True/False 2025: “Writing Hawa,” “Requiem for a Tribe,” “A Want in Her”

Among the many reasons why the True/False Film Festival, Columbia, Missouri’s annual celebration of the documentary form, is my favorite festival to attend is that it highlights fresh (and frequently side-lined) perspectives. The three films I’ve written about below— Writing Hawa, Requiem for a Tribe, and A Want in Her— all swirl around topics of […]

True/False 2025: “How Deep is Your Love”

It’s funny that so many people are fascinated— perhaps even obsessed— with the notion of looking to the stars to locate life beyond Earth, when 70 percent of our planet is covered with water, the majority of which remains untouched and unseen by humans. That may not be the case for long, however: the alien-like […]

True/False 2025: “Valentina and the MUOSters”

Valentina is adrift. Nearing 27 years old, she still lives with her parents in her hometown of Niscemi, Sicily, a place whose natural landscape is slowly deteriorating thanks to wildfires that ravage the forests, and MUOS (Mobile User Objective Systems) that dot the landscape. The satellites, part of an American base and— as cuts to […]

True/False 2025: “River of Grass”

“I remember nature always creeping in.” Those words, spoken by writer and director Sasha Wortzel in her debut documentary feature River of Grass in reference to how growing up in Florida, the natural world existed in tandem with the human one— she speaks of finding tree frogs in the toilet, opossums in the yard— immediately […]

Fantastic Fest Review: “The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee”

“On the seventh of June in the year 2015 I passed away at the age of 93. By then I had become quite accustomed to dying.” Christopher Lee rises from the grave to narrate a documentary about his own life in Jon Spira’s The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee. That statement, uttered at the […]

Fantastic Fest Review: “The Spirit of Halloweentown”

I still remember the first time I watched Halloweentown: the night of its premiere on Disney Channel on October 17th, 1998. I had just turned eight years old, and every Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM, if you will) premiere was event television in my house. But there was something immediately special about Halloweentown, the story […]

TIFF Review: “Querido Trópico”

Fractured mother/daughter relationships make ripe stories for some of the most compelling cinema, even when they are versions of the same tale we’ve seen time and time again. That statement certainly applies to Querido Trópico (Beloved Tropic), a Panamanian drama that is the first narrative feature from director Ana Endara (who has four feature-length documentaries […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “Daughters,” “Ibelin,” “Agent of Happiness”

For my final dispatch from this year’s True/False Film Festival, I’m highlight three movies that had their world premieres at Sundance at the start of the year. They are also all, coincidentally, highly emotional works, accomplishing everything from memorializing a life to examining what makes people happy to highlighting the need for systemic change in […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “Allo la France,” “A Band of Dreamers and a Judge,” “sr”

This collection of capsule reviews from the 2024 True/False Film Festival is all about quests: movies in which a filmmaker goes on a road trip to locate her country’s last remaining phone booths (Allo la France), in which stories involving giraffes across human history are gathered from virtually every corner of the world (sr), and […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “Obsolete,” “Boyz,” “Alien Island”

In this dispatch from the 2024 True/False Film Festival, I’m looking at two observational films that center around people at very different points in their lives. Sylvain Cruiziat’s Boyz depicts a trio of zoomer friends coming face-to-face with their vulnerabilities at a transitional moment in their lives, while Sumira Roy’s Obsolete looks at an elderly […]