Robuta

Throughout Cinequest, I link festival coverage to this page, including both features and movie recommendations. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest...

BEFORE THE FIRE: world premiere at Cinequest. Photo courtesy of Cinequest. Throughout Cinequest, I link festival coverage to this page, including both features...

Another struggling Hollywood artist is the heart of Booze Boys and Brownies, and this, time, she bursts into song.  She’s an actress unlucky in both...

Jennifer Levinson in TRUST. Courtesy of Menemsha Films. Throughout Cinequest, I link festival coverage to this page, including both features and movie...

Here’s an interview with the Lori Stoll, writer-director of Heaven’s Floor. [NOTE: THIS INTERVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS] The Movie Gourmet: The...

A pronounced overall success, Cinequest 2015 delivered hearty audience-pleasers from a varied and satisfying menu that featured some real gems from the indie,...

The entirely fresh coming of age movie The Other Kids traces ten kids who are about to graduate from high school in Sonora, California. The problems that these...

I love Westerns, but Slow West just didn’t work for me. It’s a film of some ambition, and it won an award at Sundance, but the movie kept sliding in and...

The title character in the Peruvian psychological drama Magallanes is a loser, but is he a lovable loser?  Played by Damián Alcázar, Magallanes bounces...

San Francisco billionaire Gordon Getty was born into great wealth, so he was never going to be a Regular Guy.  And few aspire to become composers of classical...

The Ecuadorian coming of age film Eightyseven traces three teenage buddies through an eventful 1987 and shows us a reunion in 2002.  Their families range from...

Sergio Podeley in GUNMAN. Courtesy of Cinequest. Throughout Cinequest, I link festival coverage to this page, including both features and movie...

Brooke Purdy in QUALITY PROBLEMS. Photo courtesy of Cinequest. These 2012-2020 Cinequest favorites are available to stream now: FEEL GOODS AND COMEDIES Quality...

We’re halfway through Cinequest 2016. What are the biggest hits and the most delightful surprises? BIG MOVIES Cinequest programmers hit a home run with...

The dark and violent Peruvian Guard Dog is set in 2001, five years after a controversial amnesty for the government-sponsored death squads active in the...

Ryan Walker-Edwards in DEMON. World premiere at Cinequest. Photo courtesy of Zersetzung Films. I written about the the very Best of Cinequest and even more...

The documentary The Promised Band is about a group of Israeli and Palestinian women seeking to fight through the cultural, legal, political, military and...

Here’s the premise of Songs She Wrote About People She Knows – a dissatisfied but very contained woman adopts the therapeutic device of SINGING her true...

The proto-feminist war movie Voevoda is set in the Bulgarian resistance against the Ottoman Empire.  This epic tells the historical life of Roumena, a...

Photo caption: Harris Dickinson and Lola Campbell in Charlotte Regan’s SCRAPPER at Cinequest. Courtesy of Kino Lorber. Cinequest, Silicon Valley’s own...

ES MUY COMPLICADO. In the Uruguayan dramedy The Moderns, Fausto (Mauro Sarser) is a free-lance film editor. Clara (Noelia Campo)  is the producer of...

In the astonishingly brilliant Bikini Moon, actress Condola Rashad’s blazing performance ignites Milcho Manchevski’s provocative story, resulting...

The shamelessly low brow comedy A Beginners Guide to Snuff features a very dim pair of would-be actors who seek to win a horror movie contest by simulating a...

The adventure romance The Ottoman Lieutenant, which had its world premiere at Cinequest and is now playing in theaters, is SO bad, so LAUGHABLY bad, that...

In the paranoid Romanian drama Why Me?, an able young prosecutor is assigned to bring down a corrupt kingpin, but is frustrated at every turn.  Is the system...

In the Company of Women begins with a sixty-something guy hiring a male gigolo – not for sexual favors – but to be his wing man for a night on the...

I was looking forward to the horror film The Blackcoat’s Daughter (recently retitled from February) because it stars Kiernan Shipka, whose work on Mad...

SANDY WOLF Sandy Wolf’s service to Cinequest (Cinequest’s Mr. Documentary: Sandy Wolf: part 1) is only one of his contributions to film culture....

The title character of the Swiss drama Aloys is a solitary and harshly anti-social guy who repulses all gestures of human kindness and interest by others.  He...

In the French-Canadian drama Antoine et Marie, a woman’s life is changed by an event. What happens to her is something that Marie herself must figure out, as...

Tim Blake Nelson and Gretchen Mol in THE INVISIBLES. Courtesy of Cinequest. Throughout Cinequest, I link festival coverage to this page, including both...