Sam (Donal Logue) is a man whose life is full of regrets. He carries them around like a literal weight on his shoulders, trudging through the world followed always by the sins of his past. When Sometime Other Than Now begins, Sam is lying unconscious on the beach, the waves gently lapping at his body; his motorcycle lays half-submerged nearby, and we wonder at first if he might be dead and waking up on the shores of some kind of seaside purgatory.

It soon becomes clear, though, that he’s very much still alive and the real purgatory was the life…

An interesting press release showed up in my inbox today, announcing a virtual film festival taking place in March. The Unnamed Footage Festival, which normally takes place in San Francisco, typically showcases “a unique and often obscure selection of found footage horror, first-person POV cinema, and faux documentary.” This year, though, instead of being held at their typical venues, the Unnamed Footage Festival will be what organizers are calling a “24-hour long webathon.”

UFF24hr will be a live, one-time-only, day-long marathon of weird and exclusive in-world camera features and shorts, alongside Q&As with filmmakers and industry professionals. Beginning on March…

Look: it’s no secret that Los Angeles is experiencing a major homelessness crisis. As of last month, an estimated 66,000 people are currently homeless in Los Angeles County in the middle of a deadly pandemic and some of the worst economic fallout in many generations.

Paradise Cove, a new erotic thriller directed by Martin Guigui, attempts to reckon with that context, and in doing so mishandles it in nearly every way. The film is about Knox and Tracey Bannett (Todd Grinnell and Mena Suvari, respectively), a couple who move into Knox’s mother’s beach house in Malibu in order to renovate…

This week, leading up through Valentine’s Day, I’ll be reviewing films out of the Reel Love Film Festival. Reel Love is a new virtual fest “dedicated to honoring the future of love on screen and its profound cinematic legacy thus far.”

Tim Sutton has an eye for compelling, evocative imagery. Directing from his own script, he constantly finds moments in his new film Funny Face that are so acutely-observed, so bewitching, that they seem to slip the film out of reality and into a more dreamlike, fairytale state. A man in a grotesque rictus mask and a woman in a…

This week, leading up through Valentine’s Day, I’ll be reviewing films out of the Reel Love Film Festival. Reel Love is a new virtual fest “dedicated to honoring the future of love on screen and its profound cinematic legacy thus far.”

The Reel Love Film Festival’s LGBTQ+-centric feature selection is somewhat lacking for a festival whose aim is to show “the future of love on screen.” Aside from (excellent) closing-night selection Shiva Baby, about a bisexual girl struggling to keep her life together during a particularly chaotic shiva, the only other full-length film tagged as LGBTQ+ on the festival’s schedule…

This week, leading up through Valentine’s Day, I’ll be reviewing films out of the Reel Love Film Festival. Reel Love is a new virtual fest “dedicated to honoring the future of love on screen and its profound cinematic legacy thus far.”

Writer/director Sabrina Doyle’s debut film Lorelei is a strange one. Part post-prison drama, part romance, and part class commentary, Lorelei is messy and unfocused, spending far too much time on some parts of its story and giving others the short shrift. …

A press release for Netflix’s surefire smash Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel describes the show as “the first season in a new documentary series that deconstructs the mythology and mystery surrounding infamous locations in contemporary crime.” That’s a crucial thing to keep in mind while watching director Joe Berlinger’s addictive show, which ends up being a brilliantly-constructed cautionary tale about the genre as a whole. …

James Dean would have turned 90 today, had he not been killed in a tragic car crash at the age of 24. His life was cut short just as his star was beginning to rise; only East of Eden, which was his first starring role, had been released when he died. Rebel Without a Cause hit theaters less than a month later; his final film, Giant, was still in production when he died and would not come out for another year.

It’s hard to say exactly why, in death, James Dean became the icon that he did. Something about his…