Payton McCarty-Simas

1 month ago | brightlightsfilm.com | Payton McCarty-Simas

I love it when someone just absolutely shoves the vision down your throat. * * *Vulcanizadora, Joel Potrykus’ fifth feature film, hit the festival circuit last spring with a bang, earning him a Special Jury Prize at Tribeca for his performance as a deadbeat dad at loose ends. The Michigan native’s latest is an idiosyncratic tone poem, a cypher he may or may not want you to solve.

1 month ago | filminquiry.com | Payton McCarty-Simas

There are certain films that capture a time and place so vividly that they feel more like fragments of the past–– or dirty handprints on a bathroom mirror–– than trips to the theater. So it is with Going Down (1982), Hayden Keenan’s self-distributed Australian cult classic (newly restored in 4K by Muscle Distribution), which delights in spreading graffiti and pixie dust all over Sydney’s post-punk scene.

2 months ago | filminquiry.com | Payton McCarty-Simas

As Stephen Hawking once said, “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.” It’s in that spirit that every year, for the entire month of April, my partner and I devote ourselves to a screening series unified not by genre, not by director, or actor, or era… but by monkeys.

2 months ago | filminquiry.com | Payton McCarty-Simas

Documentarian Courtney Stephens and actress Callie Hernandez came together to make a project inspired by their shared experiences losing larger-than-life fathers. Invention, the film that emerged, is a delicate, quasi-experimental blend of metafiction, archival TV/home movie footage of Hernandez‘ father, and making-of documentary footage on their process that takes grief as its starting point.

2 months ago | filminquiry.com | Payton McCarty-Simas

In Invention, an airily shaggy, collaborative piece of improvised, genre-fluid auto-fiction by documentarian Courtney Stephens and actress Callie Hernandez (La La Land, Alien: Covenant), a grieving daughter falls down a low-key conspiracy rabbit hole of the kind we rarely see today.