The Oak Cliff Film Festival in Dallas, TX (held at the historic Texas Theatre and other nearby locations) was the very first film festival I ever attended in June 2019. That feels like an eternity ago, yet I can distinctly remember setting my feet inside the Texas Theatre for the first time and feeling practically giddy. Here I was, a lady from Allen, TX, getting to experience the kind of film festivals I thought were only available to folks in Cannes, New York City, Los Angeles, or other places far beyond the Lone Star State.
I returned to the Oak Cliff Film Festival last year and had another exquisite time partaking in indie cinema of all shapes and sizes. The 2020s have been full of endless challenges for homegrown cinema, yet there was nary a trace of apocalyptic gloom in the Texas Theatre and Bishop Arts Center during these Oak Cliff Film festival screenings. People from all walks of life had gathered to experience movies where they were meant to be seen: on screens that consume your entire line of sight. These projects, often put together with pennies and nothing more than gung-ho spirit, reverberated with creative conviction.
Tech companies and movie studios, get your generative A.I. garbage out of here. Who needs that trash when you’ve got the gumption of homegrown indie cinema?
The 2025 Oak Cliff Film Festival marks another turning point, as this will be my last review or write-up for Culturess before the site closes its doors. It’s a sad moment and I urge other sites to hire the amazing writers that work for this outlet like Meg Dowell. However, I always say it’s better to bid farewell with a party than a wake. With that in mind, here are my capsule reviews for the six feature-length movies I saw at the 2025 Oak Cliff Film Festival. Thank you for reading my works on this site, please continue supporting writing from marginalized genders and voices, and never stop championing indie cinema!!
Natchez (dir. Suzannah Herbert)
Natchez, Mississippi. This Southern city has built its economy on providing tours of lavish antebellum mansions. The white owners of these locales dress up in 19th-century garbs (including Confederate general uniforms) and regale wealthy tourists with tales of the past. Simultaneously, Black individuals in the area, like Tracy Collins and Ser Clifford Boxley, are raising awareness for the very real horrors of slavery that these locations were built on. Cutesy dress-up for white residents is a horrifying whitewashing of history to other Natchez denizens.
Natchez, Mississippi housed horrors like the Forks of the Road slave market. Why is it now dominated by Gone with the Wind cosplay?
Director Suzannah Herbert’s form for Natchez isn’t necessarily revolutionary. However, her unintrusive filmmaking style allows anecdotes from Collins and Boxley (among others) to take center stage. It’s also a welcome sight that Herbert’s directorial approach rarely deploys talking head interviews and voice-over narration. Such techniques, often used to handhold audiences through exposition, could create a barrier between viewers and the Natchez residents. Instead, Herbert opts to chronicle real events as they unfold. It’s a much more emotionally immersive approach reflecting the immediacy and urgency of reckoning with the past.
Plus, this technique values the audience’s intelligence. We don’t need someone to look at the camera and flatly explain the significance of white Natchez residents living in big mansions while the Black descendants of the slaves who built those mansions are forced to live 35 minutes away from Natchez. The naturalistic, intimate visuals Herbert chronicles tell the whole story.
Heck, this entire streamlined execution is justified just through the excellent moment where Herbert initially focuses on a white woman prattling on justifying horrors of the past while shits sits in a former slave quarter now owned by Deborah Cosey. As she continues blabbering, the camera slowly turns towards poor Cosey, kneeling her head in frustration against a fireplace. The visual instincts, perfectly accentuating Cosey’s psyche, are sublime in this Natchez sequence. Such compelling moments make this a terrific documentary profiling the contrasts between citizens forced to recognize reality and privileged wealthy souls who can opt into harmful fantasy. Also a great cinematic testament to how, alas, the cis white gay men are it again.
$POSITIONS (dir. Brandon Daley)
What if Cooper Raiff starred in a crypto-themed remake of Red Rocket with a Safdie Brothers twist? That's the best way to describe $POSITIONS, a dark comedy about crypto-obsessive Mike Alvarado (Michael Kunicki) suddenly hitting it big with his virtual investments. After quitting his job and getting exceedingly cocky, his blossoming stocks crumble before his very eyes. Soon, endless bad events plague Alvarado as he obsessively tries to get back on top.
