A polished technical package lends considerable emotional weight to Supremacy, a siege/hostage drama shot through with racial animus that recently made its world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Based on real events, director Deon Taylor’s movie connects largely on the strength of its solid acting and charged stakes, but suffers a bit from muddled plotting and a dramatically diffuse end game. Continue reading LAFF: Supremacy →

Several years ago, in 2011, multi-hyphenate director Evan Glodell and a group of collaborators with whom he shared a long list of short-form collaborations made a weird little film, saturated in feverish tones, called Bellflower. Whatever one thought of that movie itself as a finished narrative product, its construction was so audacious and of a piece as to almost take one’s breath away. The Signal, directed by Will Eubank, is an extraordinarily different work, but one every bit as charged and shot through with cool assurance and technical savvy. It’s the type of indie offering that cuts right through all the noise and clutter, signaling the arrival of undeniable new talents.

Co-written by director Eubank, his brother Carlyle Eubank and David Frigerio, The Signal, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, unfolds in confident shorthand strokes, its characterizations winnowed down to spare essences. It starts off as a road trip movie. Nic Eastman (Brenton Thwaites), his girlfriend Haley Peterson (Olivia Cooke) and his friend and fellow MIT student Jonah Breck (Beau Knapp) are heading west when they decide upon a detour. A mysterious hacker known only as “NOMAD” has been messing with Nic and Jonah, and when they’re able to pinpoint his location, they decide to pay an unscheduled visit. Their directions lead them to an isolated area, however. Suddenly, there’s a flash.

When Nic regains consciousness, he finds himself trapped in a waking nightmare. He’s groggy and injured, and sealed off to boot from Haley and Jonah. A doctor in a hazmat suit, Wallace Damon (Laurence Fishburne), keeps Nic in isolation, informing him that he believes he may have come into contact with aliens. Eventually Nic escapes his enclosed compound, but encounters a number of strangers (including Lin Shaye) who force him to further re-evaluate his impressions of his situation.

The Signal is nominally a science-fiction-rooted thriller, but it’s powered by mystery more than incident, and dread more than horror. In this this regard, the first act especially is rapturous. The film as a whole is beautiful, though — an experiential treat. Eubank has a previous directorial credit under his belt (the little-seen Love), but has also served as a second unit director and cinematographer on a variety of features. Collaborating here with cinematographer David Lanzenberg, Eubank delivers a movie with a visual template that is alluring and hypnotic — the cinematic equivalent of a lonely drive down a dark desert highway. Composer Nima Fakhrara assists this evocation of mood with a score — a slow piano leitmotif which incorporates droning elements — that connotes a kind of high-brow menace.

That the film’s narrative eventually paints itself into a bit of a corner is perhaps somewhat expected. It’s here, too, where the representational tack of the movie’s first act comes back to bite it in the rear end just a little. While the performances herein are uniformly great, the plot separates Nic, Haley and Jonah, and when the story brings them back together it feels like too much time has passed. A stronger channeling of subjective point-of-view or, conversely, a slightly more conventionally structured narrative of investigation that keeps our frazzled trio together would have rooted The Signal, and afforded it more emotional punching power.

Still, the dark, involving swirl of this thought-provoking low-budget effort — a blend of Moon, The Blair Witch Project, THX-1138 and Chronicle, among other titles — doesn’t let go of a viewer easily. Even if there are some hiccups in its wind-down, there’s nowhere else one would rather be while watching it. (Focus, PG-13, 97 minutes)

A stirring nonfiction sociocultural curiosity that taps into the power of sports to bridge divides and develop kinships across incredible distances, director Mirra Bank’s The Only Real Game tells the story of a small pocket of India obsessed with baseball. Narrated by Academy Award winner Melissa Leo, the film is an involving reminder of the fact that ambassadorships need not be political, and that human understanding and connection turns on a much more intimate axis. Continue reading The Only Real Game →

When one talks about personal filmmaking as a pathway to something special, they’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better example than Evolution of a Criminal, director Darius Clark Monroe’s documentary examination of a bank robbery he committed as a teenager. The winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Full Frame Film Festival and part of the Summer Showcase section at the Los Angeles Film Festival, the movie — lent his name by executive producer Spike Lee — is an engrossing evocation of poverty in America, as well as, more pointedly, a moving look at redemption and second chances. Continue reading LAFF: Evolution of a Criminal →

A West Coast premiere at the recent Dances With Films Fest, the documentary 120 Days throws an affecting spotlight on the personal side of immigration, telling the story of a man who counts down the final four months with his family while weighing his options facing a federal “voluntary” self-deportation order.

A recent presentation at the Julien International Film Festival and a competition title at the Dances With Films Fest in Los Angeles, well-meaning indie effort Being Awesome cycles through well-worn clichés of stuck-in-a-rut, cusp-of-thirtysomething frustration, but adds nothing much new or of interest to the emotionally-adrift-guys subgenre.

