Trace Sauveur

2 months ago | awardswatch.com | Trace Sauveur

It’s all too easy to say that Friendship, the debut film from writer-director Andrew DeYoung starring Tim Robinson, plays like a feature-length version of I Think You Should Leave—possibly to the point of redundancy. But the film invites the comparison, not only through Robinson’s love-it-or-hate-it brand of weirdo abrasiveness but also via its depiction of a surreal world seemingly inhabited purely by an endless barrage of lunatics.

2 months ago | awardswatch.com | Trace Sauveur

You’d be pretty hard-pressed to find a post-apocalyptic film that doesn’t feel cobbled together from a storied history of derivative parts. Stories of loners, families, or factions surviving a world gone uncivilized—searching for any vestiges of life while avoiding hostile survivors and being forced into acts of vicious violence—evoke dozens of familiar properties that define the genre’s makeup. Director R.T. Thorne’s post-apocalypse thriller 40 Acres isn’t immune to genre familiarity.

2 months ago | awardswatch.com | Trace Sauveur

The Baltimorons is Jay Duplass’ first original feature film in 14 years. One half of the American independent cinema duo heavyweights of the aughts and 2010s, The Duplass Brothers—completed by Mark Duplass—the last we heard from Jay in terms of a proper narrative film was 2011’s Jeff Who Lives at Home, co-directed with his brother.

2 months ago | pastemagazine.com | Trace Sauveur

Listen to this article Your browser does not support the audio element. “Do you think it’s endangered?”That’s one of the first questions out of nebbish attorney Elliot Kinter’s (Paul Rudd) mouth as he studies the body of the strange-looking horse he’s just fatally maimed with his car on a winding Canadian mountain road.

2 months ago | pastemagazine.com | Trace Sauveur

Listen to this article Your browser does not support the audio element. Paul Feig’s A Simple Favor hit theaters as an amusing skewering of the very material it was adapting. It envisioned the tawdry airport novel thrills of Darcey Bell’s novel of the same name as a darkly comedic, light-on-its-feet mystery that consistently refused to take itself too seriously, warping the tone of the book into something a little askew.