Writer/director Brandon Daley starts $POSITIONS off on an immediately miscalculated note. His cinematic inspirations are anxiety-inducing gems like Good Time, Daddy Longlegs, Shiva Baby, and even certain John Cassavetes directorial efforts. Those titles often wrung constant tension out of characters who really had nothing. With no pennies in their pockets, there was no telling what these grimy protagonists were capable of.
In making Alvarado a crypto enthusiast, though, $POSITIONS is inherently focusing on a guy with some level of financial stability to begin with. As the great Dan Olson put it, most of these crypto-enthusiasts are middle-class guys with disposable income, not the ramshackle bottom-wrung souls defining the best entries in the anxiety cinema canon.
Thus, it’s immediately hard to get invested in his plight or clench your fists in suspense over what could happen next. There’s always a house for Alvarado to live in or things he can sell to get out of trouble. $POSITIONS can’t even work as a modern equivalent to After Hours (which it really channels in a subplot where Alvarado’s request to his girlfriend to make their relationship open severely backfires) where a bougie guy gets battered around by the “subversive” corners of society. Daley refuses to take Alvarado into really dark territory. There’s always a “nice guy” underneath the crypto addiction, which means the worst things that happen to Alvarado are generic R-rated comedy shenanigans like being forced to drink urine when he thinks he’s slurping down beer.
This wariness of really going full-tilt psychotic leads to a poorly-paced third act tying a sentimental bow on a movie that needed a chaotic, bleaker ending. That isn't to say there aren't redeeming parts of $POSITIONS. Kaylyn Carter, playing Alvarado's girlfriend Charlene, has some great comic line deliveries in a script that hands her an absolutely dreadful character to play. Trevor Dawkins (as Lavarado's recovering addict cousin Travis), meanwhile, scores the production’s most hysterical moment with his terrific execution of Travis wearily recalling how he feels like he met a gangster in “a past life.”
Still, $POSITIONS doesn’t quite have Emma Seligman or Josh & Benny Safdie’s gift for propulsively stressful movies while Daley is a bit too timid to go full Harmony Korine/Michael Haneke with the title’s darker qualities. In the end, $POSITIONS is one of those motion pictures just reminding audiences of superior movies they could be watching instead.
Fucktoys (dir. Annapurna Sriram)
Finally, a movie for us lesbian perverts who love when films are shot in 16mm.
Annapurna Sriram’s directorial debut Fucktoys is a rollicking, deranged yarn about follows sex worker AP (Sriram) as she navigates a modern version of the Tarot card The Fool’s Journey. Turns out, AP has a curse that's weighing down every aspect of her life. It can be lifted, but for a price. Specifically, it cost $1000 to have the curse removed. Thus, AP is off to find anyway she can make a buck in Trashtown.
Along the way, AP reunites with old flame Danni (Sadie Scott) and the duo proceed to travel across Trashtown together on AP’s scooter. A barrage of oversized characters are waiting for them throughout Fucktoys, including knowledgeable psychics, unhinged rich people, and surprisingly helpful suburban dad Robert (Damian Young).
Right after my Fucktoys screening, the moderator of my post-movie Q&A astutely observed that the entire feature hinged on “transactional relationships.” It’s an ingenious note that reflects how Fucktoys nonchalantly destigmatizes sex work. Instead of being an aberration in a “clean” world like in so many movies, sex work is just another job in Fucktoys where people exchange dollars to help each other. Plus, much like last year’s Oak Cliff Film Festival Gem Fantasy A Gets A Mattress surrounded an autistic protagonist with significantly stranger neurotypical character, Fucktoys has sex workers like AP and Danni being the “straight men” to outlandish people who don’t exist in this profession. Rarely has the reality that “sex work is work” been so entertaining, uniquely rendered, or naturally ingrained into a movie.
Beyond its thoughtful upending of sex worker depictions in cinema, Fucktoys is also just tremendously fun to watch. Sometimes, homages to camp cinema end up trying too hard to replicate the lightning-in-a-bottle genius of Ed Wood or Showgirls. Annapurna Sriram, though, has so much imagination that the good times never let up. Even just the apocalyptic backdrop (complete with hazmat-wearing clean-up workers raking leaves or washing floors in the corners of wide shots) captivates the eye. It’s such a vivid and visually arresting manifestation of how we’re all forced to navigate capitalism obligations while the world crumbles.
