Female Film Critics 24/375
The consequences of what can happen when a person is “othered” are front and center in writer-director Anu Valia’s atmospheric drama We Strangers. As it tells the story of a young Black woman named Ray (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and her dissonant, uncomfortable relationships with the people who hire her to clean their houses, the film — Valia’s feature debut — explores the complex intersection of race, class, and power dynamics.
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Filmmaker Anu Valia’s first feature, We Strangers is a subversive, darkly funny and bitter narrative commentary on socio-economic racial profiling.
The story centers on Ray, a young, intelligent, responsible. well-mannered Black woman who works as a for-hire house cleaner. She is diligent and thorough in her work. Her clients are well-to-do families, mostly White, who recommend her to each other, passing along her good services in the same way they’d share a recipe for pesto.
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For some, couponing is a thrill. For others it’s a necessity. For Connie Kaminski and her best friend Jojo Johnson, it’s a multi-million dollar business enterprise. Written and directed by the husband and wife team of Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly, Queenpins stars Kristen Bell as Connie, a former Olympian and suburban housewife who finds solace in couponing and stockpiling, while Kirby Howell-Baptiste is Jojo, the victim of identity fraud whose life has been so badly damaged by said fraud that she’s been forced to move back into her mother’s home and is trying to make a name for herself as a YouTube star.
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A so-called “prequel,” Cruella quotes more than it originates. Set in the punking ’70s in London, the film traces the early days of the evil-doer known as Cruella back to the time that she was Estella. Even as a child, her white and black hair symbolized her good and evil sides.
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Cruella just may be the best movie of the year, daaaaaahling. It’s Wicked mixed with The Devil Wears Prada, and it’s so edgy and full of life (and, yes, some death), it brings Disney into the 21st century.
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You’ve got to hand it to the Mouse. Disney can make a princess out of anyone, even one of its legendary villains, Cruella De Ville, a kind of hard-hearted Snow White whose Evil Queen is her designer boss, the Baroness. For those of us who grew up loathing that simpering, eventually sleeping princess, this is more like it: a princess who gives as good as she gets.
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What’s black, white and wittily wicked fun all over? Disney’s Cruella, an origin story of the puppy-snatching villainess from the studio’s 101 Dalmatians franchise that was launched 50 years ago with the much-beloved original animated canine classic In that version, the pelt-wearing, skunk-haired crone with jutting cheekbones swanned about as she waved her cigarette holder while plotting to make a black and white fur coat from puppies.
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Opening nationwide in theaters and streaming, Cruella is an all-new, live-action origin story, recounting the early days of the screen’s most notorious – and infamously fashionable – dog-napping villainess, the legendary Cruella de Vil from Disney’s 1961 animated classic 101 Dalmatians.
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