Film
The Baltimorons: Love is One Dental Cavity Away
The Baltimorons is a fresh film, maybe the first improv based film that’s actually good, and it wields a startling emphasis on character conflict behind the public affairs of its loser leads.
Michel Abdulaziz
Michel Abdulaziz is a reviewer and film journalist with interest in the intersection between film and culture and all the politics therein.
Film
Pools: Floatation Device Not Included
There's something real here under its boozy convos between gasps of air, in being lost inside a shame spiral, but when it comes to exploring it? Not as such; these characters gesture at depth, but Pools has little to give besides what it can tease out of its performances.
Film
Lurker: They Long To Be (Close To You)
The ambiguity the film leads with is a provocation, with a point; it's a freaky decomposition of not the business or psychosis of fame, but the spirit of its artistry, the chase, the race. Lurker is star-screwer cinema, BRAT but red, a dark oblivion of content creatives and their very many vices.
Reviews
Together: U + Me = Us
Michael Shanks’s first feature is one wicked spitfire of a horror film, and if its metaphors seem heavy-handed, it has the decency at least to deliver them in the nastiest package possible.
Film
Jurassic World: Rebirth is Pure Popcorn Fun
There'll never be another Jurassic Park, the film too strong, too sharply drawn to recapture. So maybe we shouldn't try. Rebirth is in that register; beautifully shot, exciting, and understanding of the appeal of a silly diversion without much thought behind it.
Film
🇺🇸Materialists is All About Love, But Less Than The Sum of its Parts
Good cinematography can obscure bad writing, and I'm not really sold on what Materialists is selling about us. The film has charm and disarms in funny little interludes, yet it's disinterested in anything besides the aesthetic.
Film
OH, HI! | OBSCURAE at TriBeCa
Tied Up Tight and Toxic, OH, HI! is a Heartstruck Misery for the Situationship Generation.
Festivals
Ride Or Die | OBSCURAE at TriBeCa
With Ride Or Die, Josalynn Smith transfuses grungy 90s dissatisfaction into the chassis of a beautifully shot modern feature, painted red, peeling to blue, then blossoming to a pale lilac.
Festivals
Fior Di Latte | OBSCURAE at TriBeCa
Fiore Di Latte punctures wacky with doses of real, and Charlotte Ercoli uses the madness like an easel to paint a woefully accurate portrait of addiction.
Festivals
Twinless | OBSCURAE at TriBeCa
Twinless is slightly sorta like Vertigo, on poppers, running on the energy of an off the walls 2000s movie laced with the spirit of a Hitchcockian thriller.
Festivals
Esta Isla is A Grueling Love Letter to Puerto Rico | OBSCURAE at TriBeCa
Esta Isla films in the dialect of Tropical Realism, austere and surreal, a bit verité: it makes no attempts at hiding because it holds itself plain to see.
Festivals
Paradise Records | OBSCURAE at TriBeCa
Paradise Records is of a lost artifact type, when punky, punchy storytelling was the rage. It's tone more flaccid in spaces, its pace bogged, trips on jokes better off left on the cutting room floor, yet the heart is there and the ride lively.