Underground Film Journal

Movie Reviews

Reviews of hard-to-find, obscure, creative, independent underground movies.

Articles:

Krimi

Bob Moricz’s Krimi is a stripped down Hollywood action thriller about a hit man returning to Portland and becoming embroiled in the city’s seedy underbelly.

American Arab

American Arab, the latest provocative documentary by Usama Alshaibi, is both profoundly personal and culturally inquisitive. The film tells his own unique story as well as the stories of other Arabs.

2013 AFI Fest: In Bloom

In Bloom is a neo-realist drama set in the early ’90s in the country of Georgia. It follows the adventures of two fourteen-year-old girls: One fully immersed in her adolescence, the other ready to bust out.

2013 AFI Fest: The Fake

The Fake, an animated film from South Korea and directed by Yeon Sang-ho, has a very simple, matter-of-fact visual style that delivers a complex story about the nature of faith.

Savage Witches

Savage Witches is an utterly charming paean to the cinema, mixing and matching a stream-of-consciousness of filmmaking styles and formats that flash by as if in a dream.

The Exhibitionists

When a film such as The Exhibitionists opens with a quote from Jean Baudrillard, one can be assured that what happens on-screen for the next eighty-eight minutes will attempt to mix high class with a trash sensibility.

Pictures of Superheroes

Don Swaynos’ debut feature film, the surrealist Pictures of Superheroes, is a real gem of a comedy that forms a perfect little surreal universe that never betrays its own self-contained operating system.