Director Drew Dickler may be one of the only people, if not the only, who can point to a plastic fish as a cornerstone of their queer journey. A documentary filmmaker by trade, Dickler turns the camera on herself in her OutfestNEXT-playing short, Big Bass. Told in a charmingly antiquated ’90s style, Big Bass sees […]
When summer is in full swing, I’m often in the mood for a good coming-of-age film. Something about the summer heat brings a sense of longing. Longing for a time when summer was a period of freedom. Coming-of-age films come in many shapes and sizes. It’s a subgenre that must constantly reinvent itself to keep […]
The year is 2008: Web 2.0 is in full force, Motion City Soundtrack is playing on your MySpace page, skateboarding is the epitome of cool, and major advertisers have not yet discovered YouTube. I remember what it was like to be a kid at this time—to feel like you are failing in your social circles […]
Hummingbirds, a hybrid documentary currently enjoying an ongoing theatrical run in New York City and slated for PBS broadcast July 1, offers up a gentle, verité-style slice-of-its-two-protagonists’-teen, queer, Latinx lives. Those two—Silvia Del Carmen Castaños and Estefanía “Beba” Contreras—are both the film’s primary subjects and its director-writers, exploring a first-person plural perspective on documentary filmmaking. […]
The cinema verité-style coming-of-age drama Californie is so naturalistic and arresting one might be forgiven for assuming it a documentary. And that is clearly the intent of documentarians Alessandro Cassigoli and Casey Kauffman, whose narrative feature drama was over five years in the making. A festival hit on its original 2021 run, winning awards at […]
Hayao Miyazaki is a god, and if anyone tries to tell you there is a Studio Ghibli film that isn’t worth watching, then I would treat anything they tell you in the future with suspicion. And within its faultless catalogue, one film that stands apart from the others is a finely polished gem called Whisper […]
A Deep Look at Unsettling Adolescence in Criterion’s French Drama
Warning: Spoilers are coming with us on a holiday to the French seaside. There’s a common fable concerning the best way to boil a frog. According to the fable’s entry in Wikipedia, it’s been used to describe everything from the creeping threat of socialism to climate change. It goes like this: If you throw a […]
In his debut indie film that he also wrote, Urchins, Florida-native filmmaker Adam Rioux captures the spirit of youth and the beauty of freedom as a group of young adults travels across the Sunshine State. The movie follows the quiet Ari (stunningly portrayed by Nickelodeon actress and singer Breanna Yde), a college freshman who is […]
The brain-child and directorial debut of Australian artist and filmmaker Del Kathryn Barton, Blaze premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival and tells the heart-wrenching story of Blaze, a 12-year-old girl (played by Julia Savage), who, after witnessing a violent crime, processes her trauma by summoning an imaginary dragon named Zephy. Part coming-of-age drama, part […]
Swooping, sometimes wildly, between the neo-real and the sublime, the mundane and magical, the sweet and the scarifying, Andrea Arnold’s coming-of-age tale Bird is a familiar tale with a wild twist. Whether that works or not is likely to divide viewers, but there’s no doubting Arnold’s daring, nor is there any question that a pair […]
Benjamin Brewer’s (co-writer of Netflix’s 2023 release Reptile) post-apocalyptic thriller Arcadian pays homage to the creature feature genre, taking a surprisingly refreshing approach despite its flaws. The surviving-the-end-of-the-world synopsis is often a tired concept, à la the A Quiet Place franchise. Yet, in the context of a father, Paul (Nicolas Cage), and his two twin […]
Growing up was full of ups and downs and contained some of the best moments of our lives. Yet the sting of heartbreak, high hopes, and crushed dreams also prevailed. Despite those prolific ups and downs, that time remained one of the most transformational periods as we came into our young adult and adult existence. Everyone […]
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