Click here to listen to the interview. One of the most unsettling moments in Julian Higgins’ GOD’S COUNTRY is a sequence in which the conflict that escalates between college professor Sandra Guidry and some local hunters comes to a head. They had taken offence when refused the right to park on her land, and after… Read More »
WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING
One senses that the novel of the same name on which WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING possessed some lovely prose. Certainly, when the narration includes lines from the book, there is the dark poetic ring of classic Southern Gothic reverberating from the musings on death intoned by the adult version of Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones). Whatever philosophical… Read More »
EMERGENCY
EMERGENCY starts with Sean (RJ Cyler) and Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins) attending a class called Blasphemy and Taboos, taught by a perky British woman who, after reminding her students that their syllabus contained a trigger warning about this class, confronts them with the n-word. Not just projecting it onto the classroom screen in huge letters,… Read More »
LUCE
LUCE is less a film than a political dialectic on race and class in these United States, and a brilliant, exquisitely performed one at that. Told with a deliberate, sometimes maddening ambiguity, it challenges the audience at every turn about where the truth lies, and the limits of familial loyalty. By the end, not every… Read More »
SANDSTORM (BAWANDAR)
Jag Mundhra’s SANDSTORM succeeds on several levels. First, it’s a fine piece of filmmaking that tells this story of cultural discrimination with a directness that never panders to either its audience or its characters. Second, it succeeds in outlining in stark and uncompromisingly personal terms exactly what this sort of injustice means for one woman… Read More »