Downstream to Kinshasa (2020) | Directed by Dieudo Hamadi

 4.5/5

Dieudo Hamadi’s Downstream to Kinshasa is a riveting and gut-wrenching documentary that follows a group of disabled Congolese civilians seeking reparations for atrocities committed by Rwanda and Uganda which left over 1,000 Congolese civilians dead and more than 3,000 wounded. Since their own government has done nothing for more than 20 years to seeking justice on behalf of the victims, the survivors decide to make the long trek to Kinshasa to make their case in person. This is among the best of what cinéma vérité has to offer, Hamadi’s patient camera observing the survivors and their struggle for justice without any showy editorializing or maudlin romanticizing of their disabilities. The film is frank and honest, but there is also a warmth and empathy throughout. We see it in the little moments of connection between the survivors that a film focused solely on the issues might be tempted to leave on the cutting room floor. By cutting to scenes of a theatrical production that the survivors have created to educate others about their situation, Hamadi is also able give us the interiority and background that you’re normally only able able to achieve through the use of talking head interviews or direct addresses to the camera. It’s a really nice touch that allows the survivors to tell their stories as they would like them told. Along with some of Hamadi’s other documentary work, he’s begun to create an essential portrait of the Democratic Republic of Congo through cinema. Hamadi is a masterful documentarian whose work deserves to be more widely known.

Where to Watch

Summertime (2020) | Directed by Carlos López Estrada

 5/5

Carlos López Estrada’s Summertime is a glorious film – a vibrant, joyous, and energetic ode to art, creativity, and that earnest sincerity and passion for justice and equity that seems to define young people in their late teens and early twenties. Even though the film is comprised of a series of vignettes anchored by spoken word poetry, it’s astonishing to see how effortlessly the sequences weave in and out of one another, how narrative through lines emerge, and how perfectly certain beats and moments echo one another throughout the film. López Estrada shoots and edits the film with as much energy and life as the poetry (and the city) that he’s capturing, and all of the first-time film actors are stunning – not just in performing their own work onscreen, but also in building and performing the characters they present within the film. This is one of the most delightful and moving films of the year – a film that begins with isolation and loneliness, and ends with a true sense of community and connectedness.

Where to Watch

In the Same Breath (2021) | Directed by Nanfu Wang

 5/5

Nanfu Wang’s In the Same Breath continues the filmmaker’s probing inquiries into Chinese society, this time exploring the ways the government refused to cooperate with the rest of the world at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wang’s primary focus is on China’s propaganda efforts at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she traces how, while lockdown efforts may have done a better job of containing the virus than here in the US, the state propaganda machine exacerbated the crisis and led to things being much worse for the entire world. She also draws an uncomfortable line between propaganda in China and that misinformation that runs rampant here in the US, showing that Americans don’t have the moral high ground either. There are so many candid and powerful interviews from inside Wuhan, so many striking images and heartbreaking moments that we just haven’t seen much of yet from the COVID-19 crisis. The film’s ending sneaks up you, presenting a vision of how many lives could have been saved in the past year if there had been better transparency and cooperation between China and the US (especially if we hadn’t had a US president at the time so devoted to disinformation and propaganda designed to make himself look better). It’s an incredible work from one of our great documentary filmmakers, wrestling with important questions.

Where to Watch

Mogul Mowgli (2020) | Directed by Bassam Tariq

 5/5

Bassam Tariq’s Mogul Mowgli is a gorgeous, deeply moving film about familial expectations, the pursuit of your dreams and your art, and the way chronic illness can bring the forward momentum of your life to a standstill. Tariq slowly introduces surreal imagery and elements throughout the film, creeping into Zed’s everyday experiences – a brilliant and haunting way to visually represent the sense of being unable to trust or control your body anymore. And by layering the push and pull of the father’s faith and his flight into Pakistan during the Partition of India, Tariq adds in rich complexity and nuance to the narrative as the film explores parental support and expectations, ruminating on all that we inherit from our parents – the qualities and traits we find admirable and those we resist. Tariq’s tight framing – the close-ups, pushing Zed out of the frame at times, makes the entire film feel so intimate and raw. Of course, it also helps when the film is anchored by an incredible cast – especially Riz Ahmed, whose performance is so incredibly open and vulnerable. This is a deeply moving film, one that leaves you with more to discover and ponder about disability and family and dreams long after the film has ended.

Where to Watch

Censor (2021) | Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond

 4.5/5

Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor is a creepy and effective horror film exploring the effects of grief and how unacknowledged pain and trauma can end up leading us into isolation, wreaking havoc in our lives. The film is anchored by a tour de force performance from Niamh Algar as Enid, a censor working for the British Board of Film Classification, whose grounding and matter-of-fact approach to the material helps us fully believe in the ghoulish twists and turns the narrative takes, her emotional vulnerability in the role allowing us to completely invest in our protagonist’s journey – no matter how dark that journey gets. Bailey-Bond’s visuals are mesmerizing throughout, creating hypnotic and eerily subjective landscapes through the use of highly stylized color palettes and a production design that leaves one feeling as though reality itself is unstable. Sound becomes an essential component in the terror, layering in ominous and unsettling tones, amplifying everyday sounds to the point of menace, and transforming sounds that should be familiar and warping them into something horrific. As Enid continues her work evaluating films filled with violent misogyny – as well as being confronted by her many sexist male colleagues on a daily basis – we see the toll this takes on her in ways both subtle and not-so-subtle throughout the film. This is a haunting and terrifying film – one that crawls under your skin and stays there long after the movie has ended.

Where to Watch

The Little Things (2021) | Directed by John Lee Hancock

 2/5

John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things is a boring and predictable thriller that aims for depth and profundity, but winds up saying nothing and wastes the skills of the perennially excellent Denzel Washington. Like so many serial killer narratives, the film revels in female terror and the images of victimized women, while at the same time privileging white, female innocence – especially evident n the shot the teenage girl driving alongside Washington’s character that inspires him to help solve this series of murders. The script is filled with half-baked dialogue containing references and allusions to moments that have been excised from the film in its many revisions. While Hancock is attempting to craft a weighty meditation in obsession, guilt, and regret, the film keeps our protagonist’s past and motivations such a mystery that we never care about his journey toward redemption. On the mystery side of the equation, details and clues become maddeningly obvious (at one point, a clue’s even written in bold on sandwich board for all to see), until Hancock decides to throw the details out and make up new rules for us to follow as it goes along. Unlike the films noir it seeks to emulate, the film is more steady accumulation of coincidence rather than fate shaping the lives of its characters. Hancock is desperate trying to produce a subtle and nuanced thriller with an ambiguous ending, but the elements just don’t come together.

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) | Directed by Shaka King

 4.5/5

Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah is a thoroughly compelling biopic told through the structure of a political thriller, giving us a more nuanced, complicated, and honest look at the Black Panther Party than most mainstream narrative films have been willing to attempt. In splitting the narrative’s focus between