the last call movie review

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• HBO’s <i>Last Call</i> Is the Rare True-Crime Doc That Does Right by the Victims

HBO’s Last Call Is the Rare True-Crime Doc That Does Right by the Victims

“Anything that I didn’t ask that you think I should’ve asked?” It’s a standard final interview question for investigative journalists—a gesture of due diligence that acknowledges that the scope of the story might be wider than the reporter imagines. But when it’s posed from behind the camera in HBO’s Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York , one subject questions the whole premise of the docuseries: “Why,” asks Carl Harnish, a former Pennsylvania State police officer who worked on the case, “is the emphasis on the gay part?”

It isn’t exactly a gotcha moment. Last Call , which premieres on July 9, is not that kind of true-crime doc. More than an investigation, the series is an eloquent and timely rumination on why it took police in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania so many years to catch a serial killer who, throughout the early 1990s, picked up men at gay bars in Manhattan and crossed state lines to dispose of their dismembered remains. Unlike so much contemporary true-crime schlock , which enthuses over “favorite” murders and fetishizes Jeffrey Dahmer , its emphasis is on the victims, their still-grieving families, and a larger LGBTQ community that sublimated fear into action. Harnish’s question epitomizes the disconnect that persists between police and one of the most vulnerable groups they’re supposed to serve and protect.

Based on Elon Green’s Edgar-winning book Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York , the series tells the complete story of the so-called Last Call Killer, down to the nickname’s origin in homophobic tabloid news coverage. Each murder is dutifully recounted, from the late night at a piano bar to the discovery of body parts in plastic bags. Yet we don’t hear the killer’s name until the very end of the third out of four episodes. Instead, director Anthony Caronna (who also directed Susanne Bartsch: On Top , a portrait of a queer nightlife icon, as well as a standout episode of FX’s LGBTQ-rights docuseries Pride ) devotes most of the documentary’s runtime to interviews with the family members, friends, and partners who knew the victims best.

Two of the men were closeted 50-somethings, with careers in conservative industries and families in the suburbs. We meet Thomas Mulcahy, whose remains were found in New Jersey in 1992, through his daughter, Tracy O’Shea. “My father was very kind, kind of gentle, funny in a quirky kind of way,” she recalls, sifting through photographs of the family-oriented Mulcahy just “being a dad,” from her childhood. “The big thing was, he kind of let us be ourselves.” Tony Hoyt had known the first Last Call victim, Peter Anderson, since the mid-’60s. They didn’t act on their mutual attraction at the time. “Where I grew up, everybody was straight,” Hoyt wryly explains. “One was not a homosexual.” So he married a woman and had kids, while Anderson got a big job in banking. They found each other again, briefly, several years later. It was Hoyt’s first sexual experience with another man. “We fit together, and we were safe together,” he says. But the affair couldn’t last. They were still closeted. Anderson found a wife of his own. And they didn’t see each other again until a chance meeting on the last night that Anderson was seen alive.

A decade younger, Latino, and a sex worker, Anthony Marrero represented a very different segment of queer New York. Caronna shows us an obituary for Marrero with the headline “Crack Addict, Prostitute” and suggests that his murder never got the attention it deserved because of how society viewed him. As his friend, the author and activist Ceyenne Doroshow, puts it: “There was no directory for find your dead homo friends . In my life, people disappeared a lot.” Marrero becomes a window into the antagonism and entrapment that the queer sex workers who congregated around Port Authority in the ’70s and ’80s suffered at the hands of police. But Caronna never loses sight of the individual, either. Marrero’s grand-nephew Antonio, who is bisexual, talks about how a strain of homophobia that persists within his family prevented him from learning his great-uncle’s story earlier. Antonio’s grandfather, who was Anthony’s brother, is still in denial. “I don’t think he was gay or anything like that,” he says in an interview.

The fourth and final known victim, Michael Sakara, was an out gay man with a robust social life—and his status as a fixture in the queer community led to some major breakthroughs in the case. Lisa Hall, the bartender at the watering hole where he was a regular, knew him by his real name and was able to describe the man he left with on the night he disappeared. A former partner regrets that he never got the chance to reconcile with Michael. And in an especially poignant interview, his younger sister Marilyn recounts how Michael’s openness, despite a rough childhood and an undesirable discharge from the military, made her own coming out easier: “He grounded me, and I felt protected.” The camera lingers on Marilyn grasping the hand of her spouse, Karen, and zooms in on a shelf in their home, loaded with books about grief.

These conversations are anything but pain porn. They’re rejoinders to salacious, dehumanizing media coverage of the Last Call Killer. They illuminate who every one of his victims were as people, through the eyes of those who loved them—some of whom never got to know the full extent of their identities while they were alive. And the interviews fly in the face of decades’ worth of propaganda that has framed queer people as abject, lonely outsiders.

Indeed, the heroes of Last Call are the people who spent decades helping to unite LGBTQ New York as a community. Veterans of the NYC Anti-Violence Project (then the NYC Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project) recall the difficulty of working with the NYPD; the police commissioner at the time, Ray Kelly, was a member of the openly homophobic Emerald Society, and New York City authorities dragged their feet on joining an interstate investigative task force, citing jurisdictional issues. Even as HIV-AIDS ravaged the community, it was the AVP that found the time to flyer neighborhoods about the Last Call Killer and the money to offer a reward for evidence leading to his arrest. And it was Gay USA —a cable news program that is still airing weekly episodes —that kept viewers informed about the case and held public officials who seemed to be devoting insufficient attention and resources to it accountable.

Last Call is not a formally ambitious documentary. Like many true-crime docs, it’s woven together from talking-head interviews, archival B-roll, and vague, wordless reenactments. What distinguishes it, structurally, are Caronna’s concision and attention to detail. Yet its real innovation is its compassion, in the trust that it not only establishes among the people whose lives were irreparably harmed by these killings, but also honors with its humanistic storytelling.

From time to time, Caronna touches on a subject of much speculation regarding the Last Call Killer: Was he a gay man with some kind of murder kink, or was he a raging homophobe, channeling his bigotry into ghastly crimes? (Never mind that these options are not mutually exclusive.) As many of the series’ interview subjects point out, the answer doesn’t really matter. Too many myopic serial-killer stories begin and end with the psychology of the perpetrator, revealing only slightly different flavors of psychopathology. Even before its shocking and infuriating final episode drives home the point, Last Call indicts a society whose systemic—and ongoing—homophobia, from the isolation of the closet to the prejudice embedded in public institutions, can have lethal consequences. Why the emphasis on the gay part? That’s why.

