Female Film Critics 24/375
Think Stranger Things meets Cocoon, and you’ll come up with The Burroughs, Netflix’s new sci-fi horror dramedy that introduces a group of seniors living in a supposedly idyllic retirement community in the New Mexico desert. This series attracted immediate attention but, unfortunately, as the eight episodes unfold, the cheesy, predictable plot disappoints, concluding on an ambiguous note.
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Trailblazers don’t come much more blazing than Barbara Jordan, the groundbreaking Texas politician/lawyer/all-around bad-ass who’s the subject of director Angela Lynn Tucker’s illuminating documentary The Inquisitor. As the first Black woman to be elected to her home state’s Senate since the Civil War — not to mention the first southern Black woman ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives — Jordan made an indelible mark on U.S. politics in her all-too-brief time in Washington, D.C.
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Fimmaker Angela Tucker’s astute documentary portrays Barbara Jordan in all her complexity and as a woman of her time. She got things done by compromising with the white men who made up nearly all of Congress in the 1970s yet she fearlessly used her intellect and oratory skills at key moments when democracy itself was on the line. Such moments included the impeachment hearings of President Richard Nixon. This film is a much-needed portrait of political leadership, intellectual curiosity and backbone.
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This dystopian sci-fi fantasy/drama series begins its second season with a third already in production. The opening credits are a montage of nerve endings that, as the volume increases, form various shapes. As star Alfre Woodward notes: “The characters in season two do not see the past coming to haunt them, but the past coming to be resolved…See has so many parallels with what is going on with the world – or even what could happen. There’s the idea of the masses laying trust in prophetic figures.”
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Stoic prison warden Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard) is psychologically and emotionally exhausted after years of overseeing death-row executions. Woodard delivers a masterfully restrained performance, but the film is excruciating to watch. The point is how enforcing the death penalty not only dehumanizes the condemned but also takes a spiritual toll on those who carry out the execution.
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Throughout her four-decade acting career, Woodard has garnered an Academy Award nomination, four Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes, but that doesn’t quite do justice to her practically preternatural skills as a performer.
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Clemency will leave you asking can one find hope in other people’s decisions and are men in prison simply invisible because people refuse to see them? This is one of the best films released in 2019 and I am most proud to declare it was written and directed by a woman of color…Chinonye Chuckwu.
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Alfre Woodard, named one of the deadCenter Film Festival’s 2018 Oklahoma Film Icon Award winners, considers herself an “original gangster,”
Read moreWarner Bros. will mount an Oscar campaign for Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins, striving to get first-ever
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