Abby Olcese

Kansas City Underground Film Festival returns Sept. 12-20 with weird, wild, and fascinating ultra-indies

Courtesy Sony Pictures I’m not going to be trite and say there are two kinds of people in this world; there are many kinds of people in this world, obviously. Many of them are lovely. An increasingly terrifying number of them suck. For the purposes of this review, however, we’re going to sort humanity into two camps: people who like...

Courtesy Dimensional Innovations If you’ve driven through the Legends area over the last several months, you may have noticed a huge, dark building looming over the landscape as you pull off of I-435. There it is, plopped between Great Wolf Lodge and Margaritaville: a mysterious black monolith with a logo the size of a two-story house emblazoned on the side...

Here’s the problem with reviewing movies: It’s subjective. You’re a human, reviewing a work made by other humans, and both the art itself and the processing of that art are going to be imperfect. You come to this with your own personal bugaboos, and sometimes that keeps you from being able to engage with a movie simply on the basis...

Black Phone 2. // Courtesy Universal Pictures It’s never a great sign when a filmmaker’s sequel to their own film vibes like fan fiction. But that’s exactly the vibe of Black Phone 2 (“The” was apparently one word too many to carry over from 2022’s The Black Phone). Scott Derrickson and Robert Cargill’s movie retains the stilted, tell-don’t-show dialogue from...

Frankenstein. // Courtesy Netflix Guillermo del Toro knows as well as anyone that adaptation is an art unto itself. Frankenstein is his third film in a row adapting an existing work of literature that’s also been interpreted onscreen before. The anticipation that accompanies an auteur like del Toro adapting anything—whether it’s William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures...

Courtesy Netflix When I say Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella Train Dreams is the kind of book my grandpa would like, I mean it in the most complimentary way possible. My grandpa, like a lot of Greatest Generation grandpas, experienced much in his lifetime—he lived through the Great Depression, served in World War II, witnessed Vietnam, Watergate and the technological leaps...

Photo courtesy Paramount Since the beginning of Glen Powell’s ascendancy—which, in my eyes, really began in 2016 with Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!—it feels like he’s been on the hunt for a movie star persona. He’s come close, from entering the good graces of Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick to exhibiting star-power leadership on Twisters, generating behind-the-scenes rumors on...

Courtesy Screenland You’ve probably noticed film is having a moment here in Kansas City. I’m not talking about movies and TV shows shooting here (though it was pretty cool when the Ted Lasso crew showed up for a day outside The Pitch offices on the Plaza). I mean film reels. Kansas City has joined a growing list of places where...

Courtesy MUBI There’s a moment in Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma that felt like it was targeted at me personally. Filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is sitting with Billy (Gillian Anderson) the former scream queen whose movie—Camp Miasma, the first film in the in-movie franchise of the same name—Kris is remaking. As they watch that original film...