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Complete Unknown

Grade: B-

Joshua Marston’s latest, Complete Unknown, dabbles is an existential drama with big questions that hit harder on the way out of the theater than in it. The American filmmaker and screenwriter, who swept 2004’s Sundance with his critical darling Maria Full of Grace, returns to gnaw at the truths and fallacies of life. Identity comes into question and the concept of relationships are often challenged, making for a moody dissection on how we’re more or less trapped. At times, it recalls the tugging heartburn of Linklater’s Before Sunset while also the dreamy facade of Scorcese’s After Hours. [Read Michael Roffman’s full review.]

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The Intervention

Grade: B-

While The Intervention tastes vanilla, there’s enough flavor here to keep wanting more from Clea DuVall. Despite its flaws, the film still manages to win you over, even if it never actually surprises you, making it quite an assured debut. That’s more than one can say about other ensemble dramedies cut from the same cloth. It also goes without saying that any ensemble film is always going to be a risk, even for veteran filmmakers, and that ambition bodes well for DuVall’s future. In the end, The Intervention, oddly enough, winds up feeling exactly like those annual get-togethers: “It was nice.” [Read Michael Roffman’s full review.]

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Kate Plays Christine

Grade: B-

Much of Kate Plays Christine is more of a form exercise than it is a documentary portrait, which works to both the film’s benefit and detriment. In the former category, Robert Greene shoots the film with an intimate elegance that ably parallels Sheil’s journey into character; while some images border on the staged, artifice is something of an operative point of the film, and so while it may render some sequences distracting (particularly a walk through Chubbuck’s real-life home rendered at some angles that are frankly impossible without some prior staging), it’s nevertheless an effective means of illustrating Sheil’s inner turmoil regarding the role. [Read Dominick Suzanne-Mayer’s full review.]

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First Girl I Loved

Grade: B-

What writer and director Kerem Sanga captures so well in First Girl I Loved is high school. What he captures even better is falling in love, or the naïve idea of what it means to be in love as a teenager. Anne’s love for Sasha (Brianna Hildebrand) is pure but burdened with what it would mean not only for her relationship with Cliff, but for her life in general. Sanga conveys this to us with such a deft touch that it’s a shame he fumbles the other issues that arise in First Girl. If the film is trying to display the trials and tribulations with coming out, then it can’t dismiss the unforgivable acts of its heroes. [Read Justin Gerber’s full review.]

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Morris From America

Grade: B-

Craig Robinson finds a nuanced balance between pathos and comedy, cracking wise even as he’s trying to keep a lot of ships from sinking at once for the sake of not making his son’s life any harder than it already is, or his own. In its more successful moments, Morris from America knows this lesson well: adulthood is hard from the early passage into it and onward, and all you can do is try to make it work. Usually that means figuring out what the hell that actually means to you. [Read Dominick Suzanne-Mayer’s full review.]

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Christine

Grade: B-

What Christine gets right above all else is that it comes at depression from a different angle. Director Antonio Campos (Afterschool) evades drone and downpours in favor of ‘70s soft rock and bright skies. It’s ultimately a tale of two halves, although Rebecca Hall remains pitch-perfect throughout. Her portrayal of Christine Chubbuck may or may not be a perfect representation of the late reporter, but her depiction of a depressed individual is spot-on. She never plays Christine as a caricature. She plays her with mood swings — the way the disease works. A subplot and a longer-than-necessary runtime threaten to undercut Hall’s performance, but in the end the movie succeeds as a solid investigation into the day-to-day life of one suffering from the depression. [Read Justin Gerber’s full review.]

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The Lovers and the Despot

Grade: B

At times, The Lovers and the Despot verges on the surreal; were a mockumentary made of this same topic, it would seem reasonably plausible as an impossible tale of conspiracy. But it all happened. While Sang-ok passed away in 2006, Eun-hee remains to tell their story, and the clear immediacy of the incident, even decades later, is evident in her testimony. What happened to them in North Korea, and what they came to know about the way in which the country works and is maintained, is truly unbelievable despite the total veracity of it all. And as both an utterly mad true story and as a document of the boundless reach of the cinema across borders and cultures and even ideologies, The Lovers and the Despot is wild, valuable viewing for all. [Read Dominick Suzanne-Mayer’s full review.]

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Wiener-Dog

Grade: B

“Everything has a beginning, and everything has an end.” This is one of many sobering life lessons we learn over time, but one we traditionally never grasp until it’s too late. It’s also the crux of Todd Solondz’s latest cutthroat comedy, Wiener-Dog, a varied collection of quirky stories that meditate on the breathless march towards our respective graves. The 56-year-old cult filmmaker, who smashed independent cinema to pieces over 20 years ago with 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, offers a sardonic twist on mortality through the sordid adventures of an adorable dachshund. For 90 minutes, the titular pooch takes us to four very depressing corners of America that surprise us with their unlikely humor. [Read Michael Roffman’s full review.]

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Dark Night

Grade: B

Let’s just address the Elephant in the room: Dark Night bears more than a passing resemblance to Gus Van Sant’s Palme D’Or-winning visual poem about the moments leading up to the Columbine shootings, right down to its similar final frame. And yet, there is a political undercurrent to Tim Sutton’s film that Van Sant mostly eschewed in favor of a more humanistic approach. Though that same humanism is applicable here as well, Sutton rather pointedly includes a number of small indications that Dark Night aims to comment on the culture that engenders the acts of violence around which the film is brutally, inevitably based as the acts themselves. [Read Dominick Suzanne-Mayer’s full review.]

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The Greasy Strangler

Grade: B

Stocked with full-frontal nudity, outlandish violence, outrageous sex, and eccentric characters from start to finish, The Greasy Strangler is a movie that has to be experienced to be believed. It goes on a little too long and isn’t as effective in the very end as it is at the start (blame desensitization). However, in a current climate where most movies are beset by moping twentysomethings who can’t get it together or teenagers rallying together to save the world, it’s refreshing to follow a greasy strangler and his weirdo son in a weirdo world where nothing makes sense from minute to minute. Original thought is in short supply these days. The Greasy Strangler is not. Whether too much freedom is a good thing, well, I’ll leave that up to you bullshit artists! [Read Justin Gerber’s full review.]