Female Film Critics 24/375
Bull, the powerful, poetic debut feature from writer-director Annie Silverstein, is a portrait of an unlikely interracial and intergenerational friendship that develops between a 14 year-old Krystal, called Kris (Amber Havard), whose mother is in jail, and her middle-aged neighbor Abe Turner (Rob Morgan of Mudbound), a former star bull rider who now wrangles thrashing bulls at modest rodeos.
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For many people, the name Dr. Ruth Westheimer summons an image of a diminutive sex therapist who was ubiquitous on television in the late 1980s. The new documentary Ask Dr. Ruth delivers an entertaining, enlightening portrait that shows she was, and is, so much more.
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A terrific ensemble that includes Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler (who also directs) riffs its way through some predictable and formulaic gags in Poehler’s sitcom-y version of Sideways. The fun is in how these gifted sketch comics, many of them SNL alums including Tina Fey, banter with and play off one another.
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Two new feature films mark the 50th anniversary of the still- disturbing, endlessly fascinating Tate/LaBianca murders that shook the tony enclaves of Los Angeles to the core in August, 1969. Quentin Tarantino’s star studded Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will get more attention. Mary Harron’s Charlie Says, with its focus on the women in Charles Manson’s “family” who committed the heinous murders, may be the more interesting.
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Grief in all its messiness, especially as experienced by a middle aged man, is the heart of this sparse, moving indie from writer-director Andrew Kightlinger. We see scruffy Erwin in a bleary-eyed morning ritual. He’s a rancher in the middle of nowhere, which is someplace in South Dakota where the film was shot, living with nothing but a dog, a battered truck, canned beans and booze.
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Thelma and Louise was more than a riveting movie; it hit the cultural zeitgeist when it was released in 1991 and profoundly impacted its core audience — women. One of them, Jennifer Townsend, was so stirred by the film, she conducted a survey of women’s responses. took out ads seeking responses to a mailed questionnaire about the film. Years later,the results of that survey are revealed in this engaging documentary.
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Any director, but particularly women; any cinephile, particularly women, will revel in this examination of the life and work of Paris-born Guy-Blaché, one of the inventors of cinema, who directed, wrote or produced over 1,000 films, including an estimated 150 films with synchronized sound.
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Writer/director Tre Manchester’s The Things We’ve Seen, now on streaming services, mixes elements of thriller, noir and melodrama, which is pretty ambitious for a film with obvious budget constraints. That it succeeds only intermittently is understandable and forgivable; ambition is never a bad thing.
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Girls of the Sun mixes the immediate power of contemporary news footage with a story of women bonding in the most horrific conditions: on the front lines of fighting ISIS in northern Kurdistan.
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Stephanie Wang-Breal’s powerful and timely film shines a light on the rare workings of a legal system that exists to help, not punish; to advocate, not to judge; and to genuinely find a way to change the bleak lives of the mostly young, marginalized women including trans women who survive by doing sex work in the massage parlors and on the streets of Queens.
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