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
Tag: Short Film Reviews
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
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
Waking Up: Mystery That Disorients Its Audience as Much as Its Protagonist
Matt Gorman’s 10-minute mystery with a dusting of sci-fi Waking Up follows a woman’s quest to discover what happens to her after she wakes up in a strange location with no memory. The two-hander plot finds its other character weaving in and out of Sarah’s life, helping her decrypt the clues scattered about, easily found,… Continue reading Waking Up: Mystery That Disorients Its Audience as Much as Its Protagonist
The Coronating: Stunning Imagery and Excellent Performances in Fantasy Driven by Crisis of Faith
Justin Solaiman and Hudson King’s The Coronating is a gorgeously visualised 22-minute fantasy drama examining the conflict of a knight and sibling at the eleventh hour before the corrupt new king—their brother—is coronated. A chamber film, the plot is designed with flashbacks that take the film from mental turmoil to physical danger to loss, intertwining… Continue reading The Coronating: Stunning Imagery and Excellent Performances in Fantasy Driven by Crisis of Faith
Monét: Impermeable Friendships and Their Fatal Interruptions
Grief and death intermingle into a bitter mix in Kyung Sok Kim’s Monét, a 22-minute film about two best friends, one dead and the other, to her bitter regret, not. Left alone and alive with the weight of survivor’s guilt crushing her, the protagonist Sarai—played by screenwriter Tdjiri Yakini—must contend with the accusation of being… Continue reading Monét: Impermeable Friendships and Their Fatal Interruptions
Cutting Loose: Laughably Bad Lies and Terribly Bad Friends
Sean Nam’s Cutting Loose features the ending of a bad friendship and the consternation it entails. The latter is such an overwhelming presence (and understandably so) for its protagonist that the film may have felt compelled to take its sci-fi angle seriously. The abovementioned sci-fi essentially boils down to the old My dad works for… Continue reading Cutting Loose: Laughably Bad Lies and Terribly Bad Friends