Programmers' Picks: Marcus Gorman

Secret Fest #1

I’m sworn to secrecy on the film’s identity, but you don’t want to miss out on one of the most rollicking, high-energy films of 2024. Get your secret pass ASAP.

Red Rooms

This one is for the Murderinos out there. Pascal Plante (SIFF 2018’s Fake Tattoos) goes for the jugular in this tense psychological drama about a Montreal-based model who becomes obsessed with a high-profile, truly horrific murder trial.

Killing Romance

A retired actress and a student plot to kill her vain, possessive husband in this absurdist, ridiculously heightened, and consistently unhinged musical romantic comedy. Featuring one of Lee Sun-kyun’s final performances before his untimely passing.

I Saw the TV Glow

Another woozy mindf**k of a film from Jane Schoenbrun (2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair), as two suburbanites find solace and madness in a Buffy-esque ’90s TV show. Contains the year’s most excellent soundtrack.

So Unreal

Amanda Kramer (Give Me Pity!, Please Baby Please) crafts a philosophical, montage-based video essay on the history of cyberspace/virtual reality cinema and how pop culture reflects and influences technology. To put it another way, it contains clips from pretty much all my favorite films.

The Black Sea

SIFF has shown all of Crystal Moselle’s feature films (2015’s The Wolfpack, 2018’s Skate Kitchen), and it’s because she rules. Her latest, co-directed with the film’s lead Derrick B. Harden, is a wild true story that’s fresh, funny, disarmingly romantic, and cool as hell.

RATS!

Absolute chaos, like a witch’s brew of John Waters, Richard Linklater, Troma, and the best screamo tracks, as a young vandal must survive all that suburban Texas can throw at him. Contains my favorite diegetic song of the Festival.

Janet Planet

Annie Baker (“The Flick”) has a Pulitzer Prize for a reason. Now, the award-winning playwright makes her film debut with this evocative and tender drama about an 11-year-old girl and her bohemian mother (Julianne Nicholson) in early-’90s rural Massachusetts.

Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds

If I saw this when I was little, like all the bizarre European animated films of the ’70s and ’80s they’d show at the North Berkeley library on movie nights after my parents would drop me off, it’d be my entire personality. Pure magic.

In a Violent Nature

The Sundance premiere screening was one of the rowdiest crowds I’ve ever been in. Show up in droves in your Pieces T-shirts and prepare to scream for this graphically violent deconstructed slasher film out of northern Canada.