Popular reviews

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  Review by Lucy ★★★★ 2

  NYFF 2020: film #19

  “you’re going to be just fine”

  new york mumblecore excellence. this is a little bit alex ross perry with really sharp dialogue all around, holding everything together like glue (as well as a movie like this can). worth noting is an especially great cameo from chloë sevigny in one single scene where she delivers a pretty brilliant monologue in a film filled with pretty brilliant monologues. avoid this if it doesn't seem like your thing, but otherwise i'd recommend checking it out for sure

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  Review by KYK ★★★½

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  a critic's pick for the NYT:

  Simultaneously high stakes and low-key, “Slow Machine,” the enigmatic debut feature of Joe DeNardo and Paul Felten, who also wrote it, follows a Swedish actress named Stephanie (Stephanie Hayes). She becomes romantically involved with Gerard (Scott Shepherd), an intelligence agent for the New York Police Department, and bunks with indie musicians upstate, including Eleanor Friedberger (as herself). Along the way, Stephanie attends an A.A. meeting and grabs drinks with Chloë Sevigny (playing a prickly version of herself) — both events are slightly interrupted by a possible bomb threat.

  Difficult to describe and confounding to follow, the film is best when you submit to the surreal nature of it; then, you will be open to…

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★

  found this to be seductive & wry & eerie. Scott Shepherd is so good, duh, and the whole thing really glimmers when it feels like staying up past your bedtime at a party with a bunch of iO students thinking you could get laid but knowing in your heart that you won't. that Texan accent is too, too, too funny. the ending rocks.

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  Review by ˗ˏˋ suspirliam ˊˎ˗ ★★★

  it’s a slightly spooky new york mumblecore that’s shot on 16mm and has chloë sevigny in it, how could i resist

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  Review by ₳ⱠØⱠ ★½ 6

  extremely obnoxious white hipster nyc bullshit ... i am SORRY to be a hating ass bitch like this but this was ... unpalatable

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  Review by Evan Morgan ★★★

  Part of InRO’s NYFF coverage:

  Jacques Rivette proved some decades ago that it’s possible to conjure a Langian cinema without Langian means, to describe the vast, malevolent architecture of modernity with little more than an empty stage, a shabby apartment, and a map of Paris annotated by a particularly paranoid scribbler. An ideal model for young artists conspiring to achieve sinister scope on a shoestring, though it’s one that has, historically, found little purchase among American independent filmmakers, who for the most part gravitate towards talky, homegrown realism. But perhaps as a consequence of lately revived interest in Rivette—following the 2015 restoration and re-release of Out 1—or perhaps as a response to a contemporary world that seems increasingly explicable only…

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  Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★

  shot on 16mm Lynchian mumblecore cinema that is basically a chamber drama for maladjusted cinephiles and is histrionic to a fault - so thoroughly my shit and probably yours too if you give it 71 minutes of your time

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  Review by Nick Newman 3

  "It's funny: everybody's afraid of kicking it alone. But I, for one, can't think of anything worse than a deliberately paced, collective perishing. It'd be like you're all dying in front of a mirror."
  —
  "I can never tell if you're actually recommending books to me or if you're just advertising the fact that you've read them."
  —
  One of the Great Films.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★

  Performances projected and desired. Sort of a Jost/Polanski mashup. I'm not sure if everything about the low budget aesthetic fits the movie, but directors Felten and Denardo have a much better handle in the subjective paranoia than other recent similar exercises. Great central performances. Pretty funny in a bitter way.

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  Review by Kern ★★★½ 1

  It's always invigorating to see a new film where, even halfway through, I have no concrete sense of what's occurring or where it's leading, especially when it's this understated and subtly surreal—rather than overtly absurd. I'm impressed by the filmmakers' devotion to intangibility, even though that may be the factor holding it back from greatness. If it had a more substantial thematic backbone, I'd likely be praising it, but regardless, the experience of watching it unfold is undeniably exhilarating. Fans of amorphous films like Upstream Color, Holy Motors, and She Dies Tomorrow should put this on their radar.

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  Review by teamgal ★★½

  Grimy, grainy Brooklyn psycho-noir, long on atmosphere but a bit short on most everything else.

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  Review by jarod ★★½

  we love you chloë sevigny!