Female Film Critics 24/375
Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl is director Amy Goldstein’s engrossing, entertaining gut punch of a behind-the-music documentary. Singer/songwriter Nash is the creative young woman at the center who struggles mightily against misogyny and exploration at every turn. For those not familiar with the British Nash, she became a pop star with a huge fan base of mostly young women after her 2007 smash hit Foundations.
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Kudos to Karen Cooper for 50 years of fine film programming at Film Forum, the independent art cinema she founded and has grown, over the years, from a 50 seat venue in a walk up apartment on NYC’s Upper West Side to it’s current four-screen home on West Houston Street. Cooper has never sought the limelight for herself, yet her vision, commitment and activism have illuminated New York’s cinema scene for filmmakers and moviegoers for decades.
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Despite the best efforts of the cast, the characters are a bit thin to sustain the tension and film starts to falter midway, wavering in tone between thriller and farce. We know things will spiral downward but Silent Panic doesn’t take us anywhere new or unexpected.
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The intimate documentary A Secret Love chronicles the life partnership between Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel that began in the very closeted 1940s and endured for the next 70 years. This fascinating and inspiring look at ordinary LGBT lives woven through history is the best part of the film and the reason to watch.
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Bull, the powerful, poetic debut feature from writer-director Annie Silverstein, is rooted in neorealist tradition. The film’s use of nonprofessionals adds authenticity and atmospheric detail to this fascinating look at the subculture of bull riding among black cowboys in rural Texas.
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Coming from the art house film world where small indies struggle for attention an audiences, Berlin-based actor/director Maria Schrader marvels at Netflix’s instant global reach. “I realized how in an instant [it creates] buzz in many countries and then suddenly everyone is watching. This is actually the most incredible thing — that women wearing burkas are seeing [Unorthodox] in Arabic countries. It is amazing.”
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Director Halina Dryschka’s fascinating documentary is an illuminating introduction to a major artist all but erased from modern art history. Beyond the Visible should reach the general public as a needed and welcome corrective to art history, shining a light on yet another dynamic, trailblazing woman denied her rightful place in history, until now.
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Director Malgorzata Szumowska’s The Other Lamb is a visually striking, quietly poetic but very bleak tale about an all-female cult living in a remote, dense forest. The women tend to real sheep as well as to their Charles Manson-like leader (Michiel Huisman, who seems a bit young to have fathered girls who appear older than tweens) who is known only as “The Shepherd.”
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Radium Girls is a revelation; a rich dramatization of the historical events that took place in Orange, NJ in 1927-28. Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler, who co-wrote the original screenplay with Brittany Shaw, Radium Girls blends period social drama, courtroom intrigue, labor history and a women’s empowerment message.
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It’s an ambitious undertaking to make a Civil War period film with a large cast on a minuscule budget so kudos to Union for even attempting that daunting task. Shot in Birmingham, Alabama, the film opens with an elaborate battle sequence (it appears to be an actual Civil War reenactment).
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