Movie Review: 48th Denver Film Festival Round Up Days 7-10

The Denver Film Festival just wrapped its 48th edition in your own backyard with some of the greatest films in the world playing at this massive festival. It kicked off on Friday, October 31 so, for the third year in a row, we sent our correspondent Julie River to watch as many movies as she could and report back on them.

The last few years saw some big name films, from The People’s Joker to Late Night With the Devil to I’m Still Here to Emilia Pérez, so who knows what the breakout film will be from this year’s festival. Below are some of the reviews that Julie wrote after the second half of the festival.

Charliebird

In this beautiful little film, we meet Al (Samantha Smart, who also wrote the film), a musical therapist working in a hospital to help children with terminal illnesses to find hope in the power of music. One day, Al is assigned to work with a teenage girl named Charlie (Gabriela Ochoa Perez) who is resistant to Al’s therapy at first, but gradually warms up to her and the two develop a close friendship as they navigate Charlie’s last days together.

This was a truly heartwarming (and, at times, heartbreaking) film that presented us with some really beautiful characters and some absolutely stellar performances. Smart manages to make Al as charming to the audience as she is to the young children she treats, and Perez makes us feel for the young, dying Charlie. The only complaint I had was that the flashbacks that explained Al’s trauma around death when she was a young girl were a bit confusing, and I didn’t really leave feeling like I understood those segments. I felt like that could have been cut from the film and it still would have been just as fantastic.

Rating: 91/100

Fucktoys

An easy personal favorite of the entire festival for me, Fucktoys is a grand exercise in absurdity, combining grindhouse aesthetics, a John Waters-esque sense of humor, and all the narrative cohesion of an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Officially, the plot of the film revolves around a sex worker named AP (Annapurna Sriram, who also wrote and directed the film) who hears from three different psychics that she has a mystical curse on her head that will cost $1,000 to lift. So, along with her friend Danni (Sadie Scott), she sets out on her moped across Trashtown, USA to come up with the money she needs to lift the curse. Of course, the film is such a surreal journey that even that plot is quickly lost as AP and Danni go through one absurd situation after another and seem to forget about the money after a while.

This film was supremely weird and probably ranks in the top 10 weirdest films I’ve ever seen. But the difference between this and the other supremely weird films I’ve seen before is that, unlike those other films, Fucktoys is still delightfully enjoyable. Somehow, despite the dream-like quality of the narrative, it still manages to be cohesive enough and offer endearing enough character to make the whole thing a lot of fun. This is Sriram’s first feature film, so I look forward to seeing what else she comes up with for her next film.

Rating: 100/100

The President’s Cake

In 1990s Iraq, the country faced severe economic sanctions from Western countries that made a lot of essential items very scarce, but in spite of this, President Saddam Hussein forced the entire country to celebrate his birthday, and every school in the country was required to have a celebration with cake. A young girl named Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) is selected in a random draw by her school to be the one who makes the cake for the president’s birthday or face severe punishment, but Lamia is poor and lives with her grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), so the thought of buying ingredients is a daunting task. Bibi and Lamia go into the city to buy ingredients, but when it becomes clear that Bibi can’t afford the cake’s ingredients, Lamia runs off with her school friend Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), and the two set off on an adventure to obtain flour, eggs, sugar, and baking powder despite having no money.

The film was a stark look at the poverty in Iraq under the Hussein regime where something as simple as a cake seems so far out of reach for the common citizens. The fact that it was told through the eyes of a child made it somewhat of a lighter story and a bit of a fanciful adventure.Young Nayyef gave a great performance, especially for a child actor, and really made us feel for the fear and uncertainty felt by children under this dictator’s rule. 

Rating: 94/100

OBEX

The year is 1987, and Connor Marsh (Albert Birney, who also wrote and directed the film) is a man in his 30s living a secluded life with his dog Sandy. Marsh makes his living off a mail correspondence business where he makes computer drawings of people who send him pictures. He rarely ventures out, having his neighbor Mary (Callie Hernandez) do his shopping for him. One day, he sees an ad for a computer game called OBEX which promises that, if the user video tapes themselves and answers a few questions about themselves, the creators will custom-make a version of the game with the user in it. But the concept of “being in the game” seems to be a little bit more literal than Connor bargained for, as a demon escapes from the game and kidnaps Connor’s dog, forcing Connor to literally enter the game and rescue Sandy in a surreal, epic quest.

There were a lot of things I liked about this film. The black-and-white aesthetic was perfect, and it was sufficiently creepy. The part that I didn’t like was how awkwardly structured it was. For most of the film, I thought the creatures from the game were going to come out of the computer and haunt Connor, which they did at first. But then, more than halfway through the film, Connor enters the game, and the whole thing turns into this bizarre medieval fantasy story. I didn’t mind that part of the film, but I would have liked it to get to the part inside the game much sooner in the movie. It was like it had an unusually long first act and an unusually short second and third act that seemed squished into the end of the film.

Still, the film had its endearing qualities, and Connor’s love of his dog made you really want to root for him. For anyone who refuses to watch a horror movie if the dog dies, I’ll spoil this one for you and reveal that the dog makes it to the end of the film (although there’s a brief moment when you’re led to believe she’s dead). So it’s definitely a satisfying film in many ways, I just wish they had gotten to the meat of the story a lot earlier.

Rating: 85/100

Peter Hujar’s Day

In 1974 and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) decides to interview her friend Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw), a gay photographer living in New York, about a day in his life, asking him to recount the 24 hours of the previous day. Rosenkrantz, in reality, originally intended this to be part of a book where she asked several people to recount a day in their lives, but the book went unrealized and the interview ended up being lost until 2019. Now with the interview found again, director Ira Sachs dramatized the conversation into a film depicting the conversation between Rosenkrantz and Hujar.

I was surprised by this film because I had expected that there would be some sort of acting out of the events of Peter Hujar’s day, but instead the entire film just depicts the conversation between Hujar and Rosenkrantz in Rosenkrantz’s apartment. That can make for an interesting film, as I do often like stories with limited locations and characters. And I certainly loved Hujar’s attention to detail throughout his day, and the way Whishaw delivered his lines made them fascinating.

At the same time, it’s not really much of a story. Certainly, Hujar has an interesting day as it happened to be the day that he photographed Allen Ginsberg for the New York Times, but that doesn’t automatically make it into a film-worthy story. There’s not much of a beginning, middle, and end to the story. It certainly doesn’t follow any sort of three act structure. And there isn’t really an arc for the characters. In fact, when you get towards the end of the film and Hujar is talking about how he developed the film from the shoot, it gets rather dull. It was interesting to see a glimpse into the life of a gay man in 1974, but if given the opportunity, I probably wouldn’t watch it again.

Rating: 75/100

The festival is over, but there’s still plenty going on at Denver Film year round that you should check out.