The sexual energy radiating off Sriram’s visual impulses is also so impressive. AP and Danni’s chemistry alone had me going “awwww” and “oh my!” in equal measures. Sriram knows just how to block the physical behavior between these two to suggest unspoken romantic tension, from Danni nuzzling AP’s shoulder to those glorious moments where their lips are just inches from each other. I also love the balance in how she frames scantily clad women-identifying bodies throughout Fucktoys.
There’s no question that there’s deeply sexy imagery in here that’ll inspire every queer lady in the audience to start fanning themselves. However, AP and Danni are not just here to titillate the eyes. Sriram and cinematographer Cory Fraiman-Lott make time for intimate, dialogue-free shots offering vivid windows into the minds of these characters. Particularly memorable in this regard is a shot where the camera slowly pulls back on AP sitting in silence after an emotionally draining session at the strip club.
Meanwhile, the nonchalant framing of AP’s nude body in her bathtub or the fact that Danni wearing a binder is never emphasized as a “shocking” visual speaks to how Fucktoys moments isolated from general society opt for more intimate, casual imagery. All the hot bodies you’d want out of a piece of grindhouse cinema are here. However, they’re also paired up with tremendously thoughtful visual tendencies that amplify one’s tremendous emotional investment in AP and Danni’s odyssey.
Every corner of Fucktoys radiates impressive creative precision. The 16mm photography, for one thing, is exquisite. Not only does this make Fucktoys feel like it could be a lost midnight movie from the 70s/80, but it also makes Trashtown’s decaying ambiance extra palpable. Sriram’s script, meanwhile, keeps the unpredictable, anarchic chaos coming. That steady stream of mayhem also makes room for the greatest sight in all of cinema: lesbians being mad and smashing things/people.
Combine all that with outstanding bursts of dark comedy, a murderer’s row of memorable supporting turns (Damian Young is so good here, I’ll never hear the word “bop!” the same way ever again thanks to him), and a deluge of hot ladies and enby’s filling up the screen, and is it any wonder Fucktoys is absolutely peak unhinged cinema? Annapurna Sriram easily joins the ranks of Vera Drew and Aimee Kuge keeping the flame of quality trash and genuinely transgressive filmmaking alive.
Age of Audio (dir. Shain Michael Colon)
Age of Audio is a documentary telling the rise of podcasts as a vital artfrom in the modern world. This chronological gaze at the medium’s history begins with a couple of MTV veterans starting up on an RSS feed and uploading Grateful Dead tunes to it, which technically begins the podcast revolution. That’s the first step in Age of Audio’s five-act structure, which proceeds to take viewers on an exploration of how podcasts gained momentum, the problems incurred when big money entered the space, and what the future of the medium looks like.
Colon’s execution for Age of Audio is very traditional in the documentary film space. At times, it feels a tad like a polished video essay YouTube would suggest you watch after consuming a great Todd in the Shadows or Jenny Nicholson video. However, the enthusiasm the various interview subjects have for this topic, not to mention the breezy succinct pacing, keeps Age of Audio amiable. Another wise decision is in constantly returning to the saga of independent podcaster Ronald Young Jr., who also narrates the proceedings.
Let’s put all cards on the table: podcasts today can be anything, but the most popular ones in America are often propaganda pieces for anti-vaxxer and fascist rhetoric. An Age of Audio interview subject remarking that podcasts give power back to the proletariat is so tragically ironic now that one of the most listened-to podcasts gives airtime to folks like the head of the FBI. Age of Audio doesn’t grapple with this reality, but it wisely makes Ronald Young Jr. the face of modern podcasts rather than trying to gussy up uber-wealthy, toxic dudes as protagonists worth investing in.
Young Jr. nicely encapsulates the better potential of the podcast medium, considering he still struggles to make his rent every month. Plus, his works like Weight for It offer up viewpoints that never could’ve made it into broadcast radio in a pre-podcast world. The fact that Young Jr.’s voice is so sublime (a perfect quality for any narrator) just makes it extra wonderful that Age of Audio focuses so much on him. Also welcome are distinctive visual details like framing interviews in extreme close-ups (per a comment in a post-screening Q&A, that quality mirrors the auditory intimacy of podcasts) or nestling words within footage of everyday activities (like reading a map in the woods).
