SUSANNAH GRUDER
Journalist + Copywriter
May 19, 2023
Reverse Shot: Review of Sanctuary (Zachary Wigon)
Zachary Wigon’s compact second feature is little more than an elaborate scene study, but the gutsy performances of its two leads generate enough power to give the film a good deal of gravitas.
February 3, 2023
Reverse Shot: Review of Full Time (Eric Gravel)
Full Time is largely about the labor that continues in the shadows of a labor strike, and the non-union workers living outside Paris whose lives are overturned when the city shuts down. Julie is not a Norma Rae-esque heroine interested in organizing for the greater good; she is just trying to keep herself and her family afloat.
January 27, 2023
IndieWire: Sundance Review of 5 Seasons of Revolution (Lina)
Lina’s verité film documents the fracturing of a nation and a friend group following the Arab Spring.
January 25, 2023
IndieWire: Sundance Review of The Tuba Thieves (Alison O’Daniel)
In her intentionally perplexing filmmaking debut, artist Alison O’Daniel takes open captioning to new heights.
January 23, 2023
IndieWire: Sundance Review of Shayda (Noora Niasari)
Noora Niasari’s highly personal debut tells a timely tale of domestic abuse and women’s struggle for autonomy.
September 15, 2022
IndieWire: Review of The African Desperate (Martine Syms, 2022)
Syms injects her radical vision into a reimagining of her MFA experience in her innovative feature debut.
September 8, 2022
IndieWire: Review of Hold Me Tight (Mathieu Amalric, 2021)
Vicky Krieps mesmerizes in Mathieu Amalric’s cryptic story of loss.
August 25, 2022
IndieWire: Review of Mike (Hulu TV series)
The team behind "I, Tonya" delivers an unconvincing exercise in self-examination in their boxing biopic that's more recycled than revelatory.
July 27, 2022
IndieWire: Review of DC League of Superpets (Jared Stern)
Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Olivia Wilde, and John Krasinski lead a clever, kid-friendly superhero adventure from "Lego Batman Movie" writer Jared Stern.
July 14, 2020
IndieWire: Review of Anonymous Club (Danny Cohen)
The unpolished, textured feel of Danny Cohen's intimate profile of the singer/songwriter Courtney Barnett is a wonderful match for its compelling subject.
April 29, 2022
IndieWire: Review of The Wobblies (1979, Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer)
This portrait of America's most radical labor organization is an urgent reminder of what unions make possible.
April 9, 2022
Screen Slate: Write-Up of STOP (Jeff Preiss, 2012)
With its rapid-fire editing and ceaseless, seemingly objective documentation of images that cross one person’s path, STOP (2012) assembles life like a flipbook.
March 18, 2022
IndieWire: Review of Windfall (Charlie McDowell)
A tech billionaire and his wife find themselves at the mercy of a home invader in Charlie McDowell's half-baked homage to Alfred Hitchcock.
March 9, 2022
IndieWire: Review of Gold (Anthony Hayes)
Zac Efron delivers a stark and staggering performance in a film that's too dry for anything else to grow.
March 4, 2022
IndieWire: Review of Asking for It (Eamon O’Rourke)
Equal parts Tom Cruise in “Magnolia” and Milo Yiannopoulos in real life, Ezra Miller’s turn as a men’s rights activist leaves an awkward taste.
February 11, 2022
IndieWire: Review of Playground (Laura Wandel)
Laura Wandel’s debut hits on the schoolyard moments you try to forget, where recess is a battleground rife with violence and bullying.
January 27, 2022
Reverse Shot: Sundance Round-Up
Reviewed Brainwashed (Nina Menkes), Happening (Audrey Diwan), Gentle (László Csuja and Anna Nemes) and Sharp Stick (Lena Dunham) .
January 23, 2022
IndieWire: Sundance Review of Aftershock (Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee)
This doc gives a wide-angle and close-up look at the dangers of giving birth while Black.