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Last Call Review: A Serial Killer Mystery with a Much Scarier Crime

Every frame of Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York teems with anger.

Say their names: Thomas Mulcahy. Peter Anderson. Anthony Marrero. Michael J. Sakara. Frederic Spencer. These men fell victim to a serial murderer dubbed the “Last Call Killer,” a predator that stalked LGBTQ+ men during the 1990s in New York City.

Interviews with the families and friends of said victims make up the bulk of the runtime of Last Call , the new HBO docuseries that chronicles the search for the killer. True-crime fans should take note: this is not your usual whodunit.

For the record, viewers of Last Call do find out 'whodunit' over the course of the series’ four episodes. As directed by Anthony Caronna ( Pride ), however, the show doesn’t follow the traditional clue-by-clue mystery format that invites an audience to solve the crime as they watch. Caronna instead takes a different approach: one focusing more on the lives of the victims, and on a community forsaken.

Watching the debut episode, it first seems like Caronna has fallen into the trap of so many recent docuseries : stretching a too-thin story over multiple hours to meet an episode quota. The show opens with police recalling the discovery of a human head along rural Route 72 in New Jersey. It belonged to Thomas Mulchay, a Massachusetts businessman, husband, and father. A search by law enforcement turns up the rest of Mulchay’s remains, dismembered, packed in plastic bags, and stretched out over several miles.

An analysis of his movements the night he disappeared reveal that he’d stopped at a posh New York City bar, The Townhouse, just prior to his death. At first, investigators don’t see any significance to the location. Interviews with bar patrons, however, turn up something unexpected: The Townhouse is a clandestine gay bar, catering to wealthy closeted and married men.

At this point in the series, Caronna takes a hard left turn in his narrative. Whereas any other big true-crime show — 20/20, To Catch a Predator — would have focused solely on the investigation, with family and friends weeping for the cameras, Last Call jumps into biopic territory. Mulchay’s adult daughter, Tracey O’Shea, remembers her dad, speaking of his parenting skills, his favorite activities, his personality quirks. Queer community activists then enter the frame, discussing their relationships with police, and how they set out to warn the community about a killer on the loose during a period of extreme public homophobia. It seems like a digression from the show’s main focus—finding the killer.

Not What It Seems

When Caronna uses a similar approach in Episode 2, discussing the murder of Anthony Marrero, a gay sex worker, it becomes clear that the director has a different story in mind. Last Call doesn’t want to titillate viewers with a real-life murder mystery and all the salacious detail that comes with it. Caronna wants his audience to get mad .

Every frame of Last Call teems with anger — as much rage against the killer as against a homophobic police department ill-equipped to aid a community in need. In the 1980s and 90s, even in a city as liberal as New York , LGBTQ+ people lived life constantly glancing over their shoulders to avoid violence. Yes, Greenwich Village (home of the fabled Stonewall Inn) had a reputation as an oasis for queer people looking to live openly among other members of their community. That didn’t stop outsiders — or police — from harassing residents on a regular basis.

Related: Best True Crime Documentaries on Max

At one point in Last Call , a community activist holds up a map of The Village, with tiny purple dots indicating the location of attacks in the first few months of 1992. That the dots look like a giant blood stain feels appropriate: there were over 600 acts of violence against LGBTQ people in the first three months of the year alone. Virtually none of those crimes were ever prosecuted. Young people — in particular young queer folks — should take note. Never say older gay and trans people didn’t have it hard.

Homophobia Is the True Crime

Caronna devotes so much of Last Call to this backdrop, we suspect, because the director knows the murders committed by the Last Call Killer are not the most egregious crimes in this story. During one interview, two investigators ask Caronna why it’s such a big deal that the sexuality of the victims was important to the case. In another, the brother of a career hustler insists his deceased sibling couldn’t possibly have been gay. When Tracey O’Shea weeps for her father, she doesn’t cry because he had a secret life. She cries because she understands the kind of shame that forced him to have one.

The biggest crime here is homophobia, pure and simple.

Caronna avoids making his narrative overly didactic by finding a perfect balance of plot threads. Friends remember victims, community organizers vent their anger with law enforcement, police and other investigators share their frustrations with investigating the murders, and so on. The four episodes of Last Call feel cyclical in that way. That approach also gives the show an eerie quality. The viewer knows that another murder always lurks around the corner.

Related: The 10 Greatest Serial Killer Movies of the 2010s, Ranked

An Angry Call

The fourth episode of Last Call details the break in the case that finally leads police to the Last Call Killer. Here, Caronna avoids heavy-handed psychoanalysis. Instead, he interviews longtime friends of the killer. It will astonish viewers how of their testimony echoes that of the family members of Last Call Killer’s victims: how they had no idea that he led a double life, how they suspected he was gay though he denied it, how they had no clue that amid his extensive video and photo collection, he’d drawn blood and wounds over images of muscular men.

Caronna intimates that the same homophobia which compounded the investigation into the Last Call Killer, on some level, also motivated his crimes. In that way, the director almost evokes sympathy for his villain. Almost.

Caronna devotes the final minutes of Last Call to the rash of hate crimes against queer people that exploded in the 1990s, and draws parallels between the homophobic rhetoric of the time with the current anti-LGBTQ words of American politicians. He makes the case that public demonization of queer Americans stokes the violence that claimed the lives of the Last Call Killer’s victims, as well as that of Marsha P. Johnson, Brandon Teena, Matt Shepherd, the victims of the Pulse Massacre and so many others. Last Call is not the usual siren call of crime-as-entertainment.

Last Call is a cry of anger.

Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York premiered its first episode Sunday, July 9th, with the next three episodes airing Sunday nights. It can be streamed on Max.

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Last Call review: HBO's serial killer doc is powerful and infuriating

Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York is streaming now on Max.

Kristen Baldwin is the TV critic for EW

There are murders in HBO 's Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York — at least five, probably more. But the other crime at the heart of this powerful and infuriating true-crime documentary is why it took decades and countless pleas for help from the LGBTQ+ community to capture the man responsible for so much death.

This thoughtful, well-paced series from director Anthony Caronna weaves together illuminating social and historical context, loving explorations of the victims' lives, and a gripping criminal mystery to create an emotional and educational odyssey that transcends the standard boundaries of true crime.

