Quickies to Catch Up (pt 2): Female led thrillers and CG beasts in battle

by Nathaniel R

In an attempt to clear our cache of notes and fill out that review page for 2021, we're addressing movies we didn't get around to discussing in full for your commenting pleasure. Better late than never! As we were typing these Luca emerged but it's so good it deserves one big post or several little ones before the Oscars so more on that soon. If you missed part one of this review catch-up, that's here. After the jump brief thoughts on four films: Godzilla vs Kong, Mortal Kombat, Those Who Wish Me Dead, and The Woman in the Window...

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"I Carry You With Me"

by Nick Taylor 

I am both tremendously enthusiastic and a bit disappointed that I Carry You With Me is finally getting a theatrical release. Enthused because it’s a goddamn gem that ranks among the best films of last year, and sits right alongside Lingua Franca and Welcome to Chechnya as one of the very best queer films. The disappointment comes from the fact that, as far as anyone's concerned, this is a 2020 film. Distributor Sony Pictures Classics went out of its way to give this an awards-qualifying run despite pushing its wide release date further and further back. As with the aesthetically entrancing documentary Gunda or the tonally triumphant, richly acted French Exit (both also distributed by SPC), it’s a bit mystifying that this was seen as the superior strategy rather than letting I Carry You With Me’s reputation build over the course of this year. Art doesn’t need awards, sure, but it’s a bummer that Heidi Ewing’s fiction film debut won’t be able to generate the sort of grassroots attention that Isabel Sandoval, Eliza Hittman, Kelly Reichardt, and Kitty Green all earned to different degrees over the extended 2020 season.

But enough griping! Legitimate criticisms about a film’s release strategy shouldn’t totally overcome the fact that such an engrossing, formally adventurous and emotionally direct feature has gotten a theatrical release. Compared to Lingua Franca and Welcome to Chechnya, it’s by far among the most approachable of the three, which shouldn’t bely how adventurous its storytelling approach is...

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Quickies to Catch Up (pt 1): The Conjuring 3, A Quiet Place 2, Barb & Star 1

It's been difficult to get back into the swing of things, especially since we're short on funds given how last season went with Hollywood shut down. That said, we're feeling a swing of summer energy coming so... watch out? stay tuned? cross fingers? Though we reviewed quite a few indies, docs, and festival entries, we've given mainstream stuff short shrift other than the beautifully made but maddeningly soft Cruella, the wondrously exuberant In the Heights, and the utterly lame Thunder Force. We'll be shocked if a worse movie arrives this year than the latter, which is sad since it's so easy to root for both of its leading actresses in a general career sense.

Without further ado let's get started on the catch-up (and fill out that review page) with four movies you probably saw that we didn't talk about. Let's fix that in the comment section...

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Doc Corner: Tribeca '21 — 'Socks on Fire' and 'North by Current' explore queerness in rural America

By Glenn Dunks

It’s thankfully no longer all that rare to see stories of queer people in rural settings. Especially in documentary. But that doesn’t make it any less special to see their stories—once so often relegated to traumatic narratives centering violence—told by queer filmmakers. Two films in particular at the recently wrapped Tribeca Film Festival examined the changing dynamics of (some) American small-town life. Both take elements of memoir and even non-traditional storytelling to create unique films that make strong arguments for the sheer human decency that many in minority communities desire.

While Bo McGuire’s Socks on Fire and Angelo Madsen Minax’s North by Current tell stories that confront the still very tangible realities of being LGBTQ+ outside of the more accepting big cities, they do so with artistic flair and the confidence that comes from generational change...

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Tribeca 2021: "Lorelei" review

by Jason Adams

It's always a thrill to see fantastically talented supporting actors who don't always get the leading roles they deserve actually get the leading roles they deserve. Director Sabrina Doyle's post-prison drama called Lorelei, which just debuted at Tribeca, gives us a two-fer on that front. It stars Pablo Schreiber (of Orange is the New Black and American Gods) and Jena Malone (of Donnie Darko and The Hunger Games and I could just keep going -- she's a long-time personal fave) as, respectively, the ex-convict looking to set his life straight and the girl he left behind. Lorelei starts out kinda obvious but ultimately ends up swerving, thanks to the sheer willpower of its leads and an openness by its filmmaker to follow an idiosyncratic path alongside them. It veers into far more interesting territory than you might first guess. 

Schreiber and Malone each have enormous screen presence, if not necessarily in the same ways...

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