Yamashiro Live!
2023 · 10m · USA
Directed by Blake James Reid, Max Frumkin
Genres: comedy, drama, experimental
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
A guy churns through fake identities — squatter, theater hire, free-jazz legend — manipulating his way through strangers who never asked. A shape-shifter movie that refuses to make the shape-shifting charming.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
An impostor movie with no charm offensive — most films like this want you to root for the chameleon, this one wants you to recoil. Bonus points for using Peter Brotzmann as a load-bearing prop.
Reid and Frumkin make a shape-shifter movie that refuses to make the shape-shifting charming — impersonating Brötzmann at an actual venue is a real heist. Closer to The Imposter's ambivalence than Buffalo '66's romance.
Impersonating saxophonist Peter Brotzmann at an actual venue is a real-world high-wire stunt embedded in a fever-dream identity-cycling movie — Reid and Frumkin's commitment to letting the shape-shifting be ugly is the bet.
Reviews
A fever dream odyssey carved from pure provocation, a melting-down outsider vision of an ineffectual shape-shifter...uncompromising in its unpleasantries.