In the time of COVID, we all need cathartic relief, comfort, and distraction. Without question, director Peter Cattaneo’s Military Wives, offers all that, and in spades, as the cliché says. That being said, I am someone who is tasked with identifying the bad, good, better, and best of film. As great as this film’s lead actresses …
The Other Lamb, the English-language debut of Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska feels like the fevered dream of a menstruating teen handmaid, if she were, say, “Of Donald.” It provokes the sort of disgust and repulsion we are experiencing on a daily basis when we watch the daily “press briefings”, and that’s not necessarily a bad …
“If you place a Geiger Counter over the grave of a Radium girl, it will click for a thousand years.” This written quote is part of the film Radium Girls, the shocking, fascinating, and well-executed new feature, co-directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler, based on a true story no doubt very few people had …
Are you ‘cliterate’? How many of you out there know the exact physiological structure of the clitoris? How many of you are uncomfortable with it being brought up, or even written in a sentence? That is what the new documentary The Dilemma of Desire considers as part of a larger examination of the disconnection from, and vilification …
Right before I started watching the new indie release, International Falls, I had noted to myself that I wanted to watch a documentary called Misery Loves Comedy. I don’t know much about that documentary, which features interviews with dozens of comics, but it appears to speak to the connection between comedy and depression. What director Amber McGinnis and screenwriter …
There’s an explosion of underground rappers releasing their music on SoundCloud, some of which are gaining a global audience. It is with this understanding, as a number of her high school buddies have found relative success there, that writer/director Marnie Ellen Hertzler built her part-narrative, part-documentary, part video art project called Crestone. The film is shot …
There are not enough Tom and Jerry cartoons in existence to compensate for the level of hopelessness represented in the Russian film Beanpole, which won its director/co-writer Kantemir Balagov the Un Certain Regard Best Director Prize at Cannes in 2019. Two women are at the center of a story that takes place in the last days …
Have you heard of Anne Innis Dagg? The answer is probably not, and people around the world should know her. Writer/director Alison Reid’s The Woman Who Loves Giraffes shines a spotlight on Dagg, a Canadian who traveled to Africa alone in the 50s to do some of the first studying ever of animals in their own habitat. …
Writer/director Rob Garver’s documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael is a fascinating look at a woman who carved out a life as a writer in an industry that has been famously unforgiving for opinions offered by female voices. Kael built a career as a movie critic in a very important time in cinema, right …
The more distance I get from seeing Bombshell, the more mad the movie makes me. The film, which soft-tackles the story in which former CEO of Fox News Roger Ailes finds his downfall through sexual harassment claims from the most prominent female (oft-seen) on-air personalities at the studio, is certainly a decidedly good news/bad news affair. …