In 1991, a maintenance worker in Lancaster County, PA found a dismembered male body — that of Peter Anderson, a 54-year-old banker from Philadelphia — in a rest stop trash can. Then came Thomas Mulcahy, 57, a married father of four, whose dismembered body was discovered in 1992 by maintenance workers in Woodland Township, New Jersey. Anthony Marrero, a 44-year-old sex worker, was next, found in the woods of Ocean County, NJ in 1993, followed by Michael Sakara, a 56-year-old typesetter, whose partial remains were found by a hot dog vendor in Rockland County, NY. Though the men didn't know one another, all of them had one thing in common: They were last seen in New York City, in areas and bars frequented by gay men.

Based on the nonfiction book by Elon Green, Last Call hones its focus on the many ways these murder investigations — which remained separate for years, due to jurisdictional issues and sub-par communication between law enforcement agencies — were hindered from the start by implicit and overt police bias. "More often than not the police back then were either indifferent or hostile" to the LGBTQ+ community, says Matt Foreman, a former director at New York City's Anti-Violence Project, which was founded in 1980 after a rise in bias attacks.

As a result, the cops themselves knew nothing about the community whose help they would need to stop the killer. "You know, it's just a different world," says Nick Theodos, a former NJ State Police detective who was brought in to work the Mulcahy case. Using interviews with community organizers, archival footage, and news reports from New York's Gay USA public-access broadcast, Last Call composes a vivid illustration of the distrust and suspicion that divided the city's gay community from law enforcement at the time. Because queer New Yorkers felt safer reporting crimes to groups like AVP than the police, the detectives investigating these murders were also less likely to connect them to the ongoing rise in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes .

The series is particularly successful at revealing how this barrier — and other issues facing the LGBTQ+ community at the time — persist to this day. At the conclusion of his interview with Anthony Caronna, former Pennsylvania State Police corporal Carl Harnish asks the director, "Why is the emphasis on the gay part?" Jay Musser, Harnish's former partner on the Peter Anderson murder, repeatedly insists that the victim's sexuality was "irrelevant" to the investigation, adding, "I don't know anything about the community." In the next episode, Caronna interviews a man who was drugged and taken back to his apartment in 1992 by a man who had a duffle bag containing rope. He escaped but didn't call the NYPD. "What are they gonna do?" he scoffs. "Nothing!"

It took 10 years for police to locate and arrest the perpetrator, Richard Rogers, a 51-year-old nurse at New York's St. Vincent's hospital — but as Last Call reveals, the story only gets more devastating from there. Thankfully, Caronna balances the agony of the myriad injustices with attentive and affectionate interludes devoted to the men who were murdered. Through interviews with friends, former partners, children, and family members, Last Call carefully constructs portraits of Anderson, Mulcahy, Marrero, and Sakara that celebrate them as men who loved and were loved. And Marrero's great-nephew, Antonio Marrero, reveals that his own parents disowned him when he came out as bisexual — which made him even more determined to keep his uncle's memory alive and break the cycle of shame in his family.

Antonio's story dovetails effectively with Last Call 's overarching message: Every hard-fought victory for the LGBTQ+ community is built on a mountain of setbacks, and the prize of progress, though essential, is never perfect. Grade: A-

The first episode of Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York is streaming now on Max. New episodes air Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.

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Last Call Sees What Most True Crime Misses

On the surface, Last Call looks like dozens of other true-crime series. All the familiar visual language is in place: footage of recreated scenes, lots of talking heads, timelines that flash across the screen, piles of images of documents and police evidence. Most true-crime docuseries use this kind of material to add up to proof of guilt or draw out the pleasurable dissatisfaction of a mystery that hasn’t yet been solved. Last Call still does those things, but with a marked lack of fanfare. Given the course of a story that’s subtitled When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York, it’s necessary to identify a killer, to consider that person’s life and the details of their crimes, and yet Last Call treats those narrative necessities with an almost reluctant eye. Yes, these things are important, but other things matter more.

Directed by Anthony Caronna and adapted from the book of the same name by Elon Green, Last Call makes a suggestive companion to the recent Black Mirror episode “Loch Henry,” which casts a sardonic eye on the true-crime genre as it’s usually deployed: the promise of careful sensitivity and the end result of naked sensationalism. As a story about a serial killer who murdered several queer men in New York in the early ’90s, Last Call could very easily have been exactly the kind of true crime “Loch Henry” sneers at, a dime-a-dozen streaming thriller full of shock and disgust and obsession with a killer’s mind. But it’s more interested in the lives of the victims than the killer, more attentive to history and cultural context than to repetition of violent details, and vastly more curious about systems of bias than individual criminality. It’s gentle and careful and immensely loving, even when it’s also full of palpable fury — everything true crime so rarely understands how to be.

The series’s four episodes, which roll out Sunday nights on HBO and Max beginning July 9, spend significant time with victims’ families, friends, and lovers, and their accounts become multifaceted portraits of who these men were. Because they were queer men, and because not all of them were out to everyone in their lives, the varied, overlapping perspectives help resist any simplistic reading of who they were and how they’re remembered. Thomas Mulcahy’s daughter talks about how loving he was, and about the pain of losing him in young adulthood, just as she was beginning to know him as a person beyond just her father. Peter Anderson’s lover describes their yearslong relationship and how rich it was, and what it was like to keep their sexuality a secret for all that time.

Last Call ’s humanizing impulse permeates the entire series, but it’s most striking in the treatment of Anthony Marrero, a Puerto Rican sex worker whose story stands in contrast to the killer’s other white, more economically privileged victims. Last Call includes some of the contemporaneous coverage of Marrero’s murder, which was dismissive at best and occasionally almost glib. Rather than stopping there, though, with an uninterrogated pat on the back at how far we’ve come, Last Call digs in with lengthy interviews with Marerro’s brother, who still can’t acknowledge that part of Marrero’s life, with a friend who knew Marrero well, and with Marrero’s great-nephew, who’s trying to push back against the way Marrero was erased within his own family. The result is not trying to be — cannot be — an exhaustive picture of who Marrero was. But it makes him a person, memorable and complicated, someone loyal, with an incredible capacity to charm, a man with a sense of style, a person not easily reducible to a homophobic headline or buried on a list of more white-coded names.

