Sarah Manvel 
Soul Patrol’s depiction of the Vietnam War combat experiences of a group of young black men is designed to restore their place within the military history of the American war machine, which at the time was still segregated as well as frequently openly racist. A great deal of the footage …
Say what you will about the French, it seems like everyone in that nation possesses savoir-faire. That is to say, they know the correct way to behave in any scenario. Whether it’s supporting a colleague having a bad day, mopping up bodily fluids without making a big deal about it, …
It is no surprise that Nuisance Bear won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, because it does what all good movies should, and even fewer documentaries achieve: it is not really about what it’s about. The ability to succeed on a double level is …
Hard work should always be enough, and yet we all know it never is. The excellent Shame and Money makes it clear what we lose when that’s not the case. Late in the film, about an ethnic Albanian family’s financial struggles in Kosovo, there’s a street scene in downtown Pristina …
This documentary is about the power of community in healing from grief, through the method of Gaelic psalm singing. The dialogue is almost entirely in Scots-Gaelic – the indigenous language of Scotland and a cousin to Irish Gaelic, the indigenous language of Ireland – and centers the journey of one …
American movies like The Weight used to be a dime a dozen, which is meant as a compliment. It used to be that Hollywood loved to take an action-heavy script, people it with a fun combination of big stars and delightful character actors, move like the wind from one entertaining …
The ways in which adults make decisions on behalf of children, and how those decisions are, or aren’t, in the child’s best interests are the stuff of life. This wonderful movie begins with questioning what it takes to be an artist, and ends by questioning what it means to be …
There are some movies, including Queen at Sea, which are so disturbing they can only be watched once. Fortunately Queen at Sea is so well made that its care and consideration makes its brutally tough topic easier to handle. This is why it won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at …
In 1980 Lily Tomlin was faced with a dilemma. She was riding high after winning a Tony with her one-woman play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe and then starring in feminist revenge comedy 9 to 5, but then she had to do her next thing. …
It’s very normal for documentaries to begin and end with copious lists of the various production companies who have contributed to or enabled its making. As director Valerie Veatch pointed out in her Sundance Film Festival Q&A, Ghost in the Machine has none of these. She had to fund the …
It’s not so much that Jaripeo is therapy – a reductive way to think about documentary, especially when the director is documenting their own experiences – but Jaripeo is maybe the first time some of its participants have ever been asked to think about the things they do. This is, …
Please forgive me for saying the most surprising things about Twinless are twofold: it is unusually funny, with a very clear sense of how people interact in amusing ways with each other, with an equal and equally unusual sense of danger. Most of this centers around the plot twists which …
I think we can blame the English royal family. When TV shows like Succession, The Righteous Gemstones and Yellowstone decide to examine the interpersonal struggle for power within an unbelievable wealthy family, they’ve all worked from the same template: tyrannical father and absent or dead mother with three sons and …
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die takes the worst nightmares of the current moment and turns them into comedy, but the kind of comedy where if you didn’t laugh you’d cry. This is done in the lighthearted comic blockbuster style best described as a mash-up where 1990s French horror-comedy Delicatessen …
This Chilean-Argentinian coproduction is a Chilean story but was filmed in Argentina for reasons its subject matter makes obvious. The military coup in Chile in 1973 that started with the murder of Salvador Allende brought about (speaking with understatement here) such a traumatic time to the nation that the after-effects …
Talk about melodrama! It is not so much that this adaption of Wuthering Heights goes to eleven, but that this version of Wuthering Heights starts at eleven and keeps going and going, and going, without losing its momentum for a moment. This over-the-top depiction of secret and dangerous passion makes …
It’s only January but Scottish documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street is a very serious contender for best documentary of the year. It’s rare to feel a documentary so firmly plant the seed of possibility in the mind of its audience. But there are three things audiences need to know in …
The best thing about Girls & Boys is one of the main characters is trans and absolutely no one blinks an eye at this. This is not something that could be said when I ran around Dublin, back when just being a member of the gay student clubs was an …
Since seeing Trad I’ve been trying to remember another coming-of-age movie about a teenage girl in which she doesn’t come to the tiniest bit of harm. I can’t, making Trad so rare and unusual that only this fact makes it a must-see. If that wasn’t enough, it’s about a young …
The central plot point of The Stranger – a coloniser kills one of the colonised, and there are consequences – lands very differently now that it did when the original novella was published by Albert Camus in occupied France in 1942. For one thing, the world is trying with mixed …