When teacher Antoinette Lapouge (Laure Calamy) takes the stage with her class of 8-year-olds to sing what can only be described as a completely inappropriate love song to a parent assembly dressed in a low-cut silver lamé gown, it’s clear she’s a bit of an emotional fruit loop. Her students sing the verse, but she …
It is playing with fire, or ‘falling down both sides of the blade’ (as the Tindersticks lyrics from the end credits song would say) to put oneself in a potential love triangle. That 70s hit song Torn Between Two Lovers may have been schlocky, but it was written for a reason. Spending time with an old and …
With Antonia’s Line, writer/director Marleen Gorris created a film that is both a celebration of life and an unflinching look at the challenges intergenerational women faced throughout the 20th century. The feminist filmmaker achieved for world cinema what many great female directors before her could not. 1994’s Antonia’s Line represents the first foreign-language film by a female filmmaker …
Little did first-time director Eliane Henri know that the footage and interviews she filmed of her longtime friend, the acclaimed jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove, during his 2018 world tour would be a chronicle of the last year of his life. He passed away November 2nd of that year from a longterm kidney disease, after being …
Millennial New Yorker and woman of color Rebeca “Beba” Huntt directs, writes, and produces her first documentary with Beba, a film centered on her own history, experience, and pain. Though it sounds like the height of self-absorption, it is actually a rare navel-gazer that, it turns out, is actually insightful, raw, and often unflinching in …
When Norman Rockwell began his long association with the Boy Scouts of America, he couldn’t possibly have imagined how much his romanticized, clean-cut, patriotic representation of the organization would aid in building a system tailor-made for pedophiles. The dozens of art images shown as part of the new documentary Leave No Trace are only one way filmmaker …
Since I Been Down is a profoundly emotional experience for those with compassion and concern for where America is in this moment, in terms of the rampant racial inequality and systemic racism continuing to poison the country. Writer/director Gilda Sheppard focuses on Kimonti Carter, who is changing the incarcerated from the inside of the prison system. …
Matt Tannenbaum is all about stories. He loves telling them and living them, and for over 40 years, he has loved selling them through his beloved local institution, The Bookstore, in Lenox Massachusetts. Hello Bookstore pays homage to him and to his store. As far as recent economics are concerned, his is a common tale. …
At the end of his experimental film Lux Aeterna, writer/director and provocateur Gaspar Noé plasters the line “Thank God I’m an atheist” onto the screen. As an auteur, cinema should be Noé’s chosen deity, although whether he did it dirty or created a worthy offering to that god with his movie is a matter of opinion. …
When Isaac Mizrahi called Mrs. Kasha Davis a ‘workhorse queen’ on RuPaul’s Drag Race, those of us who know and love drag beyond RPDR knew what he meant. There is a whole country full of drag artists, from sea to sequin-sparkling, shining sea, that work without the benefit of national and international television. They hone their …
