Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Yu Ha
Jason says: “GANGNAM 1970 (or GANGNAM BLUES, the name under which it’s traveling the festival circuit) is the sort of movie where I tend to spend the first ten or fifteen minutes frantically trying to remember the seemingly dozens of
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 5 cats
Director: Karim Aïnouz
Kyle says: “FUTURO BEACH is in danger of being swallowed into the niche sinkhole of gay cinema, and being dismissed for a strict, even boring tri-partite formal structure, bookended by men on motorcycles. That would be a lamentable fate for
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Rating: 3.8 cats
Director: Paul Goodwin
Jason says: “2000 AD is not the only comic that could believably have its history scored with punk rock, but most of the rest burned out fast, or never made any sort of popular impact. 2000 AD has been a
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Derek Kwok Chi-kin | Henri Wong Chi-hang
Jason says: “There are plenty of silly things in FULL STRIKE- it is, in fact, ridiculous more or less non-stop – but the filmmakers never really portray badminton as a sport that is, itself, laughable. They could have, and that
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Lorenzo Vigas
Bruce says: “My first note for FROM AFAR reads ‘out of focus.’ Little did I know when I wrote it how important focus would be in describing the psychological nature of the protagonist, Armando, played by Alfredo Costa (NO, TONY
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Robbie Pickering
Jason says: “FREAKS OF NATURE was originally called ‘The Kitchen Sink’ – some websites are listing its show times under that title – and neither name is great. ‘Freaks’ is generic and not really what the movie is about; ‘Sink’
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2.5 cats
Director: He Jiong
Jason says: “The plot of FOREVER YOUNG could come straight out of a silly sitcom meant for young adults, although I suspect that this hypothetical Chinese ‘Saved by the Bell: The College Years’ would probably go to far less drastic
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.75 cats
Director: Evan Johnson | Guy Maddin
Jason says: “Given that THE FORBIDDEN ROOM wasn’t even really supposed to be a movie, you have to say it turned out pretty well. Conceived as a two-part multimedia project – the first half live ‘seances’ where Guy Maddin and
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Todd Strauss-Schulson
Jason says: “You can tell from the title that this movie is going to be playing on horror movie tropes – the ‘final girl’ being the last survivor of a massacre who takes down the killer – but that’s often
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Rating: 0.5 cats
Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson
Thom says: “For years I’d been reading about the huge best-selling trilogy that topped the sales charts for months on end. Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed were rooted in my consciousness but since I have
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2.25
Director: Mari Asato
Jason says: “The festival program indicates that this film and the game FATAL FRAME were based upon the same book, although the credits indicate that the book was based upon the game before being adapted into this film, but those
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Christian Braad Thomsen
Thom says: “I received 2 free tickets to features at the current LGBT Film Festival so I was thrilled to attend. This film was decidedly difficult to rate because of my obvious subjectivity. Fassbinder is my favorite director for my
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Rating: 2 cats
Director: Tony Chan
Jason says: “Do you ever feel frustrated watching a movie and think, come on, this shouldn’t be so hard – you’ve got a couple attractive young stars, a decent hook, and ninety minutes to play it out; how hard can
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Elizabeth Lucas
Jason says: “FADE TO WHITE alternates between three science fiction stories taking place in and around New York City’s Central Park over the course of 112 years, and while they are in some ways a bit of a mixed bag
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Raul Garcia
Jason says: “Raul Garcia has been making the various pieces of EXTRAORDINARY TALES for a while; three of its five segments, all based upon Edgar Allan Poe stories, are listed on the IMDb as shorts released as far back as
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Ángel Vivas
Jason says: “EXTINCTION starts off problematically, with a prologue that involves three people doing what seems like the same dumb thing in a row, leading to nearly everybody getting killed by zombies. It’s the sort of thing that has the
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Rating: 4.25 cats
Director: Michael Almereyda
Jason says: “I really hope that this one opens fairly wide, because I’d like to give it a second look. I came out of it with an odd sort of ambivalence, liking almost all of what it did but feeling
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3.25
Director: Tian Yu-Sheng
Jason says: “As far as I can tell, the first ‘Qian Ren’ (‘Ex Files’) didn’t have any sort of official release in North America when it came out last year, but that probably doesn’t much matter – though I would
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Rating: 3.75 cats
Director: Patrick Kennelly
Jason says: “Perhaps surprisingly for an underground film festival, a lot of people coming into this show were using the phrase used to describe it in the program – ‘body horror’ – like it was two words that they had
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Alex Garland
Kyle says: “When a robot referred to clinically as the A.I., or Ava (Alicia Vikander), tells Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) that her maker Nathan (Oscar Isaac) is ‘not your friend’ during a power outage, we expect him to pay close attention,
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