Female Film Critics 24/375
Life is not a spectator sport, as the saying goes, and — if you’re doing it right — neither is being part of the Cajun culture. As Abby Berendt Lavoi and Jeremey Lavoi’s loving documentary Roots of Fire makes clear, those who cherish their connection to this culture tend to go all-in, especially when it comes to the toe-tapping, accordion-infused music that’s been played for generations in Louisiana dance halls.
Read more
If you’ve ever doubted that one person really can make a difference when it comes to systemic change, just spend two hours getting to know Black model/1970s fashion icon/activist Bethann Hardison via the thoroughly engaging documentary Invisible Beauty. Though, fair warning: Her passion, drive, and relentless activism may leave you feeling somewhat inadequate about your own internal drive by the time the credits roll.
Read more
Invisible Beauty belongs among the great fashion documentaries of recent years. Like Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel and The Gospel According to André about André Leon Talley, Invisible Beauty profiles a fashion insider who is also an outsider. Trailblazer, innovator, activist and all around legend Bethann Hardison co-directs this look at her life and career with Frédéric Tcheng (Halston, “Dior and I). But it’s no vanity project. Candid, thoughtful and reflective, the film is much like the memoir that Hardison is writing throughout the film.
Read more
Invisible Beauty is a thoroughly engaging autobiography documentary by and about Bethann Hardison, the Black fashion model, modeling agency owner and activist who challenged racist attitudes and practices in the fashion industry and changed ‘the look’ of runway shows, magazine spreads and other platforms for fashion marketing.
Read more
Invisible Beauty is a love letter to Black women and to the icon who is model, fashion industry veteran and activist Bethann Hardison. For anyone who knows the legacy and evolution of Black women in fashion and runway casting into the 90s. knows of the trials and tribulations that went into creating and sustaining legendary names such as Naomi Campbell, Tyson Beckford, Tyra Banks, Cynthia Bailey and Iman in a racially hostile industry, and will easily understand the importance of this documentary written and directed by Hardison herself.
Read more
Prolific author, keen observer, insightful storyteller, compulsive writer, incisive tweeter. Joyce Carol Oates is all of these things and more, as director Stig Björkman makes abundantly clear in his thoughtfully constructed, affectionate documentary Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in Service of Mind. Tracing Oates’ life and career over the course of several decades, Björkman makes it clear that she has well earned her reputation as an iconic American writer.
Read more
Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in Service of Mind is a delightful documentary delve into the persona and personal opinions of the notoriously self effacing and non-stop prolific literary goddess known as Joyce Carol Oates. Filmmaker Stig Bjorkman. a longstanding friend of Joyce Carol Oates. gives us a respectful and intimate documentary that spends its hour and a half on current interviews with Oates, as well as clips from her past interviews with Dick Cavitt and other broadcast presenters and select readings from her writings that are voiced by Laura Dern over footage of Oates at work, or hiking through the countryside.
Read more
Greenwich Entertainment’s documentary Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind is a beautiful and informative look into the life and work of the beloved and award-winning novelist by the same name, who not only wrote a series of novels drenched immensely in gender, race, socioeconomics, and politics but who wrote dramatic novels sans politics under pseudonyms which she described as getting to “start over” and “to write as if she were “writing for the first time.”
Read more
Perseverance is at the heart of Sahar Mosayebi’s moving drama Orca, which is based on the true story of Elham Asghari, the Iranian open-water swimmer who defied the legal and cultural limitations placed on women in Iran by making and breaking world records. In the process, she’s helped bring attention to the challenges faced by Iran’s female athletes, who long for the opportunity to compete in all sports, not just the officially sanctioned ones.
Read more
It feels like a precious gift, the latest film from French director Alice Winocour, a delicately constructed journey through trauma and recovery that cuts like a knife and soothes like a hug, somehow, miraculously, managing both bundles of feeling at the same time.
Read more