Erika Cohn’s latest documentary is a bitter reminder of how women in public office need to be constantly excellent, and not just merely good.

Erika Cohn’s latest documentary is a bitter reminder of how women in public office need to be constantly excellent, and not just merely good.
A small bathroom in a London townhouse is the site of large domestic ruptures.
The wellness retreat becomes a grievance summit in John Helde’s latest.
It has been observed, quite often, that there are very few good roles for Hollywood actresses of a certain age, and whether we take the fictional or real actresses, this observation holds.
Being judged for your looks is no longer a punch line.
How responsible are we for our community? What are the limitations, the boundaries of helping others who are not our family or friends?
Merci, Jeanne! Jeanne Moreau: A Real Woman Modernity and the legacy of war in Elevator to the Gallows (1958) La Notte (1961)
A well-crafted, perfectly-cast, subtle, and engaging portrait of a New York family going through some growing pains, Landline was a delight to watch. Robespierre and her team get the pertinent details of mid-nineties New York […]
Claire Breton is surrounded by life. She is an old-school midwife, coaching women in the art of breathing, listening to their bodies, and making birth joyful. She owns a little patch of a vegetable garden […]
I couldn’t help but be reminded of Sally Potter’s 1997 The Tango Lesson. A woman, an artist, starts from a blank canvas. There is an empty, large space of floor waiting to be filled with […]
Kore-eda is very much a filmmaker of place; he has lived and known many of the cities and towns in which his films are set. We are thus treated to an insider’s view of a […]
In The Future Perfect, eighteen-year old Xiaobin, recently immigrated to Buenos Aires, has her whole life ahead of her. Though she is in a foreign country and under financial and cultural obligation to her parents, […]
I’ve always appreciated the fact that this film festival, now celebrating its 60th year, has always been international in a well-curated and thoughtful way. Not that I haven’t enjoyed meeting filmmakers from previously un-represented countries […]
Frantz Hoffmeister, a soldier, fiancé, son, and friend, is dead and thus physically absent, but you know from the first five minutes of the film that he will continue to be unnervingly present. Like memories […]
The “Bachelor Girls” interviewed in Shikha Makan’s brisk documentary are professional women in their 20s and 30s, educated and gainfully employed in the large, cosmopolitan Indian city of Mumbai. For some landlords, these women would […]
Canadian filmmaker Randall Lloyd Okita (featured at CAAMFest 34) is known and admired for his oblique yet powerful narratives, even in his more abstract, short works such as Machine with Wishbone (2008) and Portrait as […]
The intelligent, capable, and unmarried working women of Mumbai struggle to find decent housing in Bachelor Girls…all the world’s a Center Stage in this riveting collection of shorts (one of many in the festival)…LF favorite […]
I was already tense during the opening titles of Asghar Farhadi’s latest, The Salesman. Having seen several of his films, I was prepared for something akin to a thriller, or even a pastoral murder mystery, […]
In paying video homage to a museum’s collected works of Japanese masters, Tabaimo reminds us of how nature and landscape greatly influenced Japanese decorative art, and also reminds us of the power of time-based media […]
Money Monster (directed by Jodie Foster), is set in one of those shiny financial market TV shows full of exaggerated numbers and practically devoid of facts or pragmatic advice. Its king and money monster is Lee Gates, who […]
Sagami Bay, blue hydrangeas, pale-pink cherry blossoms, freshly-picked plums, freshly-caught seafood, torrential rain, and four very elegant and dignified sisters who are as tough as mountains. In Our Little Sister (from the novel Umimachi Diary), […]
The mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando was very much on my mind as I watched the wide variety of films at the 40th Frameline Film Festival. It seems to me as though […]
SFIFF59 made a strong case for supporting the work of female documentarians. I have been thinking a lot recently about how female documentarians are good at effacing themselves for the service of the story, and […]
Rohrwacher’s sympathetic but clear-eyed treatment of Southern Italian Catholicism is one of the most wonderful and truthful films I have seen in a long time. It has the feel of a narrative film and the […]