The Goods: Film Reviews
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s debut film is a peculiar hybrid of drama and documentary. Haroun, playing a semi-fictionalized version of himself, returns from France to his homeland Chad upon hearing of his mother’s passing. While there, he bemoans a crumbling local cinema and ponders creating a film to capture the spirit of his home nation.
Mercifully short and non-exploitative, Lucile Hadžihalilović‘s debut is claustrophobic and tense and well-crafted. The film’s sense of dread never boils over into outright terror, but it’s nonetheless a fairly haunting little piece.
A slice of life drama about poverty in New Orleans, Below Dreams balances naturalist storytelling and audacious visuals to a nearly impressionistic effect.
Lemon starts as an investigation of how actors use performance to filter out their horrible lives before pivoting to a satire about how pitiful it is to live in LA, I guess?
A movie so hell-bent on recreating the original that it casts the same voice actress for the villain, gives her the same design (but skinny), and declares her a “sister.”
Parched tells the story of a group of Indian women in a rural desert community dealing with a regressive, sexually oppressed society. Marriages are arranged, men can sleep around but women must remain faithful and subservient, marital abuse is routine.
Part of me wants to be contrarian and rain on all the love this movie gets.
Spencer Williams was an early Black filmmaker, a protege of the legendary Oscar Micheaux.
The consensus among my peers in recent years is that To Kill a Mockingbird is Baby’s First Anti-Racism Story with a heavy dollop of white saviorism.
If you are like me, you see “Jim Henson” on the poster, and you expect something at least a little manic and silly and postmodern. Something Muppetsy.