The New Yorker:

By Richard Brody

American independent filmmaking has yielded an outpouring of cinematic imagination throughout the past several decades, even in the well-worn genre of holiday movies. The wildest Thanksgiving ride I’ve seen onscreen is in Trey Edward Shults’s Kickstarter-funded drama “Krisha,” from 2015, starring his real-life aunt Krisha Fairchild in a hectic and harrowing fictional tale of a woman with substance-abuse problems whose recovery is challenged by the resurgence of old conflicts at the festive gathering. Joe Swanberg, whose improvised dramas are a genre unto themselves, assembles a superbly inventive cast for the 2014 semi-comedy “Happy Christmas,” in which he also plays a filmmaker whose holiday celebration with his wife, a writer (Melanie Lynskey), is jolted out of routine and into turmoil by the arrival of his freewheeling sister (Anna Kendrick). With “Christmas, Again,” also from 2014, Charles Poekel portrays, with a docufictional avidity, the bittersweet romanticism of a lonely Christmas-tree salesman in Brooklyn whose night-shift duties spark poignant connections. One of the most exquisite of all independent films, David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story,” from 2017, starring Rooney Mara as the widow of a musician (Casey Affleck) who returns home posthumously, also includes a piercing spirit’s-eye view of a family’s Christmas celebration.

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