Category: Short
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Tedious thirteen minute short has Jean-Paul Belmondo monologuing a misogynist rant against silent ex-lover Anne Collette all to get to a predictable twist ending. Director Godard (poorly) dubs in himself for Belmondo. Blah. DVD, Blu-ray.Continue reading →
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Effective horror short takes a while to get going but it’s worth the wait. Classy production of a (slightly) exploitative story. Great support from Julian Seagar, excellent production design and music. None.Continue reading →
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Short set in late 1800s California has long grieving Natalie Smyka falling for the mesmerist (Cameron Cash) hired to cure her heartbreak. Some good direction, not much good acting (Smyka’s got great expressions, no delivery). John Beck plays her dad (only a couple scenes but it’s John Beck). Streaming.Continue reading →
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Dated to the point of icky commercial for the miracles of French plastics–and fossil fuels–looks amazing. The narration and–more unfortunately–music are not (for many reasons). But technically glorious; it’s only thirteen minutes. DVD, Blu-ray.Continue reading →
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Exceeding competently produced horror short features a fantastic, entirely expression-based performance from Gemma Whelan (as a home healthcare worker who starts a new assignment) but it’s very predictable, very pat. Streaming.Continue reading →
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Superb short film about teen KiKi Layne dealing with the social fallout of kissing another girl while navigating an honest self-examination of her sexuality. Great performance from Layne, awesome script and direction. Special stuff. Streaming.Continue reading →
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Beautifully made short about teenager Marcela Okeke going to live with cousins. The dialogue is off and the brief subplot inserts don’t work, but Reeder’s direction is outstanding, the cast is appealing, and the plot is good. Streaming.Continue reading →
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Director Pialat’s “tour” of Parisian suburbia, with Jean-Loup Reynold voicing the first-person narration. Covers Pialat’s childhood, the socioeconomic realities of the present, and some other features as well. Beautifully shot in black and white by Gilbert Sarthre. Superior twenty minutes. None.Continue reading →
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Short film with a reverse order narrative gimmick and nothing else. The story–about asshole Timothy Paul Driscoll dumping girlfriend Alice Hunter–is terrible. Writer/director Levinson seems utterly unaware his protagonist’s loathsome. Streaming.Continue reading →
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Well-made (particularly well-photographed by Cooper Ulrich) but ultimately pointless short about young mother Alixzandra Dove dealing with a naughty toddler who doesn’t want to go to bed. Dove’s okay, director Bloch’s okay; the writing does it in. DVD, StreamingContinue reading →
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Thistles and Thorns opens with a girl (Madison Vance) going into a forest preserve after school. Vance is practically beaming as she does, which doesn’t initially make sense—when she’s walking on the street—but does once she’s in the forest, looking around at all the nature. She goes to a rock formation and gets a storybook…
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Well-executed British propaganda short about very British sisters Martita Hunt and Mary Clare fending off Nazi infiltrators during a blackout. Great performance from Hunt and excellent direction from Hurst. It’s a good seven minutes. Streaming.Continue reading →
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Trying to describe Two Cars, One Night without getting schmaltzy might be difficult. It’s sublime, gentle, tender, funny, brilliant, inspired, exceptional. Director Waititi’s just as phenomenal directing his young actors as he is at composing the shots to emphasize their experiences; specifically, how they perceive those experiences. The short starts with these two boys sitting…
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Dirty Computer is hard to explain. It’s fairly easy to describe—it’s a fifty-six minute short film (or “emotion picture” as creator Janelle Monáe describes it) compilation of Monáe’s music videos for her Dirty Computer album. There’s bridging footage to contextualize the videos. It’s a dystopian future where Monáe has finally gotten busted for being “dirty.”…
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One Hundred a Day is a terrifying eight minutes. Rosalie Fletcher is a factory girl in the thirties and she’s in trouble. Her more worldly friends, Jenee Welsh and Virginia Portingale, know where she can take care of it. Day’s this grainy, high contrast black and white. In the factory, where the short spends most…
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I make this statement with absolute sincerity: a Michael vs. Jason fan movie is a good idea. It doesn’t need actual acting, because neither of the slasher villains are going to be speaking or emoting. Their shapes and the filmmaking are going to do the work. You could do it on zero budget, you just…
