Kerem Sanga's First Girl I Loved is a tender, honest portrait of adolescence, a film that effectively captures the confusion of budding sexuality and how societies' preconceived notions towards homosexuality can do a great disservice to youth.  The film is centered around Anne, a quirky 17-year-old photographer for the school yearbook, who while on assignment is struck by her initial, sudden attraction to Sasha, a member of the softball team.  Anne is startled by her powerful attraction, and in attempting to understand her sexual preference, she entrusts her best friend Cliff with her secret. Unexpectedly Cliff lashes out, having harbored feelings for Anne this whole time, becoming quite vindictive in his attempts to get in the way of Sasha and Anne's budding romance.  Considering sexual confusion and discovery is a major proponent in LGBT cinema, for good reason, many films of this ilk feel a dime-a-dozen, unable to really distinguish themselves from the pack.  With First Girl I Loved, Karem Sanga has created a film that does just that, thanks to its ability to balance its serious subject matter with a comedic tone.  One of the major aspects that stands out with First Girl I Love is simply how adorable the budding romance is between Sasha and Anne, two characters who themselves are swept away by their attraction and emotional connectivity.  Neither of these characters really have much time to think about the fact that they must be, at the very least, bisexual, but that doesn't (and shouldn't) matter, as they are following their hearts.  The film does a beautiful job of finding the piercing comedy in the awkwardness of "the pursuit of romance", laughing about the playful dishonesty that comes with trying to impress.  The awkward silences, the insecurities, all are laughed at in First Girl I Loved, as the film perfectly captures how discombobulated people can look when they are attracted to/falling in love with one and other.  This aspect of the film, even bigots should be able to be emotionally drawn too, given the universal feeling of love, but where the film really excels is in its ability to capture how detrimental societies taboos related to homosexuality can be on a teenagers natural development.  The confusion of adolescence is a universal concept, but when you combing this with the preconceived idea that homosexuality is "not normal" it can prove psychologically abusive to young teenagers who are simply trying to find comfort in themselves.  While the film is far from perfect, being a little too vindictive towards every male character in the film for my liking, there is no denying that First Girl I Loved is an honest, comedic look at budding sexuality, making an important case for society as a whole to not treat homosexuality as any different, for the sake of not only aware homosexuals, but those who are still in the process of discovering their sexuality.

Leslie Stevens' Private Property is an alluring piece of filmmaking, an expertly crafted noir-esque thriller that uses its tight narrative to examine the relationship between desire, gender, and class tension.  The film is centered around Duke and Boots, two young thugs, who emerge from the beach dunes in Malibu and proceed to hold up a California gas-station owner.  Calmly sadistic and calculating, Duke is clearly the brains of the operation, a character who routinely pokes and prods his psychologically-challenged partner Boots, mainly over his lack of sexual conquest.  Duke laments that he wants to help Boots seduce a woman, and when the beautiful Ann Carlyle, the upper-class wife of a insurance-company executive, enters the picture looking for directions, Duke and Boots concoct a plane.  Following Ann to her beautiful home in the Hollywood Hills, Duke and Boots squat at the empty neighbors house, with Duke slowly using charming manipulation to stroke the conscious of a woman in Ann who isn't having her own desires completely met by her husband.  Private Property touches on class to a degree, but the film's core examination is centered around the genetic evolutionary-defined roles of gender, where the man's role as a hunter/gather/provider and the female's role as a nurturer create a dangerous cocktail between the calmly sadistic Duke, who manipulatively champions himself as a poor man looking for work, and the sexually-repressed Ann, whose considerably wealth and genetically engineered penchant for nurturing enables her to help.  In Private Property, Ann's beauty serves as her potential demise in a sense, with every male character pining for her, as Duke at one point even proclaims "if I can't have you no one will".  By the end of the film both Duke and Boots fight to the death for Ann's affection, both treating her like a possession in which they are owed.  Duke was introduced as a sadistic character long before his seduction of Ann, so I'd argue this film is not about modern day feminism principles themselves, but more about the powerful forces of desire and passion, with Ann herself becoming a slave to her impulses, unable to reject her primal, carnal desires.  All these characters respond to their primal states, as if Private Property is merely a subtle statement about humanities' desire and struggle to break free from these genetically-defined, evolutionary traits.  Private Property is an extremely well photographed film, with Stevens use of depth of frame particularly standing out, routinely obstructing the foreground of the composition in an attempt to evoke the emotions of its characters.  One example of this is when Ann gives in to her sexual desires and proceeds to share a long kiss with Duke.  Stevens places a birdcage in the foreground of the frame, a visually representation of Ann's restricted sexuality and desire. caged. unable to break free.  The opening shot of the film also stood out to me, a simple shot that sees Duke and Boots emerging from the sands of Malibu.  While simplistic, the angle and the ambiance of the scene evoke a sense of danger about these two characters, as if they are emerging from the primordial ooze of masculinity.  Voyeuristic compositions are also used throughout to create tension, with Duke and Boots routinely watching the beautiful Ann from afar, calculating their next move.  An extremely well-crafted film, Leslie Steven's Private Property is an underappreciated gem which provides a complex and fascinating examination of the primal urges of humanity.    

