Precise re-enactment of the couple hours when Reality Winner’s house was being searched by the FBI for leaking confidential documents to The Intercept. The actors stick to the recordings of the actual event, which peeks through the soundtrack at times, and when something is confidential/redacted, not just the sound but the entire person will blink out of the movie. Feels like an experiment, an exercise more than a drama, but I dig it. She finally admits she leaked the papers, driven to action because her workplace made her listen to fox news all day.

Our star is Sydney Sweeney (I saw the last ten minutes of her Nocturne, and she was in a The Ward flashback), with interrogators Marchánt Davis (star of The Day Shall Come) and Josh Hamilton (Blaze, Tesla). After all the movies that’ve been shot in Georgia for the tax credit but set somewhere else, this one takes place in Augusta GA but was filmed on Staten Island, go figure. Premiered in the Panorama section of Berlin, along with Inside and Perpetrator.

Ukraine is Not a Brothel (2013)

“Kitty is filming this for some reason.” Fun, newsy doc about feminists in Ukraine who stage topless public actions and usually get arrested, traveling to other countries to protest in India, getting terrorized by cops in Belarus.

“We get money from charitable donations. We don’t know exactly where the money comes from.” The movie takes a turn upon the introduction of Victor, the man in the shadows who organizes all public appearances of this “feminist” group. “Girls are weak,” he says, then “My influence on the girls is the very same as the patriarchal influence against which we are protesting.”

Victor’s expression when asked if he started Femen to get chicks… which he did:


The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul (2015)

A bunch of girls audition to play Ukraine’s first olympic champ. Perfect stepping-stone film between the two features, too short to make much of an impact, though when all the girls are trying to cry it made me wanna cry.


Casting JonBenet (2017)

Casting sessions for each role in a theoretical JonBenet Ramsey movie, shot in Boulder where the murder took place, cutting between actor reactions. After some desperate attempts to connect themselves with the case or the family, some of them start going through their own family traumas.

The would-be policeman-actors run through the investigation, criticizing and analyzing the work of their real-life counterparts two decades earlier. Each family member gets scrutinized. We get numerology, and perverse conspiracy theories playing out like the final scenes of Top of the Lake. My birds got triggered when the JonBenets demonstrated their screaming abilities – I wonder if that’s where I stopped the movie the first time I tried to watch it. Music by Nathan Larson of Shudder to Think! This played True/False in 2017, and is one of the most perfectly True/Falsey movies I’ve seen.

After another good True/False fest, and a killer first half of the day with Bisbee and Shirkers, we ended on a lightweight heist film, with strong truefalsian elements, but whose protagonists made Katy fully angry. Tim Grierson nailed it in Paste:

Crafted to be a breezy, self-conscious heist film — the characters study Rififi for inspiration, and a key fantasy sequence is scored to the remix of Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation,” which was memorably used in Ocean’s ElevenAmerican Animals uses a lot of giddy flash to make a sobering point: These callow losers are incredibly privileged white males with little reason to execute this crime except for the fact that they’re bored. But despite strong performances from Peters and Keoghan, who both hook into their characters’ suffocating vapidity, Layton never entirely makes the case that his movie has much more intellectual heft than his protagonists. American Animals is a zippy, forgettable film about dunderheads, which isn’t the same as having a sharp perspective on those boobs.

The real fun comes in the first half as we meet the real boobs via interview footage and see their stories played out – sometimes in multiple versions if the narrators mix up their details – by the great Barry Keoghan (Dunkirk, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) and his wild buddy Evan Peters (Quicksilver in the X-Men movies). Peters flies to Amsterdam to meet Udo Kier and see about fencing some rare books, which they clumsily steal with the help of two more dudes (including Everybody Wants Some!! lead Blake Jenner) in the more sordid second half. Katy wishes we’d closed with the Mr. Rogers movie instead.


Musicians seen this year: Mary Lattimore, Lomelda, Esme Patterson, Nnamdi Ogbonnaya, Burney Sisters, Nevada Greene, Samuel James, The River Arkansas, Ohmme, Molly Healey, Skyway Man,

Food and drink from our old favorites: Craft Beer Cellar, Cafe Berlin, Cafe Poland, Main Squeeze, Nourish, International Tap House, Gunter Hans, Pizza Tree… plus good stuff from Seoul Taco, and next time we’ll skip Flat Branch and not venture into 44 Canteen unless we have no movies scheduled afterward.

Esme Patterson at the Missouri Theater:

This feels more mainstream than Kate Plays Christine or Actress without compromising Greene’s interest in blurring the lines of performance, and while bringing up tons of new and timely issues. The photography is very good (some epic travelling shots, most notably when introducing our young star Fernando) and Greene has graduated from filming lone actresses to an entire town. I came in with high expectations and couldn’t be happier – this was the standout hit of True/False.

In July 1917, striking workers in an Arizona mining town were rounded up and herded out of the town, told they’d be killed if they returned. For the hundredth anniversary, Greene films a town-wide re-enactment of the event, as portrayed by locals with hundred-year roots, by ex-miners and their families, businessmen and government officials, and town newcomers. Few had heard of the “Deportation” before the anniversary committee got underway, but as they research their roles it leads to much discussion and some uncomfortable parallels to still-current problems – deportation and communist agitation were rearing their ugly heads again right as filming began. Two brothers whose grandfather exiled their great uncle play opposite sides, a friendly young dude plays an ambivalent miner who gets swayed to become a flag-waving striker, and a descendant of a town leader insists the deportation was right and necessary until the moment when he finds himself rallying his neighbors onto desert-bound railcars at gunpoint. Minds don’t exactly get changed, but people soften their hardline positions. The whole ensemble piece is beautifully assembled and shot in widescreen, cutting between documentary behind-the-scenes footage and staged-reenactment scenes without radically changing the visuals, breaking down the boundaries between them in true Greene-T/F style.

After lunch we went to the Journalism Institute on campus because we heard there was a Strong Island exhibit. It must have been closed on Sunday, but we came across this instead: