Female Film Critics 24/375
Coming-of-age dramas don’t get much more authentic than Gina Gammell and Riley Keough’s War Pony. Born out of the two women’s deeply personal, long-standing relationship with the Oglala Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation, the film follows two young Lakota men as they deal with the ups and downs of their daily lives. In the process, it offers a frank but tender look at the realities of contemporary life at Pine Ridge.
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Riley Keough and her co-director Gina Gammell, who’ve made an absolute stunner of a narrative feature debut, spent time in Pine Ridge getting to know the Lakota residents and the harsh elements of their environment. Their immersion shows. With a terrific cast of non-professionals drawn from the community, War Pony renders the lives of the Lakota people mired in sprawling Pine Ridge with grim and incisive detail.
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War Pony is an exquisite narrative feature from first time directors Gina Gammell and Riley Keough. Set on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the film centers on two young Oglala Lakota men who are using all of their innate smarts to find opportunities to overcome the overwhelming hardships they face — poverty, abandonment, cultural disenfranchisement. The beautifully crafted film has an authenticity that is absolutely captivating.
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While she won’t speculate on her own awards prospects, Ari Wegner recently told me how happy she is to see the way women are now being more welcomed in the field of cinematography. She hopes this will continue to increase as female DPs start to see the recognition that has eluded them for so long. She discusses both the art and science of filmmaking with such a degree of passion and poetry, that her love for the medium is contagious. She is a leader, a champion, and a gifted artist, giving the world not only beautiful images, but a sense of hope and fascination too.
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Jake Gyllenhaal is one of the producers of this remake of the Danish entry as Best Foreign Film of 2018. He gives his character, Joe Baylor, a wide range of hysteria, fright, concern, and frustration. He plays up Nic Pizzolatto’s screenplay, which is more sensational than the original, which felt creepier for being subtler. Still, “The Guilty” is unpredictable, heart-stopping, and, most of all, imaginative.
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Twenty years after his breakthrough film, Training Day, Antoine Fuqua returns to the environs of the Los Angeles Police Department to deliver a very different, more subdued drama. A remake of a 2018 Danish thriller of the same name and shot under COVID protocols, it is a film where interest never flags but one that is hampered by its shaky night-in-the-life-of scenario, delivering a too shallow portrayal of the life of a troubled man.
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“Broken people save broken people.” That’s how Christina Vidal as Sgt Denise Wade explains Jake Gyllenhaal’s character Joe Baylor in Antoine Fuqua’s incredibly tense new film The Guilty. If the movie proves one thing, it’s that nothing is simple, and nothing is what it seems. Here, Fuqua teams up with Gyllenhaal in a pandemic-era story that unfolds in real time, bringing the audience on a gripping 90 minute wild ride, while the cameras stay almost exclusively in one room.
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A stripper gets more than she bargained for in Zola, a bawdy road trip about sex work, female friendship and the messy world of men. This is ostensibly a comedy, but there’s a dark side to it all that makes Zola a real innocence-to-experience trip, most of that captured through the performance of Taylour Paige in the title role. To put the best possible light on things, it’s a great yarn about storytelling.
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Noir dramedies based on “real people” and “true events” always resonate deeper and more receptively with those who find the characters familiar, relatable, and through the magic of great scriptwriters and stellar acting, redeemable.
In Zola, writer and director Janicza Bravo gives us a female “almost buddy” film that goes horribly south, showing off the worst of a particular class of white people, black people, and skeevy characters in-between the lot. Nobody, save for Zola, is someone you would want to know, but they sure can be funny.
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If this dreary dirge didn’t have an all-star cast, it would never have been green-lit – and, sadly, the actors cannot save it. Set in the 1950s and ‘60s in the rural Appalachian towns of Knockemstiff, Ohio, and Coal Creek, West Virginia, it’s a cruel, domestic drama, featuring some really sick, sadistic families affected by two sin-soaked, Bible-thumping preachers.
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