Female Film Critics 24/375
What a shame that – after winning the 2021 Best Actor Academy Award for The Father – Anthony Hopkins’ new neo-noir thriller is such a dud! The titular character (Anson Mount) is a nameless contract killer, a methodical mercenary, who shows no remorse about the way he earns a living…until a woman, an innocent bystander, is burned to death in front of her young child. He knows it’s “collateral damage,” but the horror awakens his conscience.
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A common sarcasm to express disbelief is “Right. And I’m the Queen of Romania.” Queen Marie of Romania, about a moment in the popular queen’s life, does not shed light on that idiom — or much clarity about Romania or World War I or the 1919 Peace Talks in Vienna or the queen herself.
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Set in London in 1896 during the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign, this new HBO six-episode, sci-fi series revolves around ‘Touched’ people – mostly women – who suddenly manifest an astonishing variety of abnormal abilities. The phenomenon begins with a spectral glow in the overcast sky as glittering particles fall to Earth. Suddenly, young women, many from the lower classes, demonstrate mysterious capabilities – so extraordinary that they’re considered threatening by wealthy, aristocratic men.
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More lacerating because her touch is so delicate, Haifaa Al-Mansour, the first woman to make a Saudi Arabian feature with her stunning 2012 debut Wadjda, delivers a razor sharp look at women’s lives in modern Saudi Arabia with her ironically titled The Perfect Candidate.
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Having established himself as the screen’s most reliable, older action hero, Liam Neeson comes to the rescue again in this action-thriller, set in Naco, Arizona along the Mexican border. Neeson plays rancher Jim Henson, a decorated Vietnam War sharpshooter who’s still grieving over the death of his beloved wife from cancer a year ago. Behind on his mortgage payments and facing eviction, his only friends are his faithful dog Jackson and his step-daughter Sarah (Katheryn Winnick), a border patrol agent.
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In 2012, Haifaa al-Mansour took a rather giant leap for womankind by becoming the first Saudi woman to direct a feature film and the first set in her homeland. Back then, Wadjda focused on a 10-year-old girl and her desire to be allowed to own and ride a bicycle. This time out, The Perfect Candidate, her latest title set in her patriarchy-oppressed homeland pivots on, of all things, something near and dear to Joe Biden’s heart – infrastructure.
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In his 1993 best-seller Without Remorse, novelist Tom Clancy introduced Navy SEAL John Kelly, a character in the Jack Ryan series who has been previously been played on-screen by Liev Schreiber and Willem Dafoe . Now it’s Michael B. Jordan’s turn. As this espionage thriller begins, Kelly’s head emerges from underwater in full scuba gear. He’s on a mission to extract an ‘asset’ out of Aleppo in Syria, where he and his men must unexpectedly battle Russian soldiers instead of the mercenaries that his CIA boss said would be guarding the hostage.
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The Perfect Candidate is Saudi filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour’s compelling drama about a woman physician’s plight to get the impassable dirt road leading to the local hospital paved so that patients can get to the emergency ward in time for their lives to be saved. Because her appeals to the authorities are consistently denied — or worse yet, ignored — Dr. Maryam Alsafan (Mila Al Zahrani) decides that she will campaign for election to the town council with road repair as the sole issue presented on her platform.
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Ultra-conservative religious sects. Girls prevented from getting an education and learning practical skills. Forced marriage between teen girls and abusive men far older than their reluctant brides. No, this isn’t The Handmaid’s Tale; it’s daily life in the United States right now for thousands of underage girls forced into marriages they aren’t ready for and don’t want. And as Kate Brewer’s Knots: A Forced Marriage Story makes abundantly clear, it needs to stop now.
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In Our Mothers’ Gardens is a fearless, confessionalist record, from inside personal histories, of Black mothers and grandmothers, and it is steeped in Black love and culture. It can open the eyes of people who have no true understanding of the strength of family and matriarchy in Black communities. It is a celebration that reflects, through a wide diversity of real stories by Black women, the power, importance, influence, and, above all, the perspective, of Black matriarchy
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