Last Call does this for as many of the victims as it can, with as much attention to multiple areas of the person’s life as it can possibly provide. At the same time, the series does tell the story of the investigation into who killed these men through interviews with law-enforcement officers, but many then and some even now struggle with how to find a killer who targeted a community of gay men. In one especially telling interview early in the series, we hear the director, off camera, ask two former Pennsylvania state police officers who investigated one of the murders if there are any questions the production team should have asked but did not. “Yeah,” one of them replies, asking of this docuseries, “Why is the emphasis on the gay part?”

Again and again, Last Call finds ways to answer that question. The most direct answer is simply that if police officers can’t see gay life, they’ll inevitably fail to see the details of these crimes. Beyond people who knew the victims, the most prominent voices in Last Call are activists who struggled to illuminate and eradicate anti-gay violence in the city during the ’80s and ’90s, especially New York Anti-Violence Project members Bea Hanson and Matt Foreman. Because of their presence in the docuseries, Last Call can continually return to emphasize New York City as a site of violence but also a crucial haven for gay life. As much as anything, Last Call is about the ways each of these men had joy in their life and how tragic it is that their lives ended in violence.

The most surprising thing about watching Last Call is that it is deeply, intensely sad, but that surprise is odd. Surely all documentaries about murder are sad. Why should this one be different? It is, though, and that surprise comes from the slow-rolling realization of how rare it is to come away from a true-crime production with feelings of grief instead of shock or disbelief or giddy, thrilled disgust. There’s another sadness, too: More true-crime stories could be told this way and aren’t. It’s not a loss on the same scale as the murders of Peter Anderson, Thomas Mulcahy, Anthony Marrero, and Michael Sakara, but it’s a loss all the same.

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‘Last Call’ Review: A Split-Screen Stunt Obscures the Statement at the Center of This Suicidal Plea for Help

Suicide is too important a subject to be treated the way Gavin Michael Booth does here, using a man’s depression as the hook for his show-offy shoestring indie.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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“ Last Call ” is a movie about a man in need of an intervention. Not Scott (Daved Wilkins, co-writer of the downbeat film), who misdials the suicide hotline and gets a janitor named Beth (Sarah Booth) — who’s working late at the local community college — instead, but director Gavin Michael Booth, who has fallen for the fad of shooting an entire feature in a single take — or a double take, in this case. Booth films both sides of this high-stakes phone conversation simultaneously, then crowds them into the same frame, so audiences can watch this miserable melodrama play out in real time.

Someone should step in and stop inexperienced directors from pulling this sort of stunt, especially when masked as some kind of statement, the way Booth does. I don’t mean to trivialize suicide by suggesting that “Last Call” doesn’t take the subject seriously. It’s just that Booth has chosen a technique that calls attention to itself in a way that other “oner” movies (“Birdman,” “1917”) manage to avoid. While it’s undeniably suspenseful to watch someone threaten to end his life in one half of the screen while a complete stranger ill-equipped to intervene struggles to talk him off the proverbial ledge, the director doesn’t seem especially invested in advancing public awareness about self-harm — which is ostensibly the reason that Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas and Laemmle Theatres are releasing this shoestring indie during Suicide Prevention Month.

In interviews, helmer Booth (who has produced a ton of music videos and shorts, but only a couple other low-budget features) has admitted that he initially thought of making the Beth character a crisis hotline operator, but then he learned how those professionals are trained to deal with such calls. Their checklist didn’t point to the ending he wanted, so he made it a wrong number instead.

On one hand, that adds a layer of unexpected drama to the situation. On the other, it reveals how disingenuous Booth and co-writer/co-star Wilkins were about saving Scott’s life. They’ve already decided how “Last Call” should play out, reverse-engineering their script to get audiences to that point, while hoping the formal conceit will impress and/or distract us from the insincerity of their intentions. Yes, the split-screen approach allows audiences to see what both characters are doing, but that’s also how traditional cross-cutting works — and here’s a story that should have been told in half the time.

Ironically, what’s wrong with “Last Call” isn’t the fact that it’s calculated, but that it’s not calculated enough . If you’re going to make an ultra-low-budget movie that takes place in real time, everything really ought to be planned out meticulously, but there’s so much dead space here, and it’s unfair to ask composer Adrian Ellis to fill it all: The two characters wander in and out of the frame, and DP Seth Wessel-Estes’ cameras have not been choreographed to do anything in their absence, leaving one-half of the shot “empty” at times. That’s something Mike Figgis realized when he made “Timecode” all the way back in 2000: If you’re showing concurrent action in multiple windows, it’s the director’s job to direct the audience’s attention. Booth doesn’t.

At the outset, he divides the screen horizontally, creating two dramatically widescreen windows stacked one on top of the other. Above, Booth shows a bar near closing time, although this shot doesn’t initially appear to be focused on anyone in particular. Down below, Beth’s half of the image is practically an action movie by comparison, as the single mom drives in to her night shift, juggling calls about her missing son — a dangling personal crisis that might deserve a film of its own (Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Oscar-nominated short “Madre” comes to mind), but which remains maddeningly unresolved until the final seconds of this one.

Scott is depressed, and once he reaches Beth by phone, the dividing seam rotates until they appear side by side. The two characters eventually bond over their children, but the film is frustratingly slow to build, and suicide should never be used as a device in cinema. It’s too serious a subject (I’ll never forgive another Oscar short, “Curfew,” for being glib in that regard). Once Scott’s intentions do become clear, it’s even more frustrating to realize that Beth has no way of identifying where he is.

Booth the actor gives Booth the director (the two are married) a terrific, totally relatable performance, but there’s a cruelty to what the movie puts people through that would have been unbearable if the film had focused only on her side of the story, à la Gustav Möller’s “The Guilty” (a tightly scripted thriller told entirely from the POV of a 911 operator). Frankly, I don’t get this flavor-of-the-moment obsession with real-time storytelling. It’s been the default mode of live theater for centuries. More impressive are the directors who show they can create and sustain suspense by manipulating perspective and time. Booth is more invested in manipulating emotions, using suicide and that split-screen gimmick to turn “Last Call” into a personal calling card while the characters become casualties to that agenda.

Reviewed online, Los Angeles, Sept. 18, 2020. Running time: 76 MIN.

