Female Film Critics 24/375
Amy Scott’s new biographical documentary Sheryl reveals the musician’s tumultuous personal experience becoming the icon she is, with Sheryl herself opening up about the joys and challenges in her life and career. The film is straightforward and conventional, but if the mark of a good bio-doc is having a subject and interviewees that speak honestly and from time to time lay their souls bare, Sheryl hits that note beautifully.
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Sisters with Transistors makes an explicit connection between the assumed ‘boys club’ nature of electronic music and the broader plight of feminism more generally explicit. All those catch phrases and keywords that have been tethered to the former since its conception – speaking up, being heard, making noise – are granted remarkable new meaning when tied so explicitly to the history of women in electronic music, and how broadly their place in that history has been denied.
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Billy Tipton was married 5 times, raising 3 adoptive sons, and none of them knew he was trans. This is not a pedantic, traditional, talking-heads kind of documentary. There are well-chosen and diverse artistic representatives offering a wide spectrum of the binary and non binary points of view, and they do so with candor and introspection. The result is sometimes heartbreaking, but also revelatory, life-affirming, and inspiring. No Ordinary Man is no ordinary documentary.
Read moreSpace Dogs recounts the history of the first Earthling shot into space, a Moscow street dog named Laika. But if you’re looking for a straightforward account of Laika’s rise and fall, you’d better shift course, because Space Dogs occupies an entirely different documentary sphere.
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Suzanne Bauman’s 1985 documentary The Women of Summer is a revelation. The award-winning veteran director has crafted a lively, informative and important film about the landmark residential summer school program that brought hundreds of young working women, most toiling in the country’s textile mills, to the Bryn Mawr College campus from 1921 to 1938. This seminal documentary about women’s work in the labor movement is now readily available for audiences to experience
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