Female Film Critics 24/375
The history of LGBTQ people from the mid-20 century on in North America is contained in Terry Donahue and Pat Henschel’s story, the subterfuge society required giving way to a judgmental niece carping that it’s sinful that they are not married. In some ways, A Secret Love is a time capsule, but more than that, it is an affecting portrait of a couple’s unshakeable bond in the twilight of their lives.
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Deborah Kampmeier’s searing drama, Tape, is a disturbing film precisely because it nails the culture of rape and sexual harassment that has been pervasive in so many industries for far too long.
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The film is ingeniously constructed. Writer/directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy knit together multiple story strands so that Blow the Man Down‘s tone constantly shifts, tense now, now hilarious, now a blend of both, now oddly moving. The entire ensemble is terrific.
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Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano may seem like an unlikely setting for space exploration, but for a group of intrepid scientists and would-be astronauts, it becomes exactly that in this NASA experiment captured by filmmakers Lauren DeFilippo and Katherine Gorringe in this fascinating documentary.
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A frightened prostitute runs into dark night and seemingly disappears off the face of the earth, sending a frantic mother into a walking nightmare of official indifference in this tense, evocative drama, drawn from an actual case.
Documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus makes her fiction feature debut with an engrossing, character-driven film.
One of the more frustrating facets to the Sundance Film Festival is its episodic programming. The viewer is given a tantalizing glimpse of a series, only to have to wait to see more. That hardly seems fair in our era of binge watching. And it is definitely not fair in the case of Laetitia.
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Someday, some enterprising filmmaker will no doubt turn into thrilling drama Marthe Cohn’s eventful life as a Jewish woman who resisted the Nazis in France. But Cohn has lived a long enough life that filmmaker Nicola Alice Hens was able to commit the real woman and her memories to film in this entrancing documentary.
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Award-winning documentarian Kim Longinotto’s latest celebration of the lives on women focuses on Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia with a scintillating exploration not just of Battaglia’s career but of the crime syndicate that was her frequent subject.
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Filmmaker Ana García Blaya looks to her own childhood for inspiration for this semi-autobiographical family drama defined by its title. The divorced couple at its center—ne’er-do-well, middle-aged punk rocker Gustavo (Javier Drolas) and ex Ceci (Jazmin Stuart)—mean well. Their relationship is amicable enough, but an economic downturn in Argentina has Ceci and her new husband looking toward greener pastures in Uruguay.
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Acclaimed Brazilian actress Regina Casé—a Special Grand Jury prize winner at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival for her work in The Second Mother—delivers a richly empathetic and immensely likeable portrait of a striver whose heart is as big as her ambition in Sandra Kogut’s diverting drama.
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