5 Best Movies To Watch After Women Talking (2022)

Jem Starling’s (Eliza Scanlen) wardrobe is too much for the Kentucky heat. Yet others say her bra is still too visible. She tries to praise the Lord through dance with attempts progressive yet accessible to her church. Still, her peers claim the music she picks is too aggressive. Her instructor, Misty (Jessamine Burgum), gently scolds her individuality in class. Meanwhile, at home, her family warns against not just sex but intimacy of any sort. Such is standard for a 17-year-old girl growing up a fundamentalist Christian. Body and soul are omnipresent in The Starling Girl, as much as they are mutually exclusive.  Continue Reading →

Andrea Riseborough and Marc Maron shine in a study of a one-time lottery winner years after her life has gone bust. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 South by Southwest Festival) To Leslie tells a story of painful loss and possible redemption as familiar as the ones recounted in the country songs born out of its West Texas setting. In the case of Michael Morris’s feature debut, familiarity does not breed contempt. What To Leslie lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in terms of its craft and very impressive central performances from Andrea Riseborough and Marc Maron.  Continue Reading →

The modern era of musicals moves fits and spurts. Over this young century, the form has repeatedly fallen in and out of fashion. 2021 was an on year—one pulsing full of musicals, which ranged from towering works like Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake to the dreaded and thoroughly mocked Dear Evan Hansen. Many of them were quite experimental too, like Leos Carax and Sparks’ Annette and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tick, tick…BOOM!. But even against that august competition, Joe Wright’s Cyrano carves out a place as one of the most imaginative musicals of this modern era. Although The National’s newly-composed songs don’t immediately gel with the iconic story being told, Cyrano makes its way towards a moving, complex finale, thanks to a stellar set of performances.  Continue Reading →

Three features at the Toronto International Film Festival turn the spotlight on the best and brightest in African filmmaking. African Cinema has produced some fantastic gems over the past several years that nearly no one will mention in their end of year lists. From mythical fables like Kati Kati, Luwalu, and Mimosas to political tragedies like The Fig Tree, Clash, Wulu, and Our Lady of the Nile, to films on identity and alienation like The Wound, to personal reflections of land and colonialism like Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s two films Mother I am Suffocating, This is My Last Film About You and This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection – both masterpieces – this is a continent creating some of the best of the world’s cinema right now and with good volume. So naturally, I had to seek out a few African films this year, starting with The Gravedigger's Wife.  The Gravedigger’s Wife functions similarly to Ousmanne Sembene’s classic Mandabi, where a husband’s struggles with money is at the whims of both an economy that’s over his head and at the mistreatment and deception by his own family members. Guled (Omar Abdi) is a gravedigger who needs more money for his wife Nasra’s (Yasmin Warsame) cancer treatment. He is willing to go to the village where his family is but his wife is distraught at the thought, so he looks around for work nearby. He lives in the outskirts of Djibouti, struggling to find adequate pay for odd jobs.  Continue Reading →

Pelé is the kind of sports figure it feels like you’re just sort of born having some knowledge of. I couldn’t tell you why I know who Pelé is, particularly as an American with a serious aversion to sports, but I knew he was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, soccer players of all time. I seemed to have absorbed the information out of the ether. But the new Netflix documentary Pelé (not to be confused with the 2016 biopic) corrected that. Continue Reading →