• Production: A Mutiny Pictures presentation of a Mimetic Entertainment production. Producers: Gavin Michael Booth, Daved Wilkins. Executive producers: Michael T. Delellis, Susie Delellis Petruccelli, Shelby Williams.
• Crew: Director: Gavin Michael Booth. Screenplay: Daved Wilkins, Gavin Michael Booth. Camera: Seth Wessel-Estes. Editor: Gavin Michael Booth. Music: Adrian Ellis.
• With: Daved Wilkins, Sarah Booth.

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LAST CALL: Answer The Call For This Suicide Drama

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Andrew Stover is a film critic/writer from the Chicagoland. His…

Trigger warning: contains discussion of suicide

One could argue that a brief social interaction can make somebody’s day. It can improve their mood and promote healthy behavior, especially when they suffer from a great deal of depression. Because there isn’t anything better than having someone to talk to, and having someone to listen to you with an empathetic heart, free from any judgment.

As suicide continues to be a permanent solution for many, are we, as a society, doing anything to hinder this trend? To think that suicide can be universally cured is absurd and quixotic. Despite the warnings of what suicide can do the people they love, some believe it to be inevitable or necessary. In other cases, suicide stems from other underlying issues. Whatever it is, suicide is contemplated by those who perceive themselves as unworthy, and sometimes it takes an everyday person to remind them of their worth and the long-term ramifications of their self-inflicted demise.

Gavin Michael Booth’s   Last Call  is a stirring indie drama about a suicidal alcoholic who calls the wrong number when trying to reach a suicide prevention lifeline. A multi-tasking custodian answers the phone, only to find herself mollifying the man’s pain by making small talk. Can she guide him off the ledge, or is his mind made up?

Last Call Executes The Split-Screen/Single-Take Gimmick

A low budget doesn’t stop Gavin Michael Booth  from embracing the one-shot technique, which creates a staggering effect that may very well amplify emotion. It’s also a proven technique that’ll garner adulation or attention, perhaps even showing the audience how much directorial finesse the filmmaker harnesses.

We first saw the single-take method in Alfred Hitchc*ck’s 1948 psychological crime thriller, Rope . Hitchc*ck’s   Rope was an act of cinematic boldness that threw out the rulebook of how to shoot a film. Filmmakers later attempted this enterprising and strenuous approach, filmmakers like Béla Tarr ( Macbeth , 1982), Mike Figgis ( Timecode , 2000), Alejandro Iñárritu ( Birdman , 2014), Tuva Novotny ( Blind Spot , 2018), and Sam Mendes ( 1917 , 2019). The innovation going on behind-the-scenes, however, can also have a counterpoising impact on the forces acting in front of the camera.

Last Call is a small-scale drama that treats one man’s life with considerable stakes, and a woman’s urge to save this man’s life as an act of unreserved empathy. The film follows Beth ( Sarah Booth of The Moodys ), the working mom/custodian, and Scott (co-writer David Wilkins , The Mindy Project ), the dejected drunk. In order to capture them concomitantly, Gavin Michael Booth  utilizes split-screen throughout the entirety of the runtime. At the same time, both of their realities are kept in check by a single take.

When we meet both characters, they are in a state of frustration. Beth is more visibly flustered, as she’s trying to phone anyone who may know where her son is. Beth is working the night shift as a custodian at a college, and she finds it increasingly difficult to focus on the job when her teenage son, who went to the movies earlier that night, hasn’t made it to the sitter’s yet. Protracted tracking shots of Beth racing from room to room is oddly absorbing to watch — courtesy of Sarah Booth’s  emotionally captivating performance.

Scott, on the other hand, is drinking his sorrows away at a bar. That is until it’s closing time at the bar, and he must walk back to his apartment, intoxicated and internally hurt. Soon enough, Scott goes on to drunk dial several numbers, and no one answers on the other end. Except one number mistakenly reaches Beth, the perturbed custodian/mother who answers Scott’s call.

Speaking in a garbled monotone, Scott is clearly drunk and despondent. He’s also suffering from grief and self-blame. Anyone else may have ended the call after Scott said the first word, but Beth doesn’t hang up right then and there. Instead, she tries to decipher Scott’s reasons for calling the college. As they continue to casually converse, Scott eventually realizes he didn’t call the right number, and that he didn’t call a suicide prevention lifeline. He called Beth, a tenderhearted mother who understands that you can’t succumb to past mistakes, you can only look forward and strive to be a better person.

The premise anticipates a ticking-clock scenario. But I can’t say that the single-take ploy does any favors to build tension. If anything, the single-take approach replicates the agonizingly sluggish passing of time, and how even at the end, Scott is determined to at least talk everything out with someone. Gavin Michael Booth  impressively collates the split-screen and single-take effect to bring us an ambitious indie drama about empathy and past hardship.

That being said, the script is rather elementary. A few too many lines come across as labored, or perhaps it’s how easy the lines were spoken. “Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t have time to drink,” and “Therapy was the only hope I had for my daughter to talk to me,” effortlessly widens the discussion between them. Maybe you can blame the truth serum on the alcohol. The script also tends to develop Beth from a desultory listener to a motivated listener a bit unconvincingly. Yet, Sarah Booth  makes us care about her character’s words, and her elaborate attempts to alleviate the man’s agony.

This Crisis Ends On A Gut-Wrenching Note

The set-up alone is naturalistically dire. The topic of suicide is always a delicate subject taken straight from real-life. We all know somebody who suffers from depression. We may know somebody who took their own life, or at one point attempted to do so. We may have suffered from depression ourselves. Last Call  handles the topic with brave intent, exhibiting how anyone has the ability to listen with an open ear and open heart. Empathy is the strongest weapon in our arsenal.

Sarah Booth’s Beth is the standout of the film. Assuming an anxious demeanor and compassionately handling the conversation with Scott by maintaining a soft-spoken monotone, Sarah Booth  vivifies her character’s maternal instincts and empathetic attributes. David Wilkins’  Scott is more reticent and timid.  Wilkins  plays the drunkard with a tactile sense of woe and defeat. Together,  Booth  and  Wilkins  sustain Gavin Michael Booth’s  deeply heart-rending tale by giving it their all in the last 15 minutes.

Spanning 77 minutes and only ever focusing on two characters in reasonably enclosed environments, that already sets the stage for a theatrical performance. Despite having the structure of a play, especially during the halfway point, the ending is where Gavin Michael Booth  basks in the melancholy and uncertainty of a situation that many face every day. The ending’s also where  Sarah Booth  pierces your soul and ends the movie on an incredibly high note.

