It’s like baseball, except played in the woods — teams dodge trees in the middle of the field, fans sit on tree stumps. And today is the World Series of Woods Baseball, 1997 — three teams began the season but only two remain: the Hutton Sasquatches vs the Lexington Timberhawks. We begin with a He...

A simple, restrained story of an afternoon with a babysitter, well-acted and carefully crafted. Actress Joslyn Jensen is eminently watchable as Elizabeth, the sitter, as she was in the excellent 2011 film, "Without." Director Christopher Bell presents an uncommon combination of the hyper-real and...

The Itching is a short horror film about two girlfriends whose cozy social life turns ugly when one of them contracts a mysterious illness. Beginning with a tiny itch, she rips a ragged hole in her own leg, a pooling landscape in which some terrible urge is reflected. I won’t reveal any more of t...

An aspiring film director prepares for a play based on her complicated feelings toward her father. “An Athlete Wrestling a Python” is a Australian film by director Stephanie Jane Day, an incisive, darkly comedic character study on Julien. Her present preoccupations with the artistic process and c...

In Johannesburg, South Africa, we follow two young factory workers through an ordinary day on and off the job. “Casual Workers,” directed by Keagan Afonso, is a free roaming portrait, a day in the life. Periods of work are followed by periods of rest and leisure, smoking cigarettes, staring at th...

Wandering the dappled grounds of an old farmhouse, Henry plays schoolmaster at an open-air painting retreat, where his instructional duties seem to involve holding forth at candlelit dinners in the garden and sucking down endless cans of Budweiser on the lawn while the work of painting and posing...

At a late night laundromat, a young woman questions her current life path. “Spin,” directed by Jorge G. Camarena, is a visually rich character portrait that merges an ordinary night with surreal turns. There’s no dialogue — the film gets by on its vibey atmosphere (DP: Kadri Koop) and air of unea...

A young woman imagines what life could be if she completed everything on her to-do list. Directed by Efe, “to-do” is a brightly colored satire in the form of a cheerful video tutorial. Running through an overwhelming list of things to accomplish each day, the woman (played by Lorelei Ramirez), wa...

Paulina lives and works in a small hotel in a northern Russian town with her friend Nadia when a mysterious guest arrives. “Rio,” directed by Zhenia Kazankina, is a quiet but vivid portrait of isolation that paints its wintry grey setting underneath pops of style and streaks of playfulness. (A po...

Somewhere in America, right this instant, a roomful of young women are waiting to audition for the role of a lifetime. In her headspacey short film, Anu Valia plucks her heroine Clara out of this room and momentarily holds her up to the light, before gently nudging her back into the anonymous str...

In her new short about an online troll, director Anu Valia presents an unsettling view of internet connectedness. The callous young woman in the titular role, known virtually as SushiHat, is bored with life if not constantly judging others on social media. Her cruel comments (“nice gunt”) or ince...

A dance trip through anger starring Sunita Mani moving through an abandoned building dressed starkly in a white tank top and tights against industrial brick. Directed by Anu Valia, “Blue, Blue” is an experimental dance film with wonderfully expressive choreography and moments of sly humor. It's a...

After traveling hundreds of miles, a woman must wait another twenty-four hours before she can get an abortion. Winner of the 2017 Sundance Short Film Jury Award. Directed by Anu Valia. Starring Sarah Goldberg.

This intimate glimpse at two teenage girls in a Moscow locker room is a simple but rich exploration of burgeoning sexuality and a search for expression. Alice can’t help but steal some glances at her teammate while she changes, catching flashes of skin, reflected in searching close-ups. The teamm...

Shot in New York, L.A., Moscow, and Paris, this portrait of the young and free is an appealingly raw glimpse into the joys and struggles of love. The mixed-format filming keeps the visuals fresh and the perspective deeply personal. Structured around four stages of a relationship — the meeting, th...

Mass shootings happen so often in our country that it's become routine. For the most part we make no attempt to remedy the problem, but at least we shower the victims and their families with sympathy and prayers. It's from this recognition that a divorced father and social outcast attempts to rec...

A titillating California drama with splashes of unexpected humor. Or maybe it’s the other way around. The gist: a divorced mother attempts to break up her daughter’s relationship. Maybe it’s to protect her... or maybe it’s out of jealousy. The handsome, smooth-talking boyfriend named Whit seems t...

It’s no secret that if you scratch an open-mic comedian, a Beckettian epic of beaten, wretched perseverance is bound to fall out (see: Muck, which we featured on this site last year, or Richard Pryor’s autobiopic Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling, or whatever Louis C.K. is cooking up as I write t...

Fearing her own displacement, Anna torments her stepbrother's new fiancee.

Directed by Joey Izzo. Starring Anna Seregina, Beth Lisick, and Brent Weinbach.

When a bet on Trump alienates him from all his friends, Keith aims to defend himself by telling his side of the story. As he recounts the tale of how it all went down, spouting his unlikely political views through the shocked streets of NYC post-election, it keeps getting darker and darker. Keith...

Memories and fiction begin to overlap when a pair of ex-lovers play a couple in a film. Stanley Xu directs “Reprise,” a film that blurs the line between performance and reality. In front of the camera is a complicated relationship between two characters played by actors with a complicated history...

Director Jason Giampietro sets 'em up & knocks 'em down in this hilariously straightforward story of an anxious New Yorker's ruined summer. The neurotic man, perpetually wearing a ratty aqua short-sleeve, lets a friend store a bike in his hallway for what he promises is only a couple days. Three ...

 Rudy, a grouchy, putty-colored naif rocking a Mennonite center-part, is thrown off of his normal afternoon routine of shuffling around looking glum by an intense pain in his groin. According to a not-very-trustworthy looking dude outside the bodega, it’s a hernia. Instead of wisely staying home ...