Welcome to the Indie Film Minute Blog! Browse our curated collection of film essays and explore unique perspectives on the indie film world. Visit our Facebook page and tweet us at @indiefilmminute to let us know what you think.
Particularly in a promised age of renewed “law and order,” 13TH will continue to be an all-too-necessary film as a means of contextualizing how and why black bodies remain targeted and assumed guilty on sight. When Donald Trump asserts, as he did in his first acceptance speech, that “our way of life” is under threat, we need to understand right now that “our” has never been in reference to a national collective.
Read MoreThree Colors was to be three films, each based off of a color (and its corresponding meaning) of the French flag. But given that Kieślowski preferred questions over answers, and quiet transcendence over bombast and revelation, the films do not adhere to their ideas as easily as one might think.
Read MoreStrangely enough, House on Haunted Hill has become one of my go-to’s as far as selecting movies (classic or otherwise) that unfailingly bring me enjoyment. It’s a strange comfort, knowing that the visceral stakes will be low, and that there’ll be something new about the film that I hadn’t noticed before—something that will undoubtedly send me into a fit of prolonged giggling.
Read MoreThis is the core of the brilliance of You’re Next—it is devious wit insidiously nestled in a layer of genuinely disturbing, profoundly effective terror. Directed with meticulous pacing and nostalgic flare by up-and-coming suspense golden boy Adam Wingard (The Guest), the film relies on a snark and cleverness that are so effective and divinely subtle partially because the film unfolds in such a programmatic horror-movie fashion.
Read MoreOne of the things that I never subscribed to was the notion that Quentin Tarantino cribs his ideas from other filmmakers and isn’t transparent about it.... But as someone who doesn’t subscribe to the sentiment that, say, a drum breakbeat from a jazz record being sampled on a hip-hop track qualifies as artistic theft, what I see is Tarantino paying homage to, rather than stealing from, the great films that inspired him.
Read MoreYoung Adult does something unusual in the realm of unlikable protagonists. It brazenly weaves in the cruel thread of unrealistic feminine standards alongside mental illness and prescriptive social norms. Well aware of her currency as an attractive, tall blonde, Mavis attempts to employ her sexual appeal as the hook to draw Buddy in.
Read MoreThis year, we find ourselves in the midst of what might be a real renaissance of horror films—movies that not only scare us, but also are worthy of critical examination and interpretation. That these films are coming out of the indie circuit rather than the major studio system makes this trend all the more interesting and worth examining.
Read MorePeter Strickland marvelously uses the tropes of the insect-fascination not only to subtly explicate the increasing tension between Evelyn and Cynthia, but also as a way of choreographing the politics of sex and desire within the film.
Read MoreLook Who’s Back reminds us that Hitler did not rise without support, and that the elements for populist destruction exist today, and are already being exploited by reductionist, power-hungry entities.
Read MoreTodd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog has a sweet reticence in both its character performances and direction, which deceive the viewer into expecting a sentimental story about a boy and his dog—or a vet and her dog, or a disgruntled screenwriter and his dog—then takes a fist-sized crap on all that warmth and tenderness.
Read More