Last Call: A Well-Acted & Nicely-Crafted Suicide Drama

Gavin Michael Booth faultlessly achieves the split-screen/single-take technique, while also exploring the matter of suicide with unadorned honesty. An undercooked script doesn’t make the two performances ( Sarah Booth , more specifically) any less exceptional, and the conclusion any less powerful.

A suicidal man misdials while trying to reach a suicide prevention lifeline. He soon finds fugacious comfort in the company of a custodian, proving once and for all that anyone can help anybody by simply acknowledging them without judgment. I stayed on the line long enough to appreciate Gavin Michael Booth’s  vision.

After reading the review, are you interested in seeing  Last Call ? Let us know in the comments!

The release date is unknown at this time.

For those who need it, you can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline here: 1-800-273-8255.

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Andrew Stover is a film critic/writer from the Chicagoland. His film & TV reviews can be found on Film Inquiry & Film Threat.

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Last Call Review: Closing Time

For a movie as juvenile and hollow as Last Call appears from its promotional material, it possesses a strange amount of heart. The film stars Jeremy Piven as Seamus "Mick" McDougal, a successful real estate developer who made it out of his blue-collar neighborhood in Philadelphia only to be pulled right back to the homestead when his mother passes away and the pub his father owns is floundering.

It's a movie that sees itself as a comedy first, indulging far too much in some truly regressive "bro" humor. But beneath that clumsy façade and its lower-budget aesthetic, it's clear the filmmakers wanted to craft a sincere ode to the old neighborhood bars of their past, acknowledging and exalting them as the formative foundation of so many lives.

It's just a shame that, in doing so, they could not find a better balance between accurately depicting the kind of cringeworthy jokes you're likely to constantly hear in such establishments with pursuing a more earnest exploration of gentrification and the dramatic difficulties inherent in returning home a changed man.

The result is a movie hobbled by tonal whiplash. It is a film that draws the viewer in with moments of genuine pathos before gobsmacking them with repetitive gags of questionable comedic value.

Funny, but not funny ha-ha

When we meet Mick (Piven), director Paoli Pilladi introduces the dichotomy between his upbringing and his exodus from the neighborhood by contrasting sweet moments of him as a youth (like getting teased by his degenerate friends) with his loftier present life (getting a back massage from SNL vet Cheri Oteri.) There's a twinkle of sweetness to the childhood flashback that suggests Last Call is going to be close in tone to, say, something like Kevin Smith 's Jersey Girl , a John Hughesian dramedy that is heartfelt first and only relies on humor for relief.

But within ten minutes of Mick arriving back at the Bucket, the pub his father Laurence (Jack McGee) owns and lives in, that illusion is shattered rather quickly.

Bruce Dern is there as Coach, a mainstay at the bar with a tab the length of a giraffe's neck. So are Mick's childhood friends Whitey (Jamie Kennedy wearing an omnipresent and outdated bluetooth headset) and Paddy (Chris Kerson, splitting the difference between young Billy Crystal and old Jon Gries). His brother Laurence "Dougal" McDougal (Zach McGowen) arrives late to the wake, in handcuffs, after waking up drunk in his car.

After a tense scene between Mick and Dougal arguing over the responsible brother abandoning his clan and the ne'er-do-well sibling deflecting his obvious failings, Pilladi cuts outside the Bucket to a cop car covered in Post-It notes with vulgar drawings on them and a small group of children scurrying away. This juxtaposition is the film in a nutshell.

When the movie takes the time to unpack Mick's baggage about leaving the neighborhood and his frustrations with his family, it functions surprisingly well. There's a running subplot about a rival real estate developer, Mick's boss and what appears to be a deep corruption scheme ravaging the neighborhood. Within that framework, there's plenty of room to wring some drama from Mick's complicity and how he became the kind of person his former friends despise.

Instead of digging into that in a meaningful way, however, the film repeatedly gets bogged down by diversions surrounding Dougal, Whitey and Paddy's childish activities, principally among them an ongoing "sex bet" whose ultimate victor will receive the greatest possible MacGuffin, a VHS tape recording of a little league baseball game the trio has been obsessively debating their entire adult lives.

While Kennedy avails himself quite well through the film's man-child hijinks, offering a supporting character with the texture and internal consistency necessary to make his goofiness really sing, everyone else just doesn't fit. Sure, the material itself is laughably unfunny, but actors like Kerson and McGowen just possess too much genuine dramatic energy to make the comedy feel natural, making every extended bit or jokey aside feel particularly egregious and diversionary. Dern and Raging Bull 's Cathy Moriarty are pleasant to see anytime, but they aren't given much to do either.

Comedic relief is supposed to foster laughs, not eye rolls or yawns.

Wasted potential

But the film's biggest tragedy is how sharply it encapsulates the tragedy of Jeremy Piven's acting career.

On the surface, Mick is the perfect role to capitalize on Piven's strengths as a performer. He has natural comedic ability, his own unique kind of charisma, and the range to deliver serious drama within his signature persona. Few other guys are better suited to portray the inner conflict of a hooligan gone straight reconnecting with his roots.

But since Entourage , Piven has received no roles commensurate to the absolute meal he made out of Ari Gold. That show could have been a tipping point for Piven to move into more meaty leading man roles or, at the very least, a better string of interesting supporting turns. Instead, he only ends up in half baked, small release films like this one, movies that fail to live up to their own potential in precisely the way he has. To watch him play a guy who did get out and make something of himself while seeing how trapped he is in this cycle is somehow more painful than the actual conflict onscreen.

There are bits of the subplot between Mick and his childhood crush/current love interest Ali (Taryn Manning) that feel genuine and engaging, not unlike some of the better romances in even the silliest Adam Sandler comedies. Their work together, while housed in an otherwise middling picture, is a cruel reminder of the kind of movies he could be making but never seems to get to.

Perhaps this is a stretch, but there are few things someone like, say, Robert Downey Jr. does in any given Marvel movie that Piven couldn't also sleepwalk through. How has this dude not played a smarmy villain for Big Disney yet?

Maybe on some level he's more drawn to this kind of material and, despite the smaller cultural footprint, is actually happy making movies like Last Call . Perhaps the film, originally titled Crabs in a Bucket , just meant more to him on the page, or his agent has been explicitly directed not to campaign for higher-hanging fruit in Piven's name.

