There’s a harrowing sense of immediacy to Hao Wu and Weixi Chen‘s new documentary, 76 Days, which provides a fly-on-the-wall look at the early response to COVID-19 in a Wuhan hospital. It may seem awfully soon for a film about an ongoing crisis, but…
Good Joe Bell is the kind of movie that seems designed to make straight people feel better about themselves but does very little for the LGBT people it claims to support. Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, the film stars Mark Wahlberg as a grieving…
Cuties is an impressive, complex coming-of-age narrative and a profound refutation of the nonsensical controversy that has arisen around it. The hysteria surrounding Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties (Mignonnes) is, like many such controversies in the era of QAnon conspiracy theories, much ado about nothing. To…
Boys State is an illuminating portrait of the ills of the American electoral process, but somewhat undermines its own power with idealistic platitudes. We live in a politically polarized time, a fact which we are reminded of nearly every time we turn on the TV…
Agnès Varda’s documentaries have often incorporated her immediate periphery – friends (Jane B. by Agnès V.), family (Uncle Yanco), neighbors (Diary of a Pregnant Woman, Daguerreotypes), or strangers she finds particularly interesting (The Gleaners and I, Faces Places). While she often takes part in the films…
At this point, the Disney live action remake is a fact of life, a part of the current moviegoing landscape as ubiquitous as superheroes and unwanted remakes. So far, their quality has ranged from solid (Cinderella) to unnecessary (The Lion King) to dreadful (Aladdin).…
Scott Aukerman’s Between Two Ferns: The Movie barely qualifies as a movie, in much the same way that Between Two Ferns barely qualifies as a TV show. The long running Funny or Die sketch featuring Zach Galifianakis as a hilariously inept local access celebrity…
There’s nothing particularly new in Joe Penna’s survival drama Arctic. But the director’s gritty, hard-edged vision of human resilience strikes a primal chord that other similarly themed films do not. For a movie that’s essentially Cast Away by way of The Revenant, Arctic eschews…
Amy Poehler‘s Wine Country barely qualifies as a movie – it’s essentially a vacation slideshow featuring a who’s who of industry funny women. Much like Alexander Payne’s Sideways but recast with middle-aged women, Wine Country finds a group of former co-workers out on a wine tour in the…
In the 2018 election, more women, and specifically women of color, ran for elected office than ever before. Many of these women were progressives running grassroots campaigns against establishment Democrats, advocating for what they consider to be real progressive change in the face of…
