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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
Alexandra Simpson’s No Sleep Till is an impressionistic look at a small beach town in south Florida awaiting a large Hurricane to pass through. Simpson’s interest lies not in classic disaster movie set pieces, but rather in sitting with these Floridians deep into the night as they wait out the storm. The French-American Simpson spent sections of her childhood in Atlantic Beach, Florida, and this familiarity helped her rally the small community together to help her make her debut feature.
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
“The working man is a sucker” — so reads the opening title card of Joel Alfonso Vargas’ debut feature, Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) — but no one said anything about hustling. Rico (Juan Collado), the 19-year-old at the movie’s center, might not work straight, but he works hard.
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
Alexandra Simpson’s debut feature, No Sleep Till, is hardly a typical disaster movie. There’s no panicked fleeing, no looting, no screaming and crying. Her approach to depicting the apocalypse, the meteorological kind we’re so used to by now, exacerbated by the untamable will of man, is to immerse us in the eerie stillness of its prelude.
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
The historical biopic is a cinematic genre defined more by its pitfalls than its merits, laden as these films can be with historical revisionism, unintended anachronism, and predictable plot beats. Perhaps most insidiously, films that purport to tell the “true story” of deceased individuals’ lives risk flattening complex and contradictory individuals into two-dimensional symbols of triumph or tragedy.
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
One of the harshest realities in life is a lack of closure. The sudden death of a loved one, the dissolution of a serious relationship, the disappearance of a wedding ring; whatever the case may be, the universe frequently hands us improbable and unknowable scenarios without the benefit of an assumed outcome. It’s a cruel and unforgiving actuality inextricably linked to all of existence, and it also forms the foundation of The Height of the Coconut Trees, a new film by Chinese filmmaker Du Jie.
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1 week ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
When last we left Alex Garland, he was busy parsing the American left/right divide and the moral responsibilities of war journalism in the phenomenally stupid Civil War, an intentional provocation that bore no actual point of view. In doing press for that film, Garland lamented that those receiving the movie negatively only did so because he didn’t delineate which “side” the movie took or meaningfully detail circumstances of the the conflict he’d conceived.
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2 weeks ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
There’s a scene in Alex Garland’s Civil War, in which a man is shot in the heart and killed. The man is from Hong Kong, that wonderful city where East meets West. In what little we see of this man in the film, this is what we learn about him: his name is Tony, he is a journalist traveling across the United States with colleague Bohai to cover the film’s titular, hypothetical civil war.
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2 weeks ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
It’s always a strange experience when a self-consciously campy horror film pulls out something genuinely emotional, if only for about a minute. Christopher Landon’s Drop is generally content to be exactly what you’d expect from its premise: a movie about the first date from hell thanks to people constantly checking their smartphones during dinner.
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2 weeks ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
For a film with such a coy name, we necessarily prepare, consenting or not, to play a game of comparison: why did James Benning call this film Breathless? Regardless of its appeal, the game exists. So when this single-shot film opens with workers chainsawing a large tree on a remote mountain road, dismissing an allusion to Godard’s jump cuts in Breathless becomes difficult. A metaphor for hacking away perhaps — in this film a tree, and in Godard’s a stagnancy in film form?
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2 weeks ago | 
inreviewonline.com | Luke Gorham
A man, a woman, their bodies wrapped once in golden ornament, and then again in Klimt’s golden cosmos. He cradles her head and reaches down to kiss her; she closes her eyes, waiting for his lips. The Kiss: an allegory of love, reproduced from poster to pencil case into a banality that can’t completely strip the painting of its beauty. And yet, look closer. The woman’s face is turned, the man’s hands grip tightly — is she trying to prise them from her neck?
