News

Click here to read the full article.

If, as Tolstoy put it, happy families are all alike, that’s probably because they’re opaque to the rest of us, for whom friction and rifts are as much a part of the kindred experience as love. Jesse, the hyper-observant only child at the center of Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral, takes in all the specifics of his unhappy family — not just his parents’ divorce when he’s 10, not just his father’s ongoing struggles, financial and otherwise, but the awkward silences and generational baggage, the rite-of-passage celebrations straining toward grace. The writer-director-editor’s microbudgeted sophomore film, now streaming on Mubi, juxtaposes remembered interactions and still-life shots with a deliberate, elliptical precision, the minor-key notes building to a chord that resounds with the ache of lost time and unexpressed emotions.

Through the eyes of the filmmaker’s alter ego, an artist in...

Get My Gun, the first narrative feature from documentary filmmaker Brian Darwas, begins as one kind of film and ends as something different. Along the way, it introduces at least one great character played by star Kate Hoffman giving one of my favorite performances of the year. What seems on paper to be a standard rape-revenge film is much more of a character drama—albeit one with plenty of blood and brutality before all is said and done.

We first meet Amanda (Hoffman) dressed as a nun on Halloween, pushing a baby in a swing. She sees a man she seems to recognize. She makes a phone call. “Get my gun,” she says. She grabs the man and the film flashes back an unspecified amount of time, when Amanda is working as a housekeeper in a sketchy hotel and training a new employee, Rebecca (Christy Casey), with whom she becomes fast friends.