January 22, 2022
IndieWire: Sundance Review of Speak No Evil (Christian Tafdrup)
Tafdrup's merciless horror film takes politeness to wild, unnerving ends.
January 22, 2022
IndieWire: Sundance Review of Watcher (Chloe Okuno)
Chloe Okuno's debut feature settles for cheap thrills in its story of an American woman being stalked by a killer in Bucharest.
January 21, 2022
IndieWire: Sundance Review of Riotsville (Sierra Pettengill)
An archival documentary revisits the fake towns that were built to train America's riot police in the 1960s, and laid the foundation for decades of violence.
November 19, 2021
IndieWire: Review of So Late So Soon (Daniel Hymanson, 2021)
Hymanson's debut feature is a delicately observed portrait of long-married Chicago artists as they confront their twilight years.
October 7, 2021
Reverse Shot: NYFF: Review of Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma)
Time is in many ways the subject of Petite Maman, which opens with the ticking of a clock, suggesting the childlike domain of Fanny and Alexander, a film that likewise tries to understand the mysteries of adulthood through a child’s eyes.
October 5, 2021
Reverse Shot: NYFF: Review of Titane (Julia Ducournau)
TItane starts out hard but strips itself down to a level of softness and sentimentality, examining the armors we establish to shield ourselves from the world, and what it takes to transmute our steely exteriors into something more malleable.
September 30, 2021
IndieWire: NYFF: Review of Prayers for the Stolen (Tatiana Huezo, 2021)
Tatiana Huezo offers up a murky, mesmerizing look at what it feels like for young women to come of age in a town where they have targets on their backs.
September 28, 2021
Reverse Shot: NYFF Review: The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2021)
The film is a richly layered look at the conflicting longings and impulses of early adulthood, the cinematic equivalent to a bittersweet love song that also happens to be catchy as hell.
August 31, 2021
IndieWire: Review of Anne at 10,000 Ft. (Kazik Radwanski, 2019)
Campbell’s staggering performance is the film’s center of gravity, offering a captivating sense of chaos and complexity to a unique drama.
May 21, 2021
Reverse Shot: Review of The Killing of Two Lovers (Robert Machoian)
A spare film that embraces the emptiness of the landscape, Robert Machoian's The Killing of Two Lovers seeks balance amidst an ever-present threat of romantic apocalypse.
February 5, 2021
Reverse Shot: Sundance Film Festival 2021
Wrote about festival highlights, including Nanfu Wang’s documentary In the Same Breath, luli Gerbase’s The Pink Cloud and Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta.
January 14, 2021
Reverse Shot’s Best of 2020: Never Rarely Sometimes Always
Wrote about Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always for Reverse Shot’s best of the year round-up.
October 9, 2020
Reverse Shot: NYFF 2020: Review of Beginning (Dea Kulumbegashvili, 2020)
While her emotional world remains hidden to us, we nonetheless feel an intimacy with Yana as she nestles herself into the vastness of her environment.
October 2, 2020
Reverse Shot: Review of Dick Johnson Is Dead (Kirsten Johnson, 2020)
In the spirit of films like the Chantal Akerman documentary No Home Movie and I Go Gaga, My Dear, by Naoko Nobutomo, Johnson tries to capture him on camera to come to terms with his eventual disappearance, while also somehow keeping him alive.
August 5, 2020
Reverse Shot: Review of Sunless Shadows (Mehrdad Oskouei, 2019)
Oskouei slowly chips away at any sense of calm on the surface of life at a female juvenile corrections center in Iran, spending the majority of the film listening to each woman’s inner struggles, as they wrestle with the crimes they’ve committed and the prospect of life after prison.
January 31, 2020
Hyperallergic: Review of The Assistant (Kitty Green, 2020)
Kitty Green’s latest film is as much about societal acceptance of sexual misconduct as it is about the indignities that many workers face in the office, especially younger women.