It's fun to imagine an alternate recent Hollywood history where the man has branched out into better, more fascinating roles, or at least simpler turns that make more money. But maybe making deeply unfunny movies written as love letters to bars is more his wheelhouse. If so, expect to see two to three more Last Calls every year until he retires.

Summary A local success story and real estate developer, Mick (Jeremy Piven), returns home to his offbeat blue collar Irish neighborhood in the shadows of Philadelphia for a funeral and is obligated to stay to ensure his parents’ ailing family business gets back on course. Amidst all of this, he grows closer to his childhood crush (Taryn Mannin ... Read More

Directed By : Paolo Pilladi

Written By : Greg Lingo, Michael Baughan, Billy Reilly, Paolo Pilladi

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Release date

29 th March 2021

All films, even bad ones, make some sort of case for their own existence – for the story they want to tell. It’s bewildering as to why Last Call was even made. Perhaps the movie is somehow the end result of an elaborate tax-evasion scheme? Perhaps everyone involved lost a bet?

Jeremy Piven is Mick, who thought he left the nondescript suburbs of Philadelphia behind, having moved to the city and made a name for himself as a real-estate developer. After the death of his mother, he ceremoniously returns home (which appears to have taken a grand total of five minutes driving). Will he work with his father and brother to resurrect the family pub to its former glory, or will he push ahead with his plans to build a new casino which threatens to strip the neighbourhood of its local colour?

It’s actually an achievement to have produced a feature that manages to be so clumsy on every conceivable level. Some of the choices are simply baffling. Jeremy Piven (in his mid 50s) plays a man in his f40s, with the great Cathy Moriarty (a mere five years older than Jeremy), playing the grandmother of his love interest, who appears to actually be in her 40s. Incidentally, Moriarty plays her role with a vague Eastern European accent, which she seems to forget about halfway through a sentence, before remembering. The performances range from lazy to just plain bad.

The end result is worryingly amateurish, with random profanities seemingly intended as jokes. The protagonist is repeatedly accused of suffering from erectile dysfunction. Apparently this is hilarious. Unsurprisingly, there’s also (lethargic) homophobia and transphobia, but this is the work simply trying to be edgy. However, by this point anyone still watching will be hoping that the flick falls off the edge of something. From a great height.

From the inexpert, almost arbitrary ways in which shots are composed, to the nonsensical editing, to the slapdash sound mixing that makes the sparkling dialogue difficult to hear, perhaps the greatest sin committed by Last Call is how thoroughly unlikable everyone is. Evidently, all the main characters are heavy drinkers, so at least viewers can keep their fingers crossed that alcohol poisoning will soon claim them all.

Oliver Johnston

Last Call is released digitally on demand on 29 th March 2021.

Watch the trailer for Last Call here:

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Rent The Call on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

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The Call builds plenty of suspense before taking a problematic turn in the third act.

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Last Call Parent Guide

With more profanities than minutes in its runtime, this film is unwatchable..

Digital on Demand: Mick grew up in a blue-collar Irish neighborhood in Philadelphia, but made a life for himself outside the community as a real estate developer. Now he's back to raze it and build a casino...unless his old girlfriend can change his mind.

Release date March 19, 2021

Run Time: 102 minutes

Get Content Details

The guide to our grades, parent movie review by keith hawkes.

Mick McDougal (Jeremy Piven) has always wanted to get out of his small, blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhood. He seizes the chance to leave Darby Heights and go to an Ivy League university, and even though he ends up working in Philadelphia after graduation, Mick puts off going home as much as he can…until his mother dies. Even when he’s back in the neighborhood for the funeral, Mick is still working: this time, he’s trying to get a casino built in Darby Heights. As far as Mick can tell, there’s nothing in the community worth saving anyway. His brother Dougal (Zach McGowan) is on his way back to prison (again), his father Laurence (Jack McGee) is too old to run the family bar, and his friends haven’t changed since the nineties. But when he bumps into his childhood sweetheart, Ali (Taryn Manning), he wonders if maybe he’s changed too much…

Last Call holds the dubious distinction of having the heaviest drinking I’ve seen since watching Leaving Las Vegas . Just watching this movie gave me early-stage liver cirrhosis. I’m checking myself into a rehab facility as we speak. In fairness much of the film centers around the family-owned bar, but this is downright excessive and it reinforces lazy stereotypes about the Irish. This script also has the dubious distinction of using several of the nastiest sexual terms I heard in high school, and which I have been fortunate enough not to hear since. On top of that, there are more sexual expletives than there are minutes in the runtime, which is always a sign of quality filmmaking. Or not.

In cast I haven’t been clear, Last Call isn’t a good movie. Not only is it obnoxious, vulgar, and predictable, it’s neither funny nor diverting. The premise is identical to most Hallmark romances – boy grows up in the slums, makes a big career for himself, and then comes back due to a death in the family, falls back in love with a girl from his youth, and realizes that all his big business ideology is hollow. Now, take that Hallmark movie premise and dump a cascade of content concerns onto it. As combinations go, this one ranks slightly lower than pouring hot-sauce on ice-cream. And, frankly, I’d rather eat that than ever watch this movie again. Based on the trailer, I think I would have eaten that rather than see it the first time. I had to watch it for my job, but you don’t. Take my warning and give it a miss.

About author

Keith hawkes, watch the trailer for last call.

Last Call Rating & Content Info

Why is Last Call rated R? Last Call is rated R by the MPAA for crude sexual content, pervasive language and some drug use.

Violence: Some kids are shown fighting in an alley. A barfight happens off-screen. A man is pepper-sprayed. Sexual Content: There are frequent explicitly graphic sexual conversations and references. There are several scenes which depict adult toys and sex dolls. Other scenes depict prostitutes. Only one of these scenes depicts sex in the form of a tape, which contains no nudity. There are a multitude of crude phallic drawings. Children are shown playing with condoms. Profanity: There are 133 extreme profanities, 36 uses of scatological profanity, and occasional slurs, terms of deity, and mild profanities. Alcohol / Drug Use: Characters are frequently shown drinking very heavily, and are also seen smoking marijuana and tobacco.

Page last updated October 2, 2021

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This is potentially the worst possible version of The King of Staten Island , which already had its own problems. If you liked this, you’ll probably like that better. If nothing else, it’s got Steve Buscemi in it, which only improves matters.

