Female Film Critics 24/375
Katrine Philp’s An Elephant in the Room follows children in mourning for deceases parents. The film comes at a difficult time when conversations about death and grief may be central to the lives of many families. It’s reassuring to see that regardless of how deep the grief may be, we can get through it — but it’s easier if you don’ t go at it alone.
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It’s rare to find a movie that manages to find a fresh new angle to approach a subject we’ve seen so many times before. That’s what The Surrogate does – and it’s one of the many reasons it’s such a treasure. Writer-director Jeremy Hersh has created a small gem that puts us in the shoes of people forced to make difficult moral decisions. And that makes us not just more involved viewers but better human beings.
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Imagine if someone in real life was trying to bring back animals that were extinct. That idea is explored – epically – by directors David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg in their fascinating documentary, We Are As Gods, focusing on Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog founder, environmentalist and leader of the counterculture since the 1960s.
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These days, bright-eyed teens vow to change the world by creating digital apps. That’s Ben Pasternak, a high-school dropout who’s the focus of The Boy Who Sold the World, a documentary slated to make its world premiere at the (sadly canceled) 2020 SXSW Film Festival.
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Feels Good Man is not just comic artist Matt Furie’s story, or even that of his creation, Pepe the frog. It is the story of us, and it illuminates some confusing and painful realities about the way we communicate, form opinions, and make vital decisions about the future of our country, and so much that doesn’t feel good, man.
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Baltimore itself is the stage where rappers and poets perform on street corners, dancers hotfoot their way across bridges and through buildings, clubs host sweaty dance-off competitions, where crowds gather to watch those with the best moves crowned King or Queen. And in one poignant sequence, a tulle-clad dancer performs a beautiful mixture of ballet and club moves in the graveyard where Tamika Ray (aka FatGirl), a pioneer of Baltimore dance, lays buried.
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Perched between a rom-com and a romance-fuelled psychological thriller — both of the offbeat, indie, gleefully eccentric variety — Caleb Michael Johnson’s debut feature The Carnivores sinks its teeth into the all-consuming nature of love.
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Imagine visiting the house where you lived as a child and standing next to the marks on the doorway where your parents measured your growth each year. All around us are invisible marks that measure where we are and every so often, usually unexpectedly, we get a chance to see exactly how far we have — and haven’t gone. Whether we want to or not.
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We raced to finish The Pushback in time for our SXSW delivery deadline and then the festival was canceled the same day. Although we are sad that we did not get to premiere at the festival and in Texas, where the documentary was shot, we feel like we have to make lemonade out of lemons and find the opportunity in this moment. Due to the shutdown of other productions, there will likely be more appetite for finished content in the coming months. And with social distancing, cancellation of group events, and potentially the inability to canvas, we’re thinking that a film like ours can be a useful tool to reach people through their living rooms at a safe distance.
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Are you ‘cliterate’? How many of you out there know the exact physiological structure of the clitoris? How many of you are uncomfortable with it being brought up, or even written in a sentence? That is what the new documentary The Dilemma of Desire considers as part of a larger examination of the disconnection from, and vilification of, women’s sexuality, and how it damages self-acceptance and self-value for women around the world
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