OFCS members don’t just write film reviews. Here are several articles you might find interesting.
Best of Lists
List: 20 Underrated & Overlooked 21st Century Horror Movies
Ross Miller @ Thoughts On Film
- Excerpt: I take a look at some great 21st century horror movies that you may not have seen/heard of.
A Most Violent Year
Diego Salgado @ Miradas de Cine [Spanish]
Sicario
Diego Salgado @ Miradas de Cine [Spanish]
Top 10 Sundance 2016
Top Anticipated Sundance 2016
Awards Coverage
List: 20 Underrated & Overlooked 21st Century Horror Movies
Ross Miller @ Thoughts On Film
- Excerpt: I take a look at some great 21st century horror movies that you may not have seen/heard of.
A Most Violent Year
Diego Salgado @ Miradas de Cine [Spanish]
Sicario
Diego Salgado @ Miradas de Cine [Spanish]
Top 10 Sundance 2016
Top Anticipated Sundance 2016
Interviews
Interruption presents our future stars
Joseph Proimakis @ Popaganda.gr [Greek]
- Excerpt: Apart from an engulfing cinematic experience, Giorgos Zois’ feature debut also offers a glimps in the country’s next big stars
Jim Whitaker, producer of “The Finest Hours”
Matt Charman, co-screenwriter of “Bridge of Spies”
Festivals: General Coverage
The Best and Worst of Sundance 2016, Documentary Edition
- Excerpt: 2015 was a banner year for documentaries at the Sundance Film Festival (the slate included Going Clear, Best of Enemies, The Hunting Ground, and Listen to Me Marlon), so it was probably inevitable that this year would feel like a bit of a comedown – and while I wasn’t able to see anywhere near all of them (it’s just not possible!), there weren’t a lot of nonfiction films gathering buzz as knock-your-socks-off great. But those I saw were very good indeed, so here are a few to keep an eye out for in the weeks and months to come.
The Best and Worst of Sundance 2016, Narrative Edition
- Excerpt: This year’s Sundance Film Festival seemed to get off to a rocky start; maybe it was programming and maybe it was poor choices, but I came out of the first couple of days wondering if it was just going to be a weird, off year, and nothing I was hearing from my colleagues seemed to indicate otherwise. But then a series of great movies unspooled, and we ended up with an embarrassment of riches.
Urgent Stories: The Africa World Film Festival at the Missouri History Museum
Andrew Wyatt @ St. Louis Magazine
- Excerpt: The documentary side of African cinema will be the center of attention this weekend when the Missouri History Museum hosts the Ninth Annual Africa World Film Festival (AAWFF), a fitting kick-off for the city’s Black History Month events.
Festivals: Individual Reviews
The Birth of a Nation
- Excerpt: The gifted actor, familiar from ‘Beyond the Lights,’ ‘Red Tails,’ and ‘Arbitrage,’ put everything on the line to make this dramatization of the 1831 slave revolt led by Nat Turner; he not only plays Turner, but wrote, directed, and produced the film as well. You can feel his blood pulsing through every frame of Birth of a Nation, a vital, stirring, and powerful film by and about people of color – and which arrives like a hand grenade in the midst of a deafeningly loud discussion about why that’s such a rarity in contemporary Hollywood.
Dustin Jansick @ Way Too Indie
Certain Women
- Excerpt: There are no verbose emotional arias or chest-beating screaming matches. It’s a collection of the tiniest moments, which accumulate into a kind of devastation.
The Eagle Huntress
Dustin Jansick @ Way Too Indie
The Intervention
- Excerpt: Comedy like this is all about characters, so the opening scenes are a bit on the bumpy side — understandably, as we’re getting to know these people and how they interact. But once these people are established, it’s just pinball; DuVall proves an adroit writer/director, creating durable group dynamics, situating and triangulating these characters off each other.
Joshy
Dustin Jansick @ Way Too Indie
The Land
Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
- Excerpt: Lo and Behold’ isn’t top-shelf Herzog; it doesn’t have the majesty of ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams,’ the sorrow of ‘Into the Abyss,’ or the power of ‘Grizzly Man.’ But it’s still Herzog, and that’s certainly worth celebrating.
Love & Friendship
- Excerpt: Above all (and surely to the relief of those prone to resist costume drama) it’s just a very playful picture, with Stillman throwing in clever little touches like silent movie-style character intro cards and clever on-screen text to illustrate a letter-reading scene. And it’s a spry movie to boot, running barely over 90 minutes, as Stillman adopts a good, fast, almost proto-screwball style that retains (and even adds to) the various plot machinations and abundance of characters without getting bogged down in them.
Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures
- Excerpt: If there’s a complaint to be made, it’s that the squareness of the format doesn’t allow much of a deep dive into what made (and makes) Mapplethorpe so interesting; they’re so busy covering the biographical bases that there’s precious little time to get analytical. But taking its confines into account, there’s much to recommend in ‘Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures.’
Operation Avalanche
Dustin Jansick @ Way Too Indie
White Girl
Dustin Jansick @ Way Too Indie
Wiener-Dog
- Excerpt: And that’s the problem with Solondz these days, in a nutshell; he’s just spinning his wheels, continuing to tell the same stories in the same way, and expecting them to elicit the same response. He’s certainly not the first filmmaker to get stuck in a rut, or, if you’d like to put it more charitably, to stick with a particular style; the catch is that his absurd point-of-view was so specific to its late-‘90s moment that it now seems like a relic, a filmmaker trying his hardest to provoke us with his casual mentions of rape and AIDS, but just coming off desperate.
Essays
2015, a remake year
Diego Salgado @ Diagonal [Spanish]
Destroy All Monsters: Gay Or Straight, Finn/Poe Matters
Reviews of Short Films
Day One
The Present
Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: German Short Animated Film Review
Sanjay’s Super Team
We Can’t Live Without Cosmos
Xico+Xana
Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: Portuguese-Austrian Short Film Review
Other Articles
China Doll
- Excerpt: Al Pacino in David Mamet’s new play.
Film Love Songs, Snow White and Book Giveaway
Betty Jo Tucker @ Movie Addict Headquarters
- Excerpt: During this fun podcast, A.J. Hakari raves about new Snow White Blu-ray, and Betty Jo Tucker plays film love songs. Giveaway plans for a Kindle E-book romance are also explained.
The Morning After: Feb. 1, 2016
- Excerpt: Short review of “Kung Fu Panda 3”