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Hard Luck starts as a… failed suicide attempt comedy. Nothing morbid, just absurd and slapstick. And a little dumb. Star, director, and writer Keaton always has dangerous ideas for ending his life, but never particularly good ones. There’s a lot of physical humor from Keaton during this section; situational physical comedy. Most of it is…
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Technically, Moon Knight is awesome. Excellent composition, photography, editing. Director Butera also edits, also handles some of the photography. Unfortunately he also wrote the script, which is terrible. Moon Knight is so terrible outside those technical qualities–sadly, costuming is not one of its strong suits either (no pun intended)–I’m going to take the time to…
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Recorded Live is a student film. So director, writer, and animator Wilson’s flat composition gets some wide latitude. He’s got this silly slapstick score on a sound picture, with John Goodwin getting hired to work at an already strange-sounding TV studio only to arrive there and discover a sack of clothes instead of a boss.…
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The Window opens with a crowd on the street, looking up. There’s a title card, so it’s a good bet they’re all looking at a window. Pretty soon the cops show up–it’s set in Flatbush, Brooklyn–and ask what’s going on. Some people see Jesus up in the window, some people don’t. But it’s a big…
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At just about three minutes of “action,” The Critic is the perfect length. It opens with some abstract animation–black shapes dancing around variously colored backgrounds, as active (versus tranquil) classical music plays. The designs get more complex, but for the first thirty seconds (so fifteen percent of the action), Critic plays it straight. It’s some…
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Niagara Falls doesn’t have a credited screenwriter, which is a shame as it’d be nice to know who wrote the occasionally rather witty dialogue but also who came up with such a dark short. Not even dark comedy. Just dark. The short starts with recent newlywed Helen Jerome Eddy preparing for her honeymoon to–you guessed…
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At two minutes, The Predator Holiday Special runs long. The joke runs out. It starts as a rather fun riff on the original Predator movie, with the same music and some familiar action motifs, and the Rankin-Bass stop motion holiday specials. Sure, the stop motion isn’t great and the Predator appears to just be an…
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In its opening title card, Frankenstein warns it will be a liberal adaptation of the Mary Shelley novel. It’s only going to be sixteen minutes after all. But Frankenstein hits most of the big events–it opens with Frankenstein (Augustus Phillips) leaving for university, where he becomes obsessed with the insane idea of creating life. And…
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Captain Voyeur starts better than it finishes, which is too bad since it gets better as it goes along. Writer and director Carpenter opens the short with a long tracking shot of some boring workplace. Excellent black and white photography from Joanne Willens (save two shots later on) makes the opening an observation on professional…
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This Unfamiliar Place is content in search of presentation. Director Brzeski’s father survived the Nazi attack and occupation of Poland. He never talked about it. Then there’s an unspecified earthquake (maybe the San Francisco-Oakland one of 1989, but it’s sort of immaterial because Brzeski’s not living there at the time). She thinks somehow this place…
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Black Rider is almost desperate in its lack of great. There’s a single great moment–sort of, it’s a funny twist but entirely problematic–amid a bunch of other not great moments. And the resolution to the twist is pat and a joke… only one at the expense of writer and director Danquart and the short itself.…
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Voyeur has five shots. Maybe six… but I think five. The main shot is of star (and writer and producer) Stephanie Arapian’s front door. A little of the apartment interior is visible, but mostly in shade. Or, during the night shots, it’s just a lighted window. Over the film’s six minute run time, Voyeur explores…
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As Come Swim gets under way, the short provokes a couple thoughts. First, it’s not really going to be eighteen minutes, is it? Spoiler, not only is it eighteen minutes, it’s two separate short films stuck together with the first nine minutes or so being a dream sequence. Or is it a dream sequence? Oh,…
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The opening narration of Lick the Star, which isn’t from the same character as the end narration, explains the ground situation. Ostensible protagonist Christina Turley has just returned to school after her father accidentally ran over her foot. So she’s on crutches. She worries her group of friends has ostracized her for her absence. Good…
The Stop Button 