Abby Olcese

2 weeks ago | thepitchkc.com | Abby Olcese

It's always a bummer when content and concept don't match up. This is doubly the case with Isaiah Saxon's The Legend of Ochi, a movie deeply inspired by practical effects-driven fantasies like E.T., The NeverEnding Story, and Labyrinth. Saxon and his crew attempt to reintroduce that same tactility - the movie's main furry little guy is a stunning (and adorable) puppet - and it's pretty effective. Unfortunately, Saxon doesn't give his human characters the same attention to detail.

3 weeks ago | thepitchkc.com | Abby Olcese

In the 1950s, Douglas Sirk made melodramas that combined soapy plots with sharp commentary on class, race, gender and sexuality in mid-century America. Against a technicolor backdrop, movies like Written on the Wind, All that Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life depicted characters struggling against social standards, domestic expectations or prescribed cultural roles to pursue the lives they desired.

3 weeks ago | thepitchkc.com | Abby Olcese

Andrew Ahn's The Wedding Banquet is about two gay couples (one pair female, the other male) who enter into a messy straight-presenting marriage arrangement to please the strict, traditional grandparents of one of their group. In most versions of this story - and indeed the 1993 Ang Lee movie of the same name on which Ahn's film is based - keeping the charade going would make up most of the movie, with everything falling apart at the end of the second act, followed by hard-won reconciliation.

1 month ago | thepitchkc.com | Abby Olcese

For the first third of Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza's Warfare, almost nothing happens. It's the most tension I've ever felt watching a movie in a theater. Let me explain: Warfare is an immersive, memory-based depiction of a group of Navy SEALS (including Mendoza, played here by Reservation Dogs' D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) on a 2006 Iraq war mission that got really violent. Two Iraqi scouts were killed, and two of their company were severely wounded.

1 month ago | thepitchkc.com | Abby Olcese

One of the most frequent comments you hear about Columbia's True/False Film Festival is that it's different from any other. It's the kind of statement that would be easy to brush off if you weren't hearing it from so many different groups of people: repeat attendees, new converts, veterans of bigger festivals like Sundance, Toronto, or SXSW, and, perhaps most notably, filmmakers.