Last Call (2023)

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CHALLENGERS

Running time: 131 minutes. Rated R (language throughout, some sexual content and graphic nudity). In theaters.

When the movie “Challengers” hits Prime Video after its theatrical run, I suspect the response will echo that of last year’s most controversial film, “ Saltburn .”

Like Emerald Fennell’s shapeshifting mystery, “Challengers” is, at once, artful, addictive and deceptive. The salivating viewer believes it’s one thing, becomes sure it’s another and then leaves with a different theory altogether.

There are more similarities. Directed by Luca Guadagnino (“ Call Me By Your Name ”), the movie features sexy, young stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist in various states of undress, and their characters’ open ending will either intrigue or infuriate you.

Love “Challengers” or loathe it — and I look forward to the angry emails from the latter camp — you’ll definitely want to talk about it. And isn’t that half the fun?

The delish and devilish film, which jumps erratically back and forth through 13 years of events, tracks a trio of hotshot junior tennis players on the verge of going pro.  

There are best friends, and doubles partners, Patrick Zweig (O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Faist) — truly inspired fake tennis names — and the force of nature Tashi Duncan (Zendaya).

Despite being a teen with no grand slam titles, Tashi has heaps of high-profile endorsements, and it’s widely assumed she’ll be the sport’s next big thing. Think Coco Gauff a few years back.

The boys, competitive in more ways than one, lustily chase after the phenom, and later that night in their hotel room she seductively poses a challenge: The player who wins the men’s final gets her number.

Their scandalous story isn’t told linearly, though. More than a decade in the future, down-on-his-luck Patrick is sleeping in his car and playing small challenger tournaments to squeeze out a buck to buy dinner.

A devastating injury killed Tashi’s career, while unassuming Art, now her husband, has become a multiple slam winner who’s begun to struggle and is toying with retirement. Tashi, more concerned with victory than romantic love, is his vicious coach.

Then, Art and Patrick — now bitter nemeses — unexpectedly face off at the challenger tourney. And all sorts of dormant tensions between the three athletes reemerge.

Guadagnino revels in strange relationships, such as the taboo age-separation in “Call Me By Your Name” and the smitten cannibals of “ Bones and All .” 

On the surface, “Challengers” would appear to be your average smoldering love triangle film, but, true to form, it’s a lot more complicated than that. There’s a “Will they? Won’t they?” vibe with just about everybody. 

And tennis, wrongly seen by many as a polite country club hobby, is visualized as violent and animalistic — a bloodsport of vengeance and repressed desire.

Getting that across beautifully, the director and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom shoot matches in badass ways. During one point, we watch from the perspective of the ball being brutally pummeled by the two guys.

Using words rather than rackets, the three sly actors attack each other with their conniving and tactical performances. 

Tashi, who talks more about tennis than her marriage or child, cares solely about winning. Even sex for her is a form of match manipulation. Zendaya, perfectly cast, is siren-like and terrifying — a real “coffee is for closers only” type.

And O’Connor and Faist, who I bet will explode similarly to Barry Keoghan, forge a believable bond that, as their friendship fades, becomes even more intense.

Because “Challengers” is, at its core, a sports movie, the last scene will rile up some people because the final result is not entirely clear.

However — and I could be wrong! — after the high-stakes tiebreak in the end, I walked away certain that something vital had been fixed, not broken.

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Laurent cantet dies: palme d’or-winning ‘the class’ director was 63, tom & harry holland short ‘last call’ charms sands international film festival opening-night gala.

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Ania Trzebiatowska has compiled an eclectic selection of fiction and non-fiction titles for the third annual Sands International Film Festival, which kicked off Friday evening in St Andrews, Scotland. 

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“I love the energy of this town. I love how warm everyone is and how enthusiastic the students are,” Joe Russo said opening the event. “It permeates the experience of being here. And it’s such an incredible backdrop for the festival for those reasons. It’s great to have a festival that is steeped in an academic mindset with curious students asking questions. It was a really important part of our upbringing. We were film students when we got discovered.” 

Also in the building this evening was Spider-Man actor Tom Holland , who accompanied his younger brother Harry up to Scotland to present Last Call , a short project they shot together in London. The film follows a desperate mother searching for a way to reconnect with her son. Tom stars opposite veteran Scottish actress Lindsay Duncan ( Blackbird ) in the pic, which first screened at Tribeca. The audience inside The Byre Theatre in St Andrews was charmed by the short, with many visitors remarking on its ambition and skill following the screening. Running over a brisk 19 minutes, the short could be compared, thematically, to Andrew Haigh’s last film All of Us Strangers . 

Introducing Last Call alongside Trzebiatowska, Harry said he crafted the pic while helping out around the set of his brother’s film 2021 war film Cherry , shot by the Russos. 

“When I wrote the film we were in Cleveland, Ohio, working on Cherry and I was struggling with my own mental health,” Harry said. “I knew I wanted to create something and the theme of mental health would be at the forefront of whatever I wrote.”

Last Call was paired in a double feature with Naqqash Khalid’s debut feature In Camera , starring Nabhaan Rizwan, Rory Fleck Byrne and Amir El-Masry. That film first debuted at Karlovy Vary in 2023.

Elsewhere across the weekend, Sands will screen Anna Hints’ Sundance-winning doc Smoke Sauna Sisterhood , Daisy Ridley-starrer Sometimes I Think About Dying , and Anthony and Joe Russo’s little-seen 2002 comedy Welcome to Collinwood. The latter film stars George Clooney, William H. Macy and Sam Rockwell and was produced by Steven Soderbergh , who will attend Sands to take part in an onstage Q&A with the Russos helmed by Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. The session will be the first time the Russos have discussed the film in public with Soderbergh, whom they credit for their first big break. 

“Sands exists as a tribute to Mr. Soderbergh with the intention to inspire and encourage a new generation of storytellers,” Joe said of Soderbergh in his opening remarks this evening. 

Among other events on the Sands program are discussions with the composer and conductor Alan Silvestri and casting director Debra Zane, whose credits include The Hunger Games franchise , Ocean’s Eleven, Catch Me if You Can and American Beauty. The festival ends Sunday with Maggie Contreras’ debut feature documentary Maestra , in which five female conductors from across the globe prepare for and compete in La Maestra, the world’s only competition for female conductors. 

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The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.

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