Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF)

Reconstructing the last day in a man’s life was the difficult task put to director Ryan Coogler with Fruitvale Station.  The events leading up to Oscar Grant’s untimely death on New Year’s Day 2009 is the basis for the story, the sensationalized media frenzy that came afterwards is left out of Fruitvale Station, giving the […]

The unhappy, bored housewife dilemma is no longer confined to narrative storytelling about heterosexual couples thanks to Concussion, a movie that gets a great deal of things right with representation, but falters when it comes to the scandalous underbelly of its story.  “After 40, you have to choose between your face and your ass.”–the […]

The blessed event of pregnancy, made unforgettably horrifying in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, has found yet another outlet to promote birth control with first-time Director Brian Netto’s Delivery.  Written by Netto and Adam Schindler, Delivery uses the found-footage motif to tell the story of Kyle and Rachel Massy’s road to parenthood, as the stars of […]

Found footage has a secure home in horror movies, and with Europa Report the science fiction genre gets its best found footage film to date.  From director Sebastián Cordero, his first English-language film Europa Report tells the story of a privately funded space mission to one of Jupiter’s Moons.  The hope of the crew, and […]

The sounds are heard around a burgeoning middle-class street in Brazil’s Recife, half of which used to be owned by silver-bearded patriarch Francisco, but which is now mostly tower blocks. First-time feature director Kleber Mendonça Filho reworks some of his shorts material to lay out a mosaic of life on this particular, present-day street, both […]