There are many who won’t recognize the lead actress in writer/director Channing Godfrey Peoples’ first feature Miss Juneteenth. Nicole Beharie is another of the highly-talented, woefully underutilized Black actors that deserve far more recognition and far wider casting options. Though you may not know her award-winning turn in 2008’s American Violet, a fictionalized account of the civil …
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 …
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 something perverse in seeing great actors doing great work in a film that has an extremely problematic script and plot. In the new release The Burnt Orange Heresy, directed by Giuseppe Capotondi and written by Scott B. Smith from the Charles Willeford novel, a collection of endlessly enigmatic actors that includes Claes Bang, Elizabeth Debicki, …
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 …
For decades after the war, Marthe Huffnung Cohn, the subject of Nicola Alice Hens’s documentary Chichinette: The Accidental Spy, didn’t talk about her experience as a Holocaust survivor and Nazi fighter during World War II. “People want to talk about the future, not the past”, says the 90-something diminutive powerhouse of energy. It was only recently …
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 …
