sticky, Gushy, Smelly, Farcical Extravaganza
Oli Stening’s The Sum of Several Sticky Situations involving Salami Sticks commits itself to twenty-one minutes of batty horror and comedy spread across six chapters, following the salami sticks stolen off a cop but going into tangents that are more abrupt than the sprays of blood you get in the face after dismembering a live… Continue reading The Sum of Several Sticky Situations involving Salami Sticks: Sticky, Gushy, Smelly, Farcical Extravaganza
Imperium: Living with a Failed Core
Indigo Parer’s Imperium examines the multifaceted expression of being a family bound by bitterness, resentment, and trauma going back generations. Running to twenty minutes, the film unravels its subjects on two distinct threads that both belie the complexity of familial coexistence and illuminate the gendered expression of festering tensions. Julio (Sal Galofaro) and Angela (Francesca… Continue reading Imperium: Living with a Failed Core
Cha Cha Charlie: Portrait of the Person Beneath the Persona
Matt Bieler’s 7-minute documentary glimpsing into the life of a wrestler takes family as the core of the bloody, bruising name. In turn, Byron, the subject of Cha Cha Charlie is pictured variously as a father, an insurance agent, and a wrestler—a constant in dramatically different settings. Byron Pepin aka Cha Cha Charlie balances his… Continue reading Cha Cha Charlie: Portrait of the Person Beneath the Persona
POV: Slasher Flick with A Bit of Everything
Brian K. Rosenthal’s POV, seventeen minutes long, is a pastiche of slasher flicks, its indulgence in tropes the evidence of love for the genre. In it are references to a host of staples like The Purge, Scream, and Halloween, not to mention one of its main characters—a towering figure constructed out of Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody,… Continue reading POV: Slasher Flick with A Bit of Everything
Kristina: Historicizing a Becoming in Two Short Minutes
A portrait of Kristina O’Hara McCafferty, Kristina is a concise 2-minute documentary by Mac Premo that delivers a sense of Irish women’s history, hinged on Eavan Boland’s Mother Ireland. The film uses an alternating rhythm of frenetic energy and calm, while the poem, epic in scale, is recited on the voiceover. Using the poem (recited… Continue reading Kristina: Historicizing a Becoming in Two Short Minutes