SIFF 2016: Picks for Week Two (May 31-June 2)

SIFF 2016

 

After a long weekend of SIFFing, here are a few of the movies that Team Sunbreak is considering for the second week of the festival.

Tony:

Kilo Two Bravo. Paul Katis’ debut feature is a gritty, fact-based drama about a team of British paratroopers trapped in a long-forgotten Afghanistan minefield. With its jet-black humor, coiled tension, and largely unknown cast, it’s drawing obvious comparisons (Hurt Locker, Black Hawk Down). Not bad company,

May 31, 2016 SIFF Cinema Uptown 9:30 PM
June 7, 2016 Pacific Place 9:30 PM

Battledream Chronicle.  Whatever the quality of Battledream Chronicle, it can legitimately be called historic. It marks the first animated feature from the Caribbean island of Martinique. I can’t help but be intrigued.

May 31, 2016 Shoreline Community College Theater 9:00 PM
June 6, 2016 Ark Lodge Cinemas 6:30 PM
June 9, 2016 SIFF Cinema Egyptian 9:45 PM

Author: The JT LeRoy Story. So was the case of JT LeRoy, the notorious street urchin who turned out to be a fictionalized nom de plume for 40-year-old author  Laura Albert, a masterful artistic avatar or creative charlatanism at its most egregious? If that question’s addressed with enough intelligence and weight, this documentary chronicle should be fascinating.

June 1, 2016 SIFF Cinema Uptown 6:3o PM

Josh:

Morris from America. The premise is all in the title: a hip-hop-obsessed thirteen-year-old African-American kid from New York gets transplanted to Heidelberg, Germany. Culture clashes, language differences, magnify inherent awkwardnesses. One of the buzzier acquisitions at Sundance this year, where it won a screenwriting award, plus Craig Robinson is scheduled to attend June 1 screening.

June 1, 2016 SIFF Cinema Egyptian 7:00 PM
June 2, 2016 SIFF Cinema Egyptian 4:30 PM

Uncle Howard. As a biography of Howard Brookner, director of a well-received Burroughs documentary and Madonna vehicle Bloodhounds of Broadway, this documentary isn’t entirely successful. Instead, motivated by a nephew’s access to his uncle’s film archives, it works best as a collage of the arts scene of New York in the eighties. Revealed through interviews, archival footage, and narration, it induces a sense of falling out of time, recognizing the constant impermanence of youth.

June 1, 2016 Lincoln Square Cinemas 6:30 PM

Pistol Shrimps. If you liked Chris’s interview with Brent Hodge, be sure to see his documentary about the Los Angeles recreational basketball league where Aubrey Plaza competes as a member of the Pistol Shrimps. The director will be at both screenings.

June 1, 2016 AMC Pacific Place 9:30 PM
June 2, 2016 SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival 4:30 PM

Chris:

A Monster with a Thousand Heads. This Mexican “sociopolitical revenge thriller” is one that word-of-mouth reached me during the festival. Not previously on my radar, it now looks like it’s right up my alley. It’s about a woman who takes on her insurance company in “increasingly violent” ways after it denies life-saving care for her terminally-ill husband.

May 23, 2016 AMC Pacific Place 11 9:00 PM
May 31, 2016 SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival 9:30 PM

The Queen of Ireland. You know what this world never has enough of? Revolutionary drag queens. Panti Bliss took on Irish homophobia and that led to a referendum on marriage equality and tells us all about it in this new documentary.

June 2, 2016 AMC Pacific Place 11 7:00 PM
June 4, 2016 SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival 12:30 PM

Zoom. A Canadian film that has three interlocking stories, one about an aspiring comic book artist who works in a factory that makes lifelike sex dolls, the ideal man she creates as a character (played by Gabriel Garcia Bernal), and a Brazilian model who wants to be a writer. I have been drawn to the interlocking stories since the first Altman movie I saw (I think it was Short Cuts), and this one promises to mix animation with live-action. Plus there’s original music from Kid Koala.

May 31, 2016 SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival 9:15 PM
June 1, 2016 SIFF Cinema Egyptian 9:30 PM