Letterboxd — Your life in film

Jay Gammill's "Free Samples" is a fairly good and definitely charming character study that kind of, almost plays like a cross between a slightly more dramatic (but still funny) Female-centric version of "Clerks" and a female-centric version of "Trees Lounge". It is also my 100th Letterboxd review! Yay!

Jess Weixler plays Jillian, a Law School dropout who fills in for her best friend handing out free samples in an Ice Cream truck. The usual assortment of "Clerks"-esque customer hi-jinks ensue.…

Katie Aselton's "Black Rock" attempts to put a feminist spin on the predominantly male slasher film subgenre but apart from having a female director, what sets "Black Rock" apart from other slasher films?

Is it the fact that Lake Bell and Aselton spend much of the final act nude? Is it the fact that the film is seemingly improvised? Is it the fact that the bad guys are the army buddies of the former classmate one of the film's central…

"Aftershock" is pretty much the complete opposite of "The Impossible". While the latter mines supposed inspirational moments from the disaster of a tsunami, Nicolàs Lopez's "Aftershock" mines cynicism and dark humor out of the story of a group of people trying to survive an Earthquake while out on the town in Chile. Oh and there's also a tsunami.... And escaped prisoners!

Personally I prefer cynicism to false sentimentality any day of the week so I quite liked "Aftershock", even if…

There are a lot of problems with Julian Farino's "The Oranges".

For one, it's obviously trying to be a less satirically biting version of "American Beauty" but it just doesn't work.

Also, it feels very cable TV sitcom to me, like a lesser Showtime comedy series. And that makes sense as Farino worked on 2 HBO shows: "Entourage" and "How to Make it in America".

So unless you've really been dying for a movie where Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) has…

Bob Byington's bittersweet modern screwball relationship comedy "Somebody Up There Likes Me" is a winner, a great movie that's near-epically ambitious and hits all the right notes.

Taking place over 25 years, the film follows the life of Max Youngman (Keith Poulson) a man who goes from waiter at a steakhouse to head of a pizza and ice cream empire in 25 years and the relationships he and best friend Sal (a very funny Nick Offerman) have over the years.…

Essentially what would happen if John Cassavetes and Robert Altman made a movie together, Adam Christian Clark's "Caroline and Jackie" is a brilliant, maddening work of cinema, an easy successor to Cassavetes' infamous woman gone crazy classic "A Woman Under the Influence". Only here it's TWO women under the influence.

Featuring overlapping naturalistic dialogue and long takes, the film tells of sisters Caroline and Jackie.

Caroline is played by Marguerite Moreau from "Wet Hot American Summer" and Jackie is played…

I think I just saw the most divisive film of 2013 so far with the Keanu Reeves vehicle "generation Um..." (Yes, that's the title. The title is awful). And that's saying something in a year of such divisive films as "Stoker", "Upstream Color","Spring Breakers", "To the Wonder" and "The Place Beyond the Pines".

While I personally kinda liked the movie (it's not perfect but I'm a sucker for movies about aimless "young" people), most critics will most likely rip it…

Electrick Children (Director: Rebecca Thomas)
4/5

I saw "Electrick Children" at HIFF 2012!

Rebecca Thomas' "Electrick Children", a film that's already a hit in the UK (where it will be released to DVD in 2 weeks), is a weird combination of "Martha Marcy May Marlene" and "Juno" and stars MMMM co-star Julia Garner in the lead role as Rachel Angela McKnight, a 15-year old fundamentalist Mormon girl in 1996 who discovers a cassette tape and listens to music for the…

I  recently watched Bradley Rust Gray's "Jack and Diane" and it's one of the oddest movies I've ever seen. I'm still processing it.

It will probably be forever known  as "that Lesbian Werewolf movie" but I must warn people that the werewolf stuff is used as a metaphor and takes up about 2 minutes of the movie.

At it's core, "Jack and Diane" is a vague, almost-Mumblecorian love story between two teenage girls: butch Jack (Riley Keough) and feminine Diane…

“Crawl” is a slow-burn Ozploitation thriller filled with humor and pathos and one of the most memorable screen killers since Anton Chigurh from “No Country for Old Men”.

In fact, the opening scene of the film was obviously “inspired” by Anton’s most famous scene from “No Country”.

The killer here is listed in the credits (and IMDB) as “The Stranger” but is referred to in the movie as “The Croatian” so I’ll call him The Croatian.

He’s awesome. The actor…