Review of The Phenom (2016) by Alfin N — 07 Jul 2016

Buschel is ahead of his time. Missing Person took the drunk detective movie into uniquely emotional territory. Sparrows Dance was a Brechtian romantic comedy. Glass Chin was boxing crime noir as spiritual morality tale.

And now Phenom, a baseball movie purely about the mind. Skimming the reviews just now, even the good reviews, almost no one says what Buschel is really doing. He takes movie cliches and classic American iconography and undercuts them, spinning them into a new light.

These movies are not straight. They are not set in the real world. They are set in a surreal and stylized world that has elements of the real world. But they are misadvertised as being straight. And most critics are not hip enough to see what he is actually doing.