Short reviews of films from this year's DC Shorts Film Festival
Cobra: Perhaps the first short film to feature Meatspin (don't Google it) as a plot point. A father attends his estranged son's funeral, and connects with son's friends at a male burlesque. The funeral drags, but the nightclub scenes project an enjoyable mix of silliness [...]
A grab-bag of social commentary, dumb gags, irritating drama, and one powerful real-life tale, this showcase has its share of clunkers. Aquadettes alone might be worth the trip, but it’s hard to justify sitting through the 20-minute-long Naagahaan, Zinat.
Unremembered: A mildly suspenseful mystery about an unrecorded grave at a church cemetery turns out to be a [...]
Reality, oddities, stress, and seeming superhumanism coexist in Showcase 5, which offers a few pretty-goods among the mostly mehs. If animation’s your thing, you’ve got a couple of highly original works here; if you’d rather see confrontation, there’s that, too. And one winner actually profiles a winner.
A Morning Stroll: Nominated for a Best Animated Short [...]
Many of the shorts in this eclectic and worthwhile collection are portraits of the peculiar side of life. They range from conventional documentaries to animation, but the theme across the board is the desire to connect, be it through friendship, art, family dynamics, or in defiance of death and the passage of time. All of [...]
Short reviews of films from this year's DC Shorts Film Festival
There’s some serious star power in Showcase 3, but even without A-list elevation, most of these selections are top notch. You’ll laugh, get spooked, be touched, and the misfires are over quickly. How many features can offer that?
A Short Film About Ice Fishing: This short is [...]
Short reviews of films from this year's DC Shorts Film Festival
Apart from Happy Voodoo, the movies in Showcase 2 don’t revolve around the supernatural. Though all of them rely on the simple, tested formula of people and plot. The Lonely Pair and The Queen of My Dreams, in particular, embody the power of having two people on screen [...]
Short reviews of films from this year's D.C. Shorts Film Festival
This dinner sampler of foreign starches and spicy veggies is like the best kinds of mixtapes. You get South American gun play, dead pets, women of dreams, carnivorous existentialism, two-timing loose limbs, dong shots, and evil cats, while an autistic Malaysian steals the show.
Thinking Inside The [...]
Continuing City Paper tradition, today we're going to start rolling out short reviews of every single film showing in this year's (ninth annual!) D.C. Shorts Film Festival. We'll post a chunk of reviews every day through Friday, giving you plenty of time to see the shorts before they wrap up Sept. 16.
The festival begins Thursday [...]
DC Shorts' Showcase 16 starts sweet, gets zany, and ends horrific. Romantics out there might want to skip out before the female genital mutilation and the date-rape drug deployment. Those interested in a visceral emotional punch might want to do the reverse.
0507: The moral of this wee British comedy: Don't snoop on your partner's iPhone. [...]
Dual murder plots, double suicides, and a feel-good story about a grown man who rides a pink child's bicycle—rarely does a trip to the movies hit as many different tones as does your typical shorts program. You could strain to find some recurring themes in DC Shorts' Program 4 (meditations on aging, do-gooder guys fumbling [...]
