Director: Keven McAlester
If a group of friends gets together once a week for years to swap stories and share a meal, they’re sociable. Put a Dungeons & Dragons rule book in the middle of the table, and suddenly they’re written off as socially malformed. Rather than picking apart the world of role-playing games or mocking the players, director McAlester’s documentary takes three gamers and shows how tabletop fantasy fits into their lives.
Continue reading Review: The Dungeon Masters
Directed by Ian Fitzgibbon
Starring: Dylan Moran, Mark Doherty, Keith Allen, Amy Huberman
One death is an accident. Two are a coincidence. Three and a dead dog, well, that’s just bad DIY. In this coal-black farce, set among the elegant but crumbling Victorian apartments of Dublin, the luck of the Irish is all dreadful. Indolent actor Mark (Doherty) and his neighbor, failed film writer and failed recovering alcoholic Pierce (Moran), are wastrels with no lives. But they quickly become the only characters left alive as a series of avoidable deaths in the ill-repaired house they share claims everyone they would have a motive for killing.
Continue reading Review: A Film With Me In It (2009)
Directed by Joel Anderson
Starring: Talia Zucker, Rosie Traynor, David Pledger, Martin Sharpe
As Blair Witch is to The Shining and Cloverfield is to Godzilla, so Lake Mungo is to Picnic at Hanging Rock. In that Australian gothic classic, four schoolgirls went into the Outback; only one came back. This time, the four members of the Palmer family go for a swim, but only daughter Alice (Zucker) never makes it back to shore.
Directed by Clark Lyda and Jesse Lyda
The T. Don Hutto Residential Center has become infamous as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility up in Williamson County that used to house immigrant and asylum-seeking families as their appeals go through the courts. That makes Hutto a prison for children and parents, none of whom has been convicted of anything.
Directed by Judi Krant
Starring: Jackson Kuehn, Dan Sumpter, Syna Zhang, Deng Jung
Novelties are the benchmark of a great society, proclaims starry-eyed inventor Johnson (Kuehn). But he’s no Da Vinci or Edison: His genius lies in the realm of sneezing powder, pet rocks, and Slinkies – the pieces of irrelevant crap that make someone a millionaire. Flying on a whim and a dream from Woodville, Texas (population 2,415), to Shanghai, China (population 20 million), to find someone to manufacture his closely guarded “humorous domestic hygiene product,” the sweet-natured Johnson falls under the sway of Magnus (Sumpter), an English snake-oil-dealing business consultant after his money.
Continue reading Review: Made in China (2009)