Our coverage of films at Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2025.
Reviews
Topp 10 Möst is an endearing Icelandic road movie that finds humor in the morbid and grim. Arna (Helga Braga Jónsdóttir) is a middle aged divorcee and horror-prop maker who has recently lost the will to live. After a few false starts on her suicide, she figures that she should
Reviews
The Green Buffalo Media created about indigenous people and issues on Turtle Island (North America) are often lacking, falling into myriad dehumanizing tropes. The Green Buffalo manages to avoid these pitfalls by (surprise!) treating its indigenous subjects as real people. The film covers an initiative by members of the Lower
Reviews
What a brilliant, brilliant, BRILLIANT film. This is one of those films you are EXCITED for other people to discover because it is simply SO DAMN GOOD. Yes, here at OBSCURAE we do not talk down films we don’t like (and we’ll see if my boss and friend
This review comes to us from our On-The-Ground correspondent and Santa Barbara native, Jack O’Mahoney. If Dory the monkey has 100 fans I am one of them. If Dory the monkey has 1 fan I am that fan. If Dory the monkey has no fans then I am dead
Reviews
‘And just like that I stepped back into my body again. It wasn’t a trickle, it was more like a flood.’ Village Keeper stands out by not following the route of comforting the audience by making the single black mother bring up superhuman strength to fight adversity but instead
Reviews
In our world, storms level dreams, and farmers become construction workers. This was a very emotional film about forced goodbyes, a relocation of the cowboys to the big city, against their will, away from their true loves, divorced from what makes them them. Under the sword of Climate Change, much
Reviews
An incredibly ominous premise, executed with incredible style. So, so beautiful, and reckoning with grief in such a unique and confronting way. I was promised a utopia, but this is quite clearly speculative fiction on the side of dystopia, however calm things seem in the now of the story. The
Festivals
This review comes to us from our On-The-Ground correspondent and Santa Barbara native, Jack O’Mahoney. This is a propaganda film. Let me explain. For a political documentary centering on the fallout of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and clearly produced for a “Western” (likely US American) audience, My Stolen Planet
Festivals
The premise is delightful and intriguing, despite it not being the first film to explore this idea. What makes this short stand out is the beautiful, genuinely delivered final dialogue that holds the emotional core of the film. ‘4th Dementia’ takes you by the shoulders through its first act of
On the surface, as explained, the film seemed to be a heist movie or a spy thriller. It focused on a woman whose job was to infiltrate and uncover affairs, using social tricks of the trade to reveal the true dramas and dismantle the relationships between husbands and mistresses from
Reviews
This review comes to us from our On-The-Ground correspondent and Santa Barbara native, Jack O’Mahoney. Wild Gleaming Space is a documentary that is equal parts lyrical and investigative, and so beautifully shot I thought it was a narrative film until about twenty minutes in. Beginning in the Panamanian rainforest,
Festivals
I have told everyone i’ve ever met who operated in the Film age how much I do not envy them one bit. I am a kid who knows how to respect my elders - and the work that went in to making a movie back in the day is