A world premiere and Grand Jury honorable mention selection at the recently concluded 17th annual Dances With Films Fest, writer-director Jesse Rosen’s The Jazz Funeral is a relaxed, shrewdly observed portrait of the sort of crucible that a lot of young men must pass through in entering into a functional, adult, peer relationship with their father.

An amusing, madcap blend of social satire, character comedy and well-worn road trip tropes, Gone Doggy Gone, co-written and directed by Kasi Brown and Brandon Walter, unfolds against the backdrop of a kidnapped canine. The low-budget indie film effectively winds up a bunch of characters who are by degrees self-centered, delusional and inept, and then spends the remainder of its 89-minute running time bouncing them off one another at odd angles, like rubber balls in a stairwell.

The Best of Fest winner at the First Glance Film Fest and the Audience Award winner at the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival in April, Gone Doggy Gone centers on Los Angelenos Abby and Elliott Harmon (Brown and Walter), a married professional couple on emotional autopilot who dote on their teacup terrier, Laila, treating her like a baby. After a series of personal and occupational humiliations send their (overly) devoted dog-sitter Jill (Shaina Vorspan) into a tailspin, she snaps and kidnaps Laila, emailing the Harmons a ransom video. Abby and Elliott quickly uncover the truth, but Jill hits the open road. A pursuit follows, with the Harmons’ wisecracking, weed-smoking friend Kat (Kate Connor) tagging along for the ride. After disastrous attempts at interception on their own, along with other assorted mishaps, Abby and Elliott hire Dan (Jeff Sloniker, seemingly channeling John Belushi), a slovenly, bumbling, would-be private investigator who works with his father Stan (Office Space’s Richard Riehle). As they then nominally tail him and await results, though, Dan becomes smitten with Jill, further feeding a roundelay of misunderstanding and haplessness.

At its core, Gone Doggy Gone has a great concept — something that’s both easily relatable from a comedic perspective and, in the manner in which it essays the way pets are kind of a starter baby for DINK-ers who in earlier generations would’ve already started a family, plugged into the current zeitgeist. Brown and Walter’s instincts encompass plenty of comedy of debasement, but the ranginess and rapid-fire pacing of their work as much as anything else assure that Gone Doggy Gone never loses hold of a viewer’s interest. There are also some great purposefully terrible local commercials and a dream-sequence riff on The Silence of the Lambs, showcasing a canny sense of spoofery.

In its third act — with a pit stop at a hippie friend of Kat’s, and a reversed blackmail plot — the film succumbs a bit to the kitchen-sink instincts of so many independent films, in which bigger and more clamorous is confused with necessarily better. Low-budget films that lack the resources of some of their bigger-budget genre counterparts often seem to reach for hijinks, writ large, in an effort to clinch market salability. The character of Dan, already a bit broadly sketched, figures into the proceedings more and more, but what’s meant to track as a strand of misguided obsession paralleling Jill’s just seems like misspent time. It feels like there’s a slightly more reigned in treatment of the same premise and end game that could have yielded even richer results.

What Gone Doggy Gone has going for it, though, is solid banter writing and some crisp, engaging characterizations and acting. The diminutive and demure Vorspan, playing a character who seems like she’s from a Todd Solondz film by way of the Farrelly brothers (or perhaps the other way around), is a real treat — cracked and vulnerable in a uniquely compelling way. Brown, meanwhile, has the wicked gleam in her eye of a raging, on-the-warpath, manic-sad compulsive, which works well in contrast with Walter’s more baseline, normalized exasperation at the unfolding situation. Ultimately, whether you’re the one who’s pooch-fixated or it’s someone else in your life, the freewheeling absurdism of Gone Doggy Gone will strike a chord of amusement. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Buzzworm Films, R, 89 minutes)

From mid-May 2007 through the summer of the following year, Sebastian Junger and his colleague Tim Hetherington chronicled the deployment of a platoon of American troops in a remote and notoriously deadly Afghanistan valley. The resulting experiential travelogue of war reportage, 2010’s Restrepo, picked up a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. The follow-up, Korengal, comes three years after Hetherington was tragically killed covering the civil war in Libya, and builds on the psychological perspicacity of its predecessor, delving in a very simple and direct way into what war and some of its aftereffects feel like. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Saboteur Media/Goldcrest Films/Outpost Films, R, 84 minutes)

Director Josh Boone’s adaptation of John Green’s bestselling novel about two teenagers who meet at a cancer support group and fall in love, The Fault in Our Stars is engagingly plotted and anchored by rich characterizations — a swollen tearjerker that confirms the star presence of Shailene Woodley. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 126 minutes)