The spring festival season comes to a head this week with the granddaddy of all local film festivals: the Independent Film Festival Boston, which runs from Wednesday through next Tuesday at The Brattle Theatre and Somerville Theatre (per tradition, the closing selection, Eva Victor’s “Sorry, Baby,” screens across the river next Wednesday at the Coolidge). IFFBoston is arguably the most prestigious of the local festivals, reliably attracting a bevy of well-known guest stars and launching films that set the conversation for the rest of the year. It’s also vast, spanning nearly 40 feature films and countless short subjects, which can make attendance a daunting proposition to the casual moviegoer. With that in mind, here are a few of our picks for the year’s most tantalizing, can’t-miss screenings.
“Predators”: Anyone who was near a TV in the 2000s surely remembers “To Catch a Predator,” the reality show in which producers would lure sexual predators by posing as minors in online chat rooms, then confront them with a camera crew and a stern lecture from host Chris Hansen. The show’s ubiquity almost made it easy to overlook how weird it all was, to say nothing of the dubious ethics of both its production and its presentation as entertainment. In this documentary, director David Osit picks at that scab, scrutinizing the show’s troubling popularity and continuing legacy via social media copycats. (8:45 p.m. Thursday at the Somerville Theatre)
“Obex”: Nobody makes movies quite like Albert Birney; his films, such as IFFBoston ’21 alum “Strawberry Mansion,” are whimsical and bespoke, personal and deeply, deeply peculiar. His latest, “Obex,” appears to be no exception. Birney plays Conor, a shut-in who becomes obsessed with a “state of the art” (read: circa early Macintosh) computer game, only to find his reality blur as the game appears to kidnap his dog. The uncanny aesthetic of early computer games is a perfect match for Birney’s modus operandi, and “Obex” promises to be one of the most memorable films of this year’s IFFBoston. (9:45 p.m. Friday at The Brattle)
“Pavements”: It’s tough to imagine a traditional rock biopic that could match the shaggy energy of lo-fi pioneers Pavement, whose freewheeling guitar riffs, cryptic lyrics and smirking delivery simultaneously defined alternative rock in the ’90s and seemed to poke fun at the very idea of “rock stardom.” Luckily, director Alex Ross Perry has delivered anything but a conventional rock-doc. This year’s IFFBoston Centerpiece selection, “Pavements” includes straight interview footage (or, at least, as straight as interviews with Pavement can be), but also incorporates a tongue-in-cheek jukebox musical (“Slanted!”), a faux-serious pop-up museum and even scenes from a fake “Walk the Line”-style biopic, with “Stranger Things” breakout Joe Keery as a brooding take on singer Stephen Malkmus. It all sounds like an appropriately unclassifiable tribute to one of rock’s most unclassifiable bands. (7:15 p.m. Saturday at The Brattle)
“Zodiac Killer Project”: One of the most talked-about documentaries of this year’s Sundance Film Festival was also one of its most indescribable. Maverick filmmaker Charlie Shackleton (best known for the self-explanatory 10-hour prank film “Paint Drying”) ostensibly sets out to adapt a 2012 book offering an alternative explanation for the notorious unsolved Zodiac murders. His real game, however, is to deconstruct the wildly lucrative true-crime genre, calling attention to each cliche and manipulative framing device. Once you’ve seen it, you may never stream the same way again. (8:30 p.m. Sunday at The Brattle)
“Friendship”: Cult comedy star Tim Robinson (Netflix’s “I Think You Should Leave”) makes the jump to the big screen with this cringe comedy of arrested development and malformed masculinity. Robinson plays an all-American father who develops a bro-crush on his cool new neighbor (Paul Rudd), only to instantly strain their budding friendship by being weird and off-putting as only Robinson can be. “Friendship” promises to be a classic IFFBoston crowd-pleaser, and there isn’t much that can match the infectious thrill of watching a smart-stupid comedy in a packed theater before anyone else has seen it. (9 p.m. Tuesday at The Brattle)
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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