Female Film Critics 24/375
Steven Soderbergh knows how to spot a filmmaker with something to say, and with Love, Brooklyn, he’s backed Rachael Abigail Holder’s moody, sun-dappled debut. Through the gaze of a Brooklyn cyclist who pedals as though the city’s chaotic traffic is nothing more than atmospheric background, Holder offers us a meandering but thoughtful meditation on love, change, and that hazy thing we call “moving on.”
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Amnesia has proved to be quite popular cinematically over decades and across genres. Using this mental dilemma as the catalyst for story, director Duke Johnson places veteran actor Paul Cole in a perplexing, confounding predicament in The Actor. Cole awakens after an accident (hit over the head with a chair by the unexpected arrival of a would-be lover’s husband) in an unnamed town somewhere in 1950s Ohio. With no idea of his identity, Cole must follow nominal clues to rediscover his life. Not entirely successful in probing the challenge of memory and depth of identity, nevertheless The Actor offers a thought-provoking diversion.
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Anytime is a good time to see Nicole Beharie onscreen. She elevates every project she’s in, but in veteran TV director Rachael Holder’s feature narrative directorial debut, she’s in great company. Love, Brooklyn, released at Sundance 2025, also stars André Holland and DeWanda Wise, and all three are acting up such a storm, they almost make the film’s scant script irrelevant. Almost. Holland plays a bicycle wielding writer not only vacillating between relationships, but also procrastinating on an essay assignment about the magic of an evolving Brooklyn, New York. He’s hanging with ex-girlfriend and gallery owner Casey (Beharie) while in an as-yet-to-be-defined relationship with Nicole (Wise).
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The eight-year gap between Barry Jenkin’s first film Medicine for Melancholy and his sophomore follow-up Moonlight has been a source of some considerable anxiety for all the cinephiles eagerly awaiting Jenkins’s new work. Opening Oct. 21, AWFJ’s Movie of the Week is Moonlight, a political work in that it posits the experience of being black in the US, not with the triumphant exceptionalism of a film like The Birth of a Nation, but with attention and care to a common and shared humanity. Read More…
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