Female Film Critics 24/375
Symptoms of PTSD – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – permeate Heart of the Beast, a treacherous survival story about a military veteran and his combat dog in Alaska’s wilderness. Yet it’s also a love story about the devotion between a man and his loyal canine companion, joining classics like Rin Tin Tin, Old Yeller and Lassie.
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Brad Pitt goes through the wringer in the survival drama Heart of the Beast, but his canine co-star runs off
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Subtitled – “Greed knows no limits” – all four of its leading characters are thoroughly dislikeable and so selfish that you really don’t care who survives the ‘lost in the wilderness’ ordeal. Secretive siblings Lee and Cheryl are a study in contrasts. For a recently released ex-con, he’s deceptively sensitive and friendly, while she’s evasive and openly hostile.
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Kasia Adamik’s Winter of the Crow, co-written by Adamik, Sandra Buchta and Lucinda Coxon, is a tight thriller that intrigues as much as it paints a picture of bleak political events in 1980s Poland. Lesley Manville is an actress who is never given roles to truly show her talents. Thankfully, Winter of the Crow is one of the projects where Manville is able to showcase her gifts by portraying a layered character who grows amid harsh adversity.
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In The Art of Adventure, director Alison Reid (The Woman Who Loved Giraffes) tells the globe-trotting tale of Robert Bateman and Bristol Foster, two longtime Canadian friends whose shared passion for nature and drive to see the world beyond North America led them on an 18-month odyssey across 50,000 miles and 19 countries in the late 1950s — and, later, fueled their careers as passionate stewards of the environment.
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The Alliance of Women Film Journalists highlights movies made by and about women. With a vigilant eye toward current releases, we maintain an interactive record of films that are pertinent to our interests. Be they female-made or female-centric productions, they are films that represent a wide range of women’s stories and present complex female characters. As such, they are movies that will most likely be reviewed on AWFJ.org and will qualify for consideration for our annual EDA Awards, celebrating exceptional women working in film behind and in front of the camera.
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Nigerian-born British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah’s trailblazing 1995 sci-fi feature Welcome II the Terrordome has been restored and will be released in on October 6, 2026, on Blu-ray via The Criterion Collection. The first theatrically distributed British feature by a Black woman, the dystopian science fiction film furiously evokes a near future in which Black people are segregated within a slum called the Terrordome. In her prescient sci-fi feature, Onwurah builds a visionary, Afrofuturist cosmology that connects the history of slavery to modern-day systemic racial brutality.
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Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland reminds viewers of the attentive commitment of Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika (an always superb Sandra Hüller) to her father (Hanns Zischler). In fact, the formidable Erika enjoyed a full life as an actress, writer, and rally driver. In 1946 she reported on the Nuremberg war crimes trials before traveling to California to care for Thomas who was being treated for lung cancer. In Fatherland’s 1949 Germany Erika and Thomas drive in their black Buick sedan across the ruins of Germany, from Frankfurt to Weimer, from the former city under US control to the latter under Soviet domination where Thomas delivers a passionate, courageous anti-Nazi address advocating freedom from tyranny.
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Unfolding in the style of horror film, which it is, directors Laura Poitras’ and Rachel Lauren Mueller’s They’re Here documents ICE’s illegal, combative activity in Minneapolis, Minnesota, this past winter. Immediately mimicking the menacing, stalking point-of-view shots that evoke anxiety in that genre of films, the association is apt given ICE’s threatening, frightening, even terrorizing men, women, and children. In a revealing, informative 25 minutes, They’re Here presents the array of tactics used by ICE agents in military uniforms and, almost universally, with partial masks covering their faces, thereby concealing their identity.
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Ostensibly about the power of unions and workers uniting for better wages and improved job conditions in the microcosm of New York City, Union Town truly creates empathy and even admiration for the people who keep the Big Apple and America moving, one delivery at a time.
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