Female Film Critics 24/375
Briskly paced and packed with fascinating information about one of film’s true pioneers, Pamela B. Green‘s Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache is a crash course in film history — or, more accurately, film herstory. Because, as it turns out, the roots of cinematic storytelling are as feminine as they can be.
A determined mother prepares to battle an extremist regime in desperate hopes of finding and rescuing her young son, who was torn from her by the same oppressors who turned her into a sex slave. No, it’s not The Handmaid’s Tale — it’s director Eva Husson’s powerful Girls of the Sun, which is based on all-too-real circumstances in present-day Kurdistan.
Stephanie Wang-Breal’s calmly compassionate fly-on-the-wall documentary Blowin’ Up takes viewers inside a unique courtroom in Queens. Run by Judge Toko Serita, the court is the first of its kind to approach prostitution in a way that encourages solving problems rather than compounding them. Counseling and training take the place of shaming and judgment.
Timely and authentic, Michal Aviad’s drama “Working Woman” will resonate with any ambitious woman who’s ever found that success on the job is accompanied by unwanted sexual attention from a male supervisor/co-worker. So, you know, every ambitious woman.
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It’s no exaggeration to say that Steve Bannon quickly became one of the most reviled figures in Donald Trump’s inner circle during the 2016 election and the early days of Trump’s presidency. Cagey and clever, Bannon never seemed to make a move that wasn’t completely calculated. So you have to wonder what his motivation was to allow filmmaker Alison Klayman and her cameras into his life to film The Brink, an intimate documentary that follows Bannon from 2017 through the historic 2018 midterm elections.
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Following the infamous 2012 case in Steubenville, Ohio, in which two teen boys who were local highschool football heroes assaulted and raped an intoxicated female classmate, Nancy Schwartzman’s compelling documentary, Roll Red Roll, crystalizes the danger of supporting a “boys will be boys” mentality.
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The life of an actress isn’t always an easy one — even more so in a country like Iran, where traditional currents run strong and “following your dreams” isn’t so simple for any woman, let alone a woman who wants to take to the stage. In his latest uniquely crafted film, Jafar Panahi again defies the Iranian government’s ban on his film production to explore themes of dreams vs family and social obligations. 3 Faces, a compelling drama about craft and connection.
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Every single Jew who died during World War II at the hands of Hitler and his Nazis had a story to tell — and the fact that so many of those stories died with them is an unfathomable tragedy. But some of their stories survived, including those preserved by the brave Polish Jews who risked their lives to create the Oyneg Shabes Archive. This astounding cache of documents and artifacts from the Warsaw Ghetto is the subject of Roberta Grossman’s moving, fascinating documentary Who Will Write Our History.
Smart, strong, and determined, college senior Sawyer (Hermione Corfield) is no victim. But she is someone who finds herself in the wrong place at the wrong time in Jen McGowan’s tense survival thriller “Rust Creek” — and what happens as a result will ensure that you never leave home without rock-solid directions (or a backup phone battery) again.
Winner of the AWFJ’s 2018 EDA awards for Best Film and Best Non-English Language Film (as well as Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing), Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” is a lushly filmed, beautifully specific slice-of-life drama that presents its central female characters with love and compassion. The story centers on Cleo (newcomer Yalitza Aparicio), the cook/maid/nanny to an upper middle class family living in Mexico City’s Roma district in the early 1970s.