Female Film Critics 24/375
In the streets of Medellín, Colombia, two teenagers wander. They could be students: They carry backpacks, they’re engaged in animated conversation, they pass a notebook back and forth. There is clearly a partnership here, and a sense of shared interests, and a common purpose—but Days of the Whale doesn’t indulge in this educational artifice for long.
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The controversial nature of Abel Ferrara’s career is given life in Tommaso, a sort of confessional from the filmmaker that uses fantasies to communicate a fevered mind. Starring Willem Dafoe as Tommaso, a version of Ferrara, the film hurtles forward with increasing surrealness to a conclusion heavy with self-flagellating imagery.
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From Iceland to Eden is moderately entertaining but suffers from undeniable familiarity—until a last-act swerve that is so jarringly puzzling that it sets the film apart from others in this genre.
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What sacrifices would you make for the chance, however slim, of financial stability? The slippery slope of what you would give up for the fantasy of wealth is the focus of Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, a film that puts an extremely humanist spin on the classist struggle depicted in films like this year’s Best Picture Oscar winner Parasite.
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Some lessons about life never change: do what you love, surrounded by people you love, before it’s too late. That’s a simple but reassuring series of messages that are the through line for the sometimes satisfying but fundamentally patronizing The Etruscan Smile, director Oded Binnun and Mihal Brezis’s adaptation of the bestselling 1985 novel La Sonrisa Etrusca.
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The Great Alaskan Race is a commendable passion project from filmmaker Brian Presley, a film dedicated to the “unsung heroes” who helped save the Alaskan city of Nome from a diphtheria outbreak in the early 20th century. The mushers and dog teams that transported diphtheria vaccine 700 miles from Anchorage to Nome are given the hero treatment here, and they certainly deserve praise—but this movie is so superficially constructed that it’s impossible to feel empathy for the characters.
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Shot after French sculptor Prune Nourry learned of her breast cancer diagnosis and capturing elements of her treatment, Serendipity works as a compact collection of the artist’s creations and a meditation on what her cancer diagnosis means for her as a woman and as a creative force.
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The thriller Coyote Lake takes the conceptual frame of vigilante justice and places it over a mother-daughter story about familial control and abuse, a combination that nudges at themes of religious obsession and misandry. The result is a tense experiment that considers the extremes of revenge but that overall doesn’t stray too much from a recognizable depiction of maternal manipulation.
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High above Mexico City, more than 20 floors above the ground, Eve (Gabriela Cartol) works with her whole body. She dashes across hotel rooms, leaning over to pick up trash. She perches in the bathroom, scrubbing away. She smooths sheets and blankets with her entire upper half, making a 90-degree angle with the bed. Her responsibilities are highly regimented and take an immense physical toll, but you wouldn’t know that from her polite small talk or her demure “Excuse me” when she leaves a room. Eve has been trained to serve and to be ignored.
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At what point do you give up on a dream? Films about aspiring musicians almost universally consider this question, mostly from a male point of view. Movies about the female experience either skew juvenile or are thoroughly mocked, and it’s arguable whether the latest extremely successful version of A Star is Born provided enough autonomy to the character played by Lady Gaga. Into this landscape arrives Wild Rose, a movie that follows a recognizable narrative flow but features a strong performance from Jessie Buckley as a Scottish woman struggling to break into a musical genre that isn’t her country’s own.
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