Penny Lane's Nuts! is a playful, invigorating documentary about Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, an eccentric man of intelligence who built an entire empire of medicine due to his goat-testicle impotence cure and his pioneering use of radio.  Featuring a host of cinematic techniques which include animated reenactments, interviews, archival footage, and a somewhat unreliable narrator, Nuts! is a highly enjoyable story of one man's entrepreneurial rise to a place of celebrity and influence in the 1920s.  Penny Lane's Nuts! is the type of documentary that is best to go into knowing as little as possible, given that one of the film's greatest attributes is its ability to manipulate the viewer.  I'm trying to keep things somewhat vague in this regard, as the less you know the better, but lets just say that I haven't seen a film in awhile that played with my perceptions of the world so effectively, only to expose the truth in a way that left me quite startled by its conclusion.  Nuts! as a documentary is a great example of the power of convincing narrative structure, a film that is utterly believable in its early David vs. Goliath story that finds Dr. Brinkley fighting for the common man against his perceived oppressors, the status quo, only to pull the carpet out from underneath the viewer and reveal the true subversive nature of Dr. John Romulus Brinkley's medical empire.  Documentary filmmaking more so than any other genre of film can fall victim to lazy filmmaking, but Nuts! never comes close to relying solely on its unique story, embracing its absurd subject matter to tell this tale with vigor and imagination.  Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Penny Lane's Nuts! is that by the end of the documentary it becomes clear that the film itself is simply mirroring that of its primary subject, delivering a convincing set of circumstances that effectively cons the audience into believing its well-intentioned narrative, a very similar practice to how Dr. Brinkley himself rose to prominence.  Playful, eccentric, and utterly manipulative in the best possible way, Penny Lane's Nuts! is an imaginative and fascinating documentary that shouldn't be missed. 

Aleksey German's Under Electric Clouds is a challenging portrait of humanity, a film that is utterly ambitious in its indictment of the current state of Russia, which manages to be as elusively oblique as it's transfixing.  Taking place exactly one hundred years after the communist-led Russian Revolution, Under Electric Clouds is set in 2017 Russia, where the future looks incredibly bleak due to what is expected to be another world war.  Told through a series of interconnected vignettes, Under Electric Clouds is a philosophically bleak examination of humanity, a film that is far from streamlined but utterly fascinating due to its powerful ideas and stunning visual design.  Through these interconnected stories, Under Electric Clouds is an existential story of humanity, a film that almost professes that we are all just animals trying to do the best we can, with the human condition being full of continuous attempts at success no matter the amount of times we fail.  There is a lot of sadness within this repetitious try, fail, try, fail nature of humanity, with Under Electric Clouds being a story of despair and seclusion, an experience that perfectly matched by its visual design, a dark, cloudy atmospheric palette, creating a look of dystopia the filmmakers' no question intended. The existential component of Under Electric Clouds relates to the idea that our individual lives are by proxy meaningless, with the cycle of human failures and successes as it relates to politics, humanitarianism, etc throughout history hardly improving on the grand scale of time.  While I'm sure this film sounds incredibly depressing and boring by now, Under Electric Clouds presents these ideas in a way that somehow manages to never feel all doom and gloom, as the film's tone routinely oscillates between black comedy and hyper serious hypothesis about humanity and the meaning of our existence.  Beneath all the conjecture, Death is a major element Under Electric Clouds too, being presented in a very cold, matter of fact nature throughout the vignettes, another reminder by the filmmaker of how meaningless individuals are in the grand scheme of things.  One of the more interesting components of Under The Electric Clouds is its commentary on the the failures of globalism, presenting a pointed commentary on how it has only created a fallacy of togetherness, with forced collectivism being in a space where money, and power, still reign.  History and tradition by proxy have been trampled for the perceived better future, with perhaps my favorite commentary of Under Electric Clouds being how it reveals how dangerous that blanket assumption can be, this ideal that the future will always be better than the past, or present.  A hyper ambitious study of not only Russia but humanity itself, Under Electric Clouds is a somewhat messy, but always intoxicating, existential and spiritual journey about a host of fascinating hypothesis.