Reviews:
 Photo Courtesy Sarasota Film Festival.
At one point in Scott Hicks' Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, the composer jokes that by blending Western and Eastern sensibilities in music he was creating work so radical that he was often mistaken for an idiot, and in fact at times still is. As Glass laughs off the comment, Hicks' quietly enthralling biodoc blooms into a penetrating study of one man's very specific, very intimate creative process. In thorough although not belabored vignettes, Glass catalogues the composer's identity as child, student, father, husband, collaborator and spiritual seeker. Read more...
 Photo Courtesy Sarasota Film Festival.
In this Academy-award nominated stop-motion animation, directors Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski's fashion a morally and metaphysically disturbing environment lavished with gorgeous detail and heartbreaking nuance. With darkness all around and uncertainty the reign of the day, Madame Tutli Putli explores mortality and human fraility with mute innocence and only a little light of hope. It's the type of macabre statement that invigorates the primitive in the psyche, exposing its audience to a Grimm's fairytale for adulthood. Read more...
 Photo Courtesy Sarasota Film Festival.
Lynn Shelton's My Effortless Brilliance is at its best in moments of awkward, intelligent and quirky humor. The precision with the sophomore feature helmer crafts her comic punches hits with such astounding realism that it's only natural to empathize with the sometimes trivial, sometimes dire plights of her much flawed characters. What undermines Shelton's gift for comedy, however, is her penchant for sentiment that rambles itself out into tedium. Read more...
 Photo Courtesy Sarasota Film Festival.
Beautifully textured CG meets a simple, sad love story of Romeo and Juliet likening in Alex Weil's One Rat Short. When a struggling street rat by chance chases a floating Cheetos bag, he sets out on a journey that introduces him to his white as snow lab rat lifemate.Read more...
 Photo Courtesy Sarasota Film Festival.
Illana Trachtman's Praying With Lior falls within the current trend of documentaries broaching compelling subjects with a less than artful aesthetic, and so while the story of Lior Liebling, a young man with a high-functioning form of Down syndrome, stirs the heart, it doesn't remain in the consciousness longer than the films' 87-minute run time. Read more...
 Photo Courtesy Sarasota Film Festival.
When it comes to film, 'cute' usually reads as derogative, that polite way of saying, "Rent it later." In the case of Pierre Salvadori's peppy romantic-comedy Priceless, 'cute' really is meant as a compliment. With his smart, uplifting tale of gold digger Irène (a fantastically beautiful but horrifying thin Audrey Tautou) and innocent, doe-eyed hotel clerk Jean (Gad Elmaleh), Salvadori hits the funny, sweet chords in a heartwarming and utterly engaging way. Script by Salvadori and Benoît Graffin moves in perfect rhythm, its love story development both comfortable and yet absolutely and joyously suprising.Read more...
 Photo Courtesy Sarasota Film Festival.
As if veteran animator Claude Cloutier sat down with a dictionary and wrote for himself amusing sets of antonyms and contradictions, his gorgeously detailed short Sleeping Betty champions visual absurdity and already twisted logic then gone to mayhem. Aleins serve on court; witches vacuum with brooms; and a moose head marries a dragon body. Much like Terry Gilliam's work for Monty Python, it's a wonderful world of fantastical weirdness, and it's just the type of vision that makes animation so thrilling as a medium. Read more...
 Photo Courtesy Sarasota Film Festival.
Byron Karabatsos' Still Birth Chicken succeeds primarily in inducing gastrointestinal discomfort. Other than that, it succeeds in little else. An experimental parody of the starving artist cliche, the short chronicles a depressing day of starvation as a painter (Gabriel T. Byrne), rather than eat the egg of his still life, makes a thin soup of limp vegetables and leftover chicken bones. Read more...
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
