Features
Thursday, November 17 2011
The Crows Come Home to Roost: The Death of Lisa Kimmel Fisher
Six Feet Under concludes its third season with a bold suite of emotionally devastating episodes that go straight for the jugular, nearly drowning the Fishers -- and the viewers -- under a tidal wave of fear, guilt and despair.
Thursday, May 28 2009
Independent Film Festival of Boston 2009
A perfect occasion to get drunk on film, to fall in love with the movies, to reassert the primacy of film as the last central universal art form.
Friday, May 16 2008
Independent Film Festival of Boston 2008
The Independent Film Festival of Boston brought a slew of new features, documentaries, and shorts to Beantown for the sixth year. PopMatters has all the highlights (and lowlights) from films that tackled everything from vanishing languages to fashion design.
Friday, June 1 2007
Non-sequiturs
These films share connecting tendrils of a strident defiance of convention, of this total faith in the surface non-sequitur; a seeming senselessness that really only masks the deeper connections and traditions flowing beneath their surfaces.
Friday, June 1 2007
Closing Night
An audience decked out in full Boston Red Sox gear waits, in vain, for the appearance of star slugger, David Ortiz -- the film, it seems, was incidental. Meanwhile, Scott Caan, son of the enigmatic James Caan, gives a possible starmaking performance as a wiseguy wannabe.
Reviews
Friday, May 4 2012
The Truly Impenetrable 'Sleeping Beauty'
Provocative and sophomoric in about equal measure, Sleeping Beauty is, like the best fairy tales, thrumming with nightmarish, subterranean dread—and is, like the worst, heavy-handed and damningly dull.
Thursday, April 19 2012
'The Descendants' Is Compulsively Watchable
The story deals with precisely the sort of messy, depressing ordeals in life we go to the movies to get away from, but the languid pace and occasional shots of off kilter wry humor allow it to never become such an overwhelming plunge into despair as to be unwatchable.
Tuesday, April 10 2012
'Melancholia': The Stasis of Despair and the Allure of Rapture
Lars von Trier's stunning, occasionally beautiful, slow-motion apocalypse, Melancholia, reaches for a moment of cathartic ecstasy amongst the crippling stasis of despair.
Friday, March 16 2012
'Tiny Furniture' Is a Tiny Miracle
Never overrun by the self-conscious quirk or straining obnoxious affectation of some of her peers' work, Lena Dunham’s film is a modest, honest confessional that finds joy and poignancy in the tiny, awkward, stupid moments in life.
Friday, December 9 2011
'Winnie the Pooh's Virtue is how Effortlessly It Spins Charm and Humor out of Its Spare Story
Disney's return to the Hundred Acre Wood is a gentle, loving and refreshingly old-fashioned delight.
Blogs
Friday, April 30 2010
Let's Hear It for American Indies!
Best of the fest! Back to back screenings late into Saturday night restores this reviewer's faith in American indies and reaffirms the brilliance of Turkish-German director Fatih Akin at the Eighth Annual Independent Film Festival of Boston.
Wednesday, April 28 2010
Alarmist Documentaries About Money, Power and the Evaporation of Privacy. Fun!
In a true sign of the times, alarmist films about our precarious times screen at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Meaney checks out Casino Jack and the United States of Money and Erasing David.
Monday, April 26 2010
Independent Film Festival of Boston: The Extra Man / Harmony and Me
The Independent Film Festival of Boston is running April 21-28 at various locations throughout the greater Boston area.
