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More than anything else, when we see someone attacked and traumatized on screen—the screen, of course, being a simulation of our real lives—why do we presume to know anything about how they would or should react?
Read MoreI left the theater speechless that night. Not solely because the screenplay is emotionally gut-wrenching (which it is), but because there are just some works that make plain the inadequacy of summary more readily than others. Fences is such a work—unflinching, mature, surprisingly radical in its approach, and best honored, I’d say, by respectful quiet in its presence.
Read MoreIf Jackie tells us anything, it is that these myths are carefully constructed, and that while we may want to believe in them, once they’re established, it is very hard to sift through what is real and what is fake without upsetting the legacies of canonized men.
Read MoreHere are ten of our favorite indie film discoveries from 2016.
Read MoreIn 2017, the struggle for social, racial, economic, and environmental justice needs a strong and truthful media backbone around which to unite. Thankfully, 2016 has given us something to work with in the realm of the silver screen. The following seven films are a great place to start in tackling our 21st-century problems without harkening back to the days when white males were the only full-fledged human beings.
Read MoreBut Loving’s style is of a different ilk: it’s not so much a film about a courtroom battle, which, with clumsy handling, could easily drift into melodrama suited for assuaging white guilt. Instead the court case hovers in the corner, like a specter that shows itself only when you begin to forget its presence.
Read MoreThe Girl on the Train functions, in a myriad of unexpected ways, as a soliloquy. It is a soliloquy for ineffable, unattended loss; a soliloquy for shattered, misplaced desires; a soliloquy for lives ended or redirected. Most compellingly, and most devastatingly at times, the film—directed by The Help’s Tate Taylor—is an unflinching soliloquy for broken women.
Read MoreIt is not lost on the viewer that Curtis’s documentaries themselves are a type of attempt to bring clarity, and by extension simplicity, to the vast range of interconnected “truths” vying for attention, but it is a distinct relief that he doesn’t cloak this attempt in false neutrality.
Read MoreIt would be easy to take this as a straight narrative; indeed, Ford (working off his own script, adapted from Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan) does little to suggest that anything we’re seeing isn’t real. But on close inspection, we start to notice the details of one storyline bleeding into the others.
Read MoreMean Creek, then, stands bleakly as a film where there are only victims and martyrs: there are no tragic heroes, and there is no veneration for the satiation of bloodlust. The violence that has been inherited, lionized, and aestheticized is no longer a source of valiance for young men.
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