“The Independent Film Festival of Boston has made it to the age of 13, and it’s looking stronger than ever,” write Ty Burr and Peter Keough, arguing in the Boston Globe that “the IFFB remains the city’s premiere curated festival for new independent movies… For the Centerpiece Spotlight of the IFFB, we have a homecoming: a documentary about the unstoppable Boston area comic Barry Crimmins,” Call Me Lucky. “Director Bobcat Goldthwait is a comedian himself, but the movie is essentially serious—if occasionally seriously funny—as it surveys Crimmins’s groundbreaking work in creating the Boston stand-up scene of the 1980s before detailing his political activism, his coming to terms with childhood abuse, and his vocal stands against the Catholic church and Internet child pornography.”
Among the titles Burr and Keough preview are Andrew Bujalski‘s Results, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe, Patrick Brice’s The Overnight, Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s documentary on the rivalry between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, Best of Enemies, the closing night film, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl—and H.: “Along with festival selection They Look like People by Perry Blackshear, Rania Attieh, and Daniel Garcia’s cryptic nightmare is another example in the new no-frills horror genre that favor the surreal terrors of the subconscious over the spectacle of special effects…. H. plays like an M. Night Shyamalan movie as envisioned by Greek auteur Theo Angelopoulos.”
“IFFB 2015, like previous instantiations, will feature a broad array of genres and subject matter with more than 20 narrative features, over 40 documentaries and shorts packages that include animation, narrative and documentary programing,” writes Tom Meek for WBUR. “The opening night film, The End of the Tour, starring Academy Award nominee Jesse Eisenberg and funny guy Jason Segel as the enigmatic author David Foster Wallace, has strong local and festival ties. Wallace attended Harvard and spent time in the Boston area, and the film’s director, James Ponsoldt, who is slated to be in attendance (along with Segel) also brought in the opening night feature two years ago with the quirky romance, The Spectacular Now.”
For Movie Mezzanine, Sean Burns talks with David Chen about his film, The Primary Instinct, which captures a live performance by Stephen Tobolowsky that sprang from the book that sprang from the podcast, The Tobolowsky Files. And if you’ve never listened to The Tobolowsky Files, start with Episode 44, in which Tobolowsky tells the convoluted tale behind the making of David Byrne‘s True Stories (1986).
Check back here in a few days for something a little different and delightful from the IFFB.
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