Age of Audio does what it says on the tin and, unfortunately, not much more. It’s a look at the rise of podcasts and the industry’s modern state. Only glimpses into Ronald Young Jr.’s everyday life (including engaging interviews with his sister and mom) provide unexpected levels of depth. However, if you’re comfortable with just getting your expectations met, Age of Audio is a polished execution of its goals. The whole production could’ve reached A+ territory, though, if it had made room for interviews with the Podcast: The Ride boys, though.
Messy (dir. Alexi Wasser)
Stella Fox (Alexi Wasser) certainly lives up to the title of Messy. Written and directed by Wasser, Messy follows Stella in New York City after an Earth-shattering break-up. She begins to engage in a series of sexual and romantic flings all in pursuit of finding the guy that lives up to her grandiose vision of "the perfect man." Inevitably, the men she ends up sleeping with include guy-with-rattail Max (Thomas Middleditch), middle-aged bar owner The Mayor (Adam Goldberg), and other oddball dudes. Even with the constant advice and support of pals Ruby Soho (Ruby McCollister) and Mandy (Merlot), Fox’s life never gets easier. “The hardest part of life is living it” as one single scene Messy character so truthfully remarks.
There’s lots of compliments to pay towards Messy, but its best quality is that it’s so exceedingly funny. Wasser's inspired raw screenwriting weaves hysterical poetry out of distinctively phrased lewd comedy, such as Ruby’s declaration that “camel toe is the new cleavage!”, Mandy observing that “as long as you’re not doing hard drugs [in New York City,] you’re basically sober” or Fox navigating a guy talking about the aroma of his previous lover’s vagina. Messy’s script also gives its lead character some exceptional bursts of cringe comedy to handle. A great early example of this is Fox (in a largely unbroken take) rattling off to Ruby a comically lengthy list of requirements for any man she gets serious with, including him having “no sisters, mom, or other woman friends.”
It’s all so well written and Fox’s streamlined, observational visual approach lets viewers soak in all the witty, raunchy banter. Sequences of Fox, Soho, and Mandy just laying around their apartments and talking in lengthy wide shots are especially great examples of this filmmaking style. Wasser and cinematographer Barton Cortright constantly capture all three characters in the frame at all times, which quietly solidifies how close they are with one another. In such images, Wasser, McCollister, and Merlot exude subtle yet vivid flashes of their characters' individual personalities through intricate body language.
Best of all, the deeply believable tight-knit rapport between these three women is so tangible within these unhurried, spacious shots. Rather than cutting from one isolating close-up to the next, Messy marinates in these three women navigating the complexities of relationships and love.
These delicately rich visual sensibilities and captivatingly amusing performances epitomize why Messy’s dialogue-heavy storytelling works so well. Also aiding the production is Wasser’s gusto as a performer and writer. Whether it’s Nate Parker, Seth MacFarlane, or Sylvester Stallone, many actors headlining their own directorial efforts embrace hagiographic protagonists. Now that they’re calling the shots, these filmmakers concoct roles that will allow them to look super cool or smoosh Charlize Theron before the credits roll.
Wasser, meanwhile, plays Stella Fox with enthralling bravura and ceaseless messiness. This multi-hyphenate talent unflinchingly portrays Fox waking up in the morning with vomit chunks smeared across her face, slurping on a lover’s toes, or making the absolute worst decisions on who she should bone. There’s undeniable fun in seeing where Wasser’s unpredictable gusto will take viewers next. However, these ragged corners of Fox are also superb in touching on something real. Speaking from experience, the desire to connect with someone takes people to strange places. Love is the carrot on a stick compelling us to do what previously would’ve been unthinkable.
Wasser’s work as Stella Fox (whether it’s in her acting, writing, or directing) isn’t reducing this woman to a shock value-driven punchline. That relatable feeling that the love of your life might be just around the corner informs an emotional reality underpinning everything Wasser does. That quality makes Messy such a compelling feature, in addition to its ceaselessly funny dark comedy and terrific performances. No wonder John Waters chose this as one of his favorite movies from 2024. The visually precise Messy is a hilariously written triumph.