Tribeca 2019: "Come to Daddy"

Team Experience reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason Adams

Come to Daddy opens like a big-screen reboot of Schitt's Creek, with Elijah Wood working his best elaborate David Rose ensemble of flappy black fabrics without discernible seams. He's yanking a wheelie suitcase through a no place field. Slowly, the cinema happens -- the field gives way to the trees, a forest, a gorgeous coastline, all while Elijah's Moe-hairdo and black nail polish paint him as a rank outsider in this place of nature and wonder.

Soon enough we see that he's doing what all us fancy city boys must do at one point or another -- he's going home. Except not entirely...

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Review: The Curse of La Llorona

by Tony Ruggio

Latino audiences are the leading demo for moviegoing so Hollywood ignores them at their own peril. Cynical though it is, somebody at Warner Bros said "no mas" and rang James Wan to add one more wrinkle to his ever-expanding Conjuring universe.

Serving as producer, Wan's fingerprints are everywhere. From swooping dollies and immaculate crane work, to an early scene of kids frolicking to 70's tunes, La Llorona often flatters the original with homage. The simple foreboding of a dark corner in the room or a hazy reflection in the mirror, it’s all there and it works for the most part...

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Pussywillows! Serial Mom at 25

by Salim Garami

What's good?

The existence of Serial Mom 25 years ago establishes that America’s current obsession with true crime stories – with the likes of Serial and American Crime Story and the never-ending avalanche of Netflix documentaries – is not something remotely new to our day and age. Hell, it wasn’t even new to 1994; many of the social observations Serial Mom makes arguably were already well before up to the previous year’s The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. There is little prophetic in the satire but there is A LOT of scary forecasting regarding the OJ Simpson murder case that was just around the corner at the time of its release...

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New Podcast: Us, Dumbo, The Beach Bum, and Gloria Bell

by Murtada Elfadl, Chris Feil, and Nathaniel R

 

Now that 2019 movies are more than underway, a new season of the Podcast is upon us! 

Index (55 minutes)
00:01 Julianne Moore is Gloria Bell
12:30 Jordan Peele's Us starring Lupita Nyong'o  [MAJOR SPOILERS]
33:30 Tim Burton's Dumbo
40:00 Randomness
42:50 Harmony Korine's The Beach Bum and Matthew McConaughey's strange year
52:00 Randomness

Supplemental Reading
• Film Comment Gloria Bell review
• Murtada's Beach Bum review
• Chris's Us review
• Jason's Serenity review
• Paulina García's great performance in the original Gloria

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Gloria Bell, Us, Dumbo

Review: The Wind

by Chris Feil

Capturing the emotional and topographical emptiness of the American West, director Emma Tammi’s The Wind is a horror film that succeeds through its sparseness. The desert landscape that surrounds first settler Lizzy Macklin and her husband Isaac becomes a horrifying abyss of the unknown. As Lizzy stares out at her uninhabited surroundings, waiting patiently for more enterprising souls to arrive, that abyss stares right back into her.

What unfolds in this slim and mighty pickax of horror is a terrifying case of the plains. It sure proves psychologically claustrophobic looking out on the unending expanse of a home on the range, where yesterday and today, real and imagined all blur together in isolate malaise. Don't confuse the film's modesty for a lack of depth, for this creaky well runs deep.

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