Browsing: Sundance 2015

Film Festival True Story (dir. Rupert Goold, 2015)
0

True-crime stories have long fascinated the general public, reaching back decades on film and television and probably centuries in print. Sometimes the how, but more often, the why becomes an obsessive subject of inquiry. The roots of crime, specifically murder where true-crime stories in print and on film are concerned, can be traced back to sociological, cultural, and psychological causes. Biology might play…

Film Festival The Nightmare (dir. Rodney Ascher, 2015)
0

A fascinating, if frustratingly incomplete, exploration of “sleep paralysis” and night terrors through the eyes of several people uncovered by director Rodney Ascher (Room 237), The Nightmare offers more chills and scares than most mainstream and non-mainstream horror films. Where Room 237 focused on…

Film Festival The Stanford Prison Experiment (dir. Kyle Patrick Alvarez, 2015)
0

To call director Kyle Patrick Alvarez (C.O.G.) and one-time South Park screenwriter Tim Talbot’s The Stanford Prison Experiment, a chilling, disturbing, discomfiting dramatic recreation of the title experiment, a horror film might sound, at least initially, facile or simply wrong, but the increasingly humiliating, punitive encounters between “guards” and “prisoners” (student volunteers in…

Film Festival Last Days in the Desert (dir. Rodrigo García, 2015)
0

Reverential, respectful, minus the overt sermonizing and pontificating all too typical of New Testament-based or Biblical dramas, Rodrigo Garcia’s (Albert Dobbs, Mother and Child, Nine Lives) latest film, Last Days in the Desert, gives us a human Jesus (Ewan McGregor) – or as he’s called here, Yeshua – doubtful of himself, of his relationship with God, even of his voice. Not yet fully formed as the…