Dan Mecca

‘Tangerine’ Team on Capturing the Look and Feel of Their iPhone-Shot Sundance Hit

One of the things that makes Sean Baker's Tangerine a stand-out amongst the hundreds of films that played at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival is its specific sense of time and place. Set in and around the Donut Time on Santa Monica Boulevard, Baker's film evolves into a great Los Angeles film in its hour-and-a-half runtime as it digs into the lives of two transgender prostitutes trying to get their lives in order while an Armenian cab driver finds himself caught in an odyssey all his own....

[Sundance Review] Cop Car

For a good long while, Cop Car, directed by Jon Watts, plays like a wonderful genre picture, featuring two impressive lead performances from child actors James ...

[Sundance Review] Zipper

From top to toe, Mora Stephens' Zipper plays like one of those sections in certain House of Cards episodes that feel cheap and easy and trashy. For a minute or ...

[Sundance Review] I Smile Back

Sarah Silverman shines in I Smile Back, a fairly standard, though very dark, addiction drama driven by its superb leading performance. Laney (Silverman) is marr...

[Sundance Review] Unexpected

Early on in Kris Swanberg's Unexpected, inner-city school teacher Samantha Abbott (Cobie Smulders) finds out that she's pregnant. The timing's off, as the Chica...

[Sundance Review] Christmas, Again

Christmas time is a lonely time for many; a "time of giving" that reminds more than a few of us what we've lost. This is the feeling Christmas, Again wades in, ...

[Sundance Review] People, Places, Things

Somewhere in Brooklyn, a semi-blocked graphic novelist named Will (Jemaine Clement) catches his wife Charlie (Stephanie Allynne) cheating on him with a “monolog...

[Sundance Review] The D Train

In The D Train, written and directed by Andrew Mogel and Jarred Paul, Jack Black digs into the deepest, saddest part of our social psyche to create a character ...

Dan Mecca

Managing Editor

Dan Mecca is the co-founder and managing editor of The Film Stage. He is a producer and filmmaker living in Pittsburgh. He watches a lot of movies and tracks them on Letterboxd.