I recently watched the entire first season of Portlandia on Netflix streaming. Prior to this, I had never heard of the show. It began last year on IFC (Independent Film Channel), which, along with the Sundance Channel, is one of the few cable channels that provides alternatives to the generic Hollywood blockbusters that dominate most [...]

The title of this film refers to the identity crisis suffered by a young woman (Elizabeth Olsen) who has recently escaped from a cult. The film switches back and forth between the past and present, as Martha (her real name) comes to live with her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and Lucy’s new husband Ted (Hugh [...]

Burzynski is a controversial documentary about an alternative cancer cure. More specifically, it’s about the work of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, who has allegedly found an effective cure for many types of cancers while facing persecution from the FDA and other arms of the medical establishment. This is a movie that has gotten lots of grass [...]

There are so many film festivals around these days, and one that’s already ten years old is the Woodstock Film Festival, that takes place in the famous upstate New York town every fall. As Indiewire points out, this is a film festival that has become a showcase for some high quality and well received independent [...]

Nowadays, the question of “How do I make a movie?” is a lot easier than ever before. Who would have though, say 20 years ago, that you could make your own short film on a phone? Of course, a 10 minute “movie” shot on your iPhone may not get nominated for an Academy Award, but [...]

Foreign Language Films Are Dead; Long Live Foreign Language Films Foreign language films have never been popular with American audiences. It’s only a small portion of even art house or indie audiences who more than occasionally watch a film in a language other than English. Americans are notorious for being “American audiences—even sophisticated ones—appear to [...]

The Extra Man (2010) is one of those ultra quirky indie comedies that tries a little too hard to be eccentric. Traditional comedies, for example, will typically pair up a bizarre character with a “straight man” who sees the eccentricities of the other character through the supposedly normal eyes of the rest of the world. [...]

A recent interview with veteran indie film director John Sayles prompted us to take a closer look at his fascinating career. The interview, by the way, is about his forthcoming film Amigo, about the little known Philippine-American war. His film debut was Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), about a group of friends reminiscing about [...]

Straight Time (1978) is a lesser known film from another decade that has quite a bit to offer contemporary fans of indie films. The last film I reviewed on this blog was John and Mary, which starred Dustin Hoffman along with Mia Farrow. So, in keeping with the theme of older Dustin Hoffman films, I [...]

If you’re a lover of documentaries, you may be interested to know of a website called Top Documentary Films, where you can watch all kinds of documentaries for free. This is not a very well known resource -at least I didn’t know about it until I happened to find it when doing research for this [...]