Female Film Critics 24/375
A grandmother takes on the powers that be in The Seer and the Unseen, Sara Dosa’s sophomore feature that made its debut at the SFFILM Festival. The documentary’s depiction of efforts to stop development across one of Iceland’s magnificent lava fields is enchanting—and not just because Iceland’s legendary elves are the titular “unseen.”
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Is sweet little elderly English librarian Judi Dench a spy for the KGB?! There’s a lot of hot-button stuff going on in the loosely based-on-a-true-story Red Joan, from Marxist radicalization at Cambridge University in the late 1930s through sexism at Britain’s atomic-bomb project during World War II and into the Cold War…
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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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Amazing Grace is an enlightening documentary, drawing listeners to an experience, to a history, to a wretch-changing sound. It takes you back to 1972, when Aretha Franklin at age 30 returns to her childhood church to record gospel songs.
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Set in 1945, immediately after W.W. II, it’s a love triangle involving a stiff-upper-lip English couple and the anguished German architect whose palatial home on the banks of the Elbe River the British Army has requisitioned.
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This is what feminism often means, unfortunately: rediscovering — over and over again — the achievements of the women who blazed trails before us who have been erased in the annals written in their wake. And so it is with Alice Guy-Blaché, who isn’t just an innovator and trailblazer among women filmmakers but of cinema on the whole.
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Briskly paced and packed with fascinating information about one of film’s true pioneers, Pamela B. Green‘s Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache is a crash course in film history — or, more accurately, film herstory. Because, as it turns out, the roots of cinematic storytelling are as feminine as they can be.
Stories about journeys made by men in which women play supporting roles as inspirations, antagonists, and helpers have been the foundation of Western Civilization. The old Bards stuck to narratives in which the old heroes explained the patriarchal cosmos through their exploits as they came home from war, or established great cities, perhaps met God, and, almost always, as they conquered death in one way or another. Options are now more various.
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Writer/director Madeleine Olnek did not invent this story of Emily Dickinson’s love for her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. Olnek makes clear from the start that Dickinson’s love letters, quoted aloud and printed on screen, are filed in libraries in Harvard and Amherst.
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Recently relocated from Boston, Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and Louis (Jason Clarke) Creed are young parents who want their children – eight year-old Ellie (Jete Lawrence) and two year-old Gage (twins Hugo & Lucas Lavoie) – to live a quieter suburban life in rural Ludlow, Maine.
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