Perhaps the most polarizing film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, writer-director Matt Sobel’s Take Me To The River has left some critics grossed out and others fascinated with this evocative, probing mood piece that winds up a bit thin.
Essays
Best of Sundance NEXT 2015: Poekel’s bittersweet and quiet Christmas Again
Christmas, Again is a quiet, subtle film from writer-director Charles Poekel, about a lonely man, aptly named Noel (Kentucker Audley), who spends the week before Christmas selling and delivering Christmas trees.
Review: John Crowley’s moving, romantic Brooklyn
Colm Toíbin’s novel Brooklyn was in many ways a perfect book, a taut and heartwrenching story of a young Irish woman, Eilis, and her traumatic experience immigrating to America in the 1950s: the way it left her in limbo, no longer comfortable in Ireland and always an outsider in her new home. John Crowley’s screen adaptation, written by the incomparable Nick Hornby, is even more emotionally resonant — if not as poetically constructed as Toíbin’s prose — in part because it’s a more modern, feminist take on the story.
Sundance Review: Sewitsky’s touching and complex Homesick is among the festival’s best
Norwegian filmmaker Anne Sewitsky’s Homesick is moving, funny, and devastating — and one of the best films at Sundance 2015. Homesick is now streaming on Netflix UK
Glassland is a sensitive portrait of a boy becoming his parent’s parent
Gerard Barrett’s sensitive and subtle drama Glassland takes a haunting look at what happens when a child is forced to parent his parent: the pressures, the shame, the lies, the anger, and the constant stress of being responsible for someone for whom you shouldn’t be responsible. Although it’s a strong study of the effects on its characters — Jack Reynor (What Richard Did) and Toni Collette (About a Boy) give terrific performances — the plot is otherwise thin, the psychological insights somewhat lacking.
Sundance 2015 Review: Larry Kramer in Love and Anger captures both the man and the LGBT movement
By laying bare the horrors of dealing with AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, Carlomusto infuses us with the same anger and impatience that Kramer felt.