Recently I sat down with Bryan Connolly (director, co-producer, co-editor, “kinda writer”) and John Gholson (lead actor) of ‘Make Popular Movies’ – an improvisational comedy film about making movies that are a commercial success, as well as the many hilarious situations that arise in the process. ‘Make Popular Movies’ screened at the 2022 edition of the Chattanooga Film Festival where […]
One of the most exciting things about independent movies is being able to bring to life a concept that big studios wouldn’t fund, such as Bryan Connolly’s scathingly accurate satire of the Hollywood film industry Make Popular Movies. After opening with an absurdist skit involving a disruptive gorilla in a theater, which turns out to be a shoot for a […]
Never has there ever been a holiday film quite like Eric Pennycoff’s The Leech, which pits the holy against the hellish for a thematically strong, rapid-fire descent into festive madness. The film opens with a crawl up the steps of an aging and nearly empty church where Father David (Graham Skipper of Sequence Break and Dementia: Part II putting in […]
A brief disclaimer momentarily flashes across the screen revealing the origin of the film’s footage to be a collector who purchased a box of 8mm and 16mm film dating back to 1967 from a deceased estate, before dropping viewers right into the first reel of director Derick Muller’s debut film Wesens. The first ten or so minutes all take place […]
“I guess I do believe that we live in The Matrix because, I don’t know. Sometimes I look around and I just feel like I’m in a video game anyway, and instead of health points I’m just trying to get likes.” These are the words that open Nick Corirossi and Van Alper’s film Bolt Driver, which serves as both a […]
A series of pictures and general information about the victims accompanied by a horrific recording of a 911 call set the stage for the grim events that will unfold across Robbie Banfitch’s The Outwaters before temporarily thrusting the viewer into the personal lives of these travelers via memory cards recovered from their camera. Through displaying personal moments between the characters […]
The Adams family (though probably not the one that comes to mind if you’re unfamiliar with the New York based family of filmmakers) has crafted yet another darkly entertaining horror film to follow up their haunting 2019 outing The Deeper You Dig, this time opting for an equally intense yet morbidly comical approach to the coming-of-age witch story; a sub-genre […]
There’s few voices in independent film who can weave a cinematic universe with enough depth to rival some of Hollywood’s biggest studios in terms of layered storytelling spanning multiple movies, however it seems to be second nature to filmmaking duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead who alongside their longtime producer David Lawson Jr. aim to do precisely this every time […]
It’s been over a decade since controversial filmmaker Lena Dunham’s sophomore feature Tiny Furniture premiered at SXSW and took home the award for best narrative feature. Since then she’s done a fair amount of acting as well as created HBO’s acclaimed series Girls which she also starred in, but has since had some media run-ins (many surrounding events mentioned in […]
An experimental Shudder original film from Northampton, MA based electronic music duo Boy Harsher isn’t something many people probably ever had on their list of “things that will actually exist at some point” but that’s precisely what The Runner is. A hybrid that falls somewhere in between film and visual album (though leans much closer to the latter), The Runner […]