January 29, 2020
Reverse Shot: Sundance Film Festival 2020
Wrote about highlights of the festival, including Janicza Bravo’s Zola, Eliza Hittman’s Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always and Miranda July’s Kajillionaire.
January 23, 2020
Hyperallergic: Sundance’s Documentary Shorts Offer Brief but Powerful Glimpses Around the World
The festival’s program is especially robust this year, featuring films about the Hong Kong protests, abortion helpline volunteers, and more.
January 14, 2020
Reverse Shot: 2019: Two Cents
Wrote about Luke Lorentzen’s Midnight Family for Reverse Shot’s annual “Two Cents” list — in which critics air their thoughts on anything that they loved, hated, or believe might have been overlooked in the year’s “best of” round-ups.
January 3, 2020
Reverse Shot’s Best of 2019: Parasite
Wrote about Bong Joon' Ho’s Parasite for Reverse Shot’s best of the year round-up.
December 17, 2019
Hyperallergic: Best of 2019: Our Top 12 Documentaries and Experimental Films
Wrote about Garrett Bradley’s America for Hyperallergic’s Best of the Year round-up.
December 16, 2019
Hyperallergic: Best of 2019: Our Top 15 Feature Films
Wrote about Mariano Llinás’s La Flor for Hyperallergic’s Best of 2019 round-up.
November 27, 2019
Hyperallergic: The Documentary Project That’s Followed the Same Subjects for Over 50 Years
63 Up is the latest installment in the Up series, which has revisited a set of British people every seven years since they were children, tracking their lives and development.
November 8, 2019
Hyperallergic: The Artful Amateurism of Home Movies
In MoMA’s first exhibition composed entirely of home movies, visitors are placed into the perspective of these amateur filmmakers, ever so often stumbling upon a choice moment of intimacy.
October 16, 2019
Reverse Shot: NYFF 2019: Review of Motherless Brooklyn (Edward Norton, 2019)
In attempting to say something meaningful about race and politics in the city’s biggest borough, Norton has fallen into the same pattern as many real-life real-estate developers and city planners, getting rid of what made the source material so compelling in the first place, and adding his own personally convenient plotlines in the process.
October 9, 2019
Reverse Shot: NYFF 2019: Review of Varda by Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2019)
Throughout, in the manner of The Beaches of Agnès (2008), Varda looks back at her work, attempting to connect the dots both for herself, and for her audience. Knowing she can no longer be with us, the ever benevolent Varda has left us with the next best thing.
October 3, 2019
Reverse Shot: NYFF 2019: Review of Oh Mercy! (Arnaud Desplechin, 2019)
By doing away with narrative tricks or genre bending, Desplechin puts the focus on the performances, which provide a multifaceted and devastating study of urban desperation.
September 12, 2019
Reverse Shot: Review of Chained for Life (Aaron Schimberg, 2019)
Like Rod Serling, director Aaron Schimberg is eager to expose our own biases, and here he thrills at luring us into a vertiginous series of alternate dimensions, seeking to unravel our ideas about the nature of beauty captured on camera.
August 30, 2019
Hyperallergic: Grappling With the Final Stages of a Father’s Life
Aneta Bartos seeks to capture the surreal space of memory, blurring real and imagined worlds in order to represent that which is beyond fact or fiction.
July 19, 2019
Hyperallergic: Exploring the Isolations of Age, Disability, and Depression in Japan
A trio of documentaries playing at this year’s Japan Cuts festival tackle different facets of social alienation.
May 23, 2019
Hyperallergic: How a Great American Fashion Designer Rose and Fell Along with Disco
A documentary tracks the life and work of superstar designer Halston.
May 3, 2019
Hyperallergic: Other Music Remembers a Beloved New York Record Store
The documentary tells the story of the music institution’s life — and death.
March 29, 2019
Reverse Shot: Review of Diane (Kent Jones, 2019)
Diane asks what it means to build your life around other people, and what happens when those people begin to slowly disappear.