A+ username, by the way.

It's not really seamy in the noir-ish sense, but I love John Sayles' Sunshine State for embracing all the sweat, languor, and bad taste of coastal small-town Florida.

No worries! Stacking all the reviews here, along with the comments, makes it confusing enough to navigate here.

The festival frequently insists that UCR isn’t somehow lower than the main competition, but even its name (roughly translated: films that the fest has a certain regard for) begs to differ.

I can be really hot/cold on Lynch overall, and - being not the biggest fan of FWWM - I came into this with a lot of skepticism, but holy hell did I love it. Even the stuff that didn't quite work… worked, if that makes sense.

Strong disagreement.

The Loneliest Planet similarly hinges on the guy's instinctive cowardice-in-the-moment, which then shifts how he and his loved one perceive their relationship. The movies are very, very different but it's hard not to shake that moment in both cases.

On the off chance people haven't seen it, would you be okay with editing spoiler tags in there?

I admit that I didn't care much for Force Majeure (I couldn't shake the superior film, from a few years before, that had beat it to that Big Moment), but the description of the performance art scene sounds so right that I'm immediately on board for this. Congrats, Dowd: you've made me want to see a film I had no…

Nah, I think it's worthwhile, and hardly indulgent - it's, what?, two or three paragraphs on a day when only one film screened? Let em give some context to where and how these reviews are written, since festivals aren't a "normal" filmgoing experience and that affects how the films are appraised (even D'Angelo, last…

Does that make the villain Alex Jones?

Does Venom read bedtime stories to children? 'Cause then I'm totally onboard.

I don't know if he fully "counts" but surely Ezra Miller deserves to be in that conversation.

Seriously. The ultra-Orthodox community kicked up quite a row against him. He's running around painting targets on his back, and it's hard not to respect that.

Great write-up, Dowd! Looking forward to following this through the week.

Another vote for the Zvyagintsev, though for my money, he still hasn't topped the tense intimacy of The Return (thought I've really loved some of his films since. It's just a really high bar.)

But it's also easy to see why Soviet kitsch has become a cottage industry of its own. It aims for a kind of naive photorealism but the worst of it lands closer to uncanny and horrifying/hilarious all at once. At his best/worst, Laktionov is like a bizarro-world Norman Rockwell with no wit or taste (Check out "After…

Not sure I was fully onboard once the sex scene turned to desert fantasy (maybe it's the resolution on my screen, but it looked… not great?), but man, the story was so tender and heartachy that it's my favorite thing the show's done so far. Feeling lost and hopeless in a foreign country, finding someone to share that…

One helluva deserved Oscar, too. She's great in it.

After one episode we looked up the actor, because his accent started sounding a bit too distracting to be real. And sure enough…