Tribeca Review: “Missing From Fire Trail Road”

At the end of 2020, Mary Ellen Johnson-Davis, a resident of the Tulalip Indian reservation outside Seattle, vanished in plain sight. Her husband, a white man with whom she had reportedly been experiencing some marital issues, reported her disappearance to the authorities and then washed his hands of the matter. Officially, the investigation is at […]

Review: “The People’s Joker”

If I regret one thing about my experience covering the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, it’s returning my ticket for the Midnight Madness world premiere of Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker. My reasons for doing so have nothing to do with the film itself; as a lifelong Batman fan and a bonafide hater of Todd […]

Review: “Love Lies Bleeding”

As soon as reclusive Lou (Kristen Stewart) glimpses statuesque body builder Jackie (Katy O’Brien) from across the gym she manages, we know she’s sunk. The way director Rose Glass allows the camera to absorb this expression of desire, and the sensuous way she lingers on the body, tracing every line of Jackie’s muscular frame, are […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “There Was, There Was Not,” “1489”

Displacement has been a common theme across many of the films I’ve watched at this year’s True/False Film Festival, the annual event in Columbia, Missouri celebrating nonfiction filmmaking, and with the current genocide unfolding in Palestine, each of them feels particularly urgent. Coincidentally, two Armenian films by women documenting the Artsakh War and the way […]

Berlinale Dispatch: “Dahomey,” “My Stolen Planet,” “Hands in the Fire”

For this dispatch from the 74th Berlinale, I’m looking at three films (coincidentally all directed by women) that merge history and filmmaking. Mati Diop’s magnificent Dahomey and Iranian filmmaker Farahnaz Sharifi’s My Stolen Planet both operate in the nonfiction sphere, while Portuguese director Margarida Gil’s Hands in the Fire is a loose adaptation of Henry […]

Review: “Bye Bye Tiberias”

Hiam Abbass craved escape. At least, that’s what she remembers. As she rifles through a stack of letters she wrote to her parents shortly after her mother’s passing, she is specifically searching for the one she penned to explain to them why she left home, because she can’t quite recall what she said in it. […]

Review: “Origin”

Origin is about as ambitious an adaptation imaginable. It’s a fitting project for director Ava DuVernay, who—whether working in narrative features or documentaries or television— has always swung for the fences. Her film is based on journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which posits that racism in the United […]

Review: “Saltburn”

Gloomy atmosphere, haunted castles, grotesque characters, cursed families, doomed romances— these elements and more have come to define the gothic genre, the first entry into which is generally considered to be English writer Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. Walpole’s tale of the lord of a manor and his family was inspired by […]

SLIFF Review: “La Chimera”

The most recognizable definition of a chimera comes from Greek mythology, in reference to a female creature made up of several different animals: a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. But the word can alternately be used as a noun to refer to something one hopes for, but is impossible to ever […]

Home Video Review: “The Unknown Country”

The snow crunches beneath her feet as Tana (Lily Gladstone) steps into her car. She pauses as she glances at the handicapped tag hanging on the rearview mirror before quietly removing it. A voice on the radio details the perilous weather conditions, but as night turns to day and the snow becomes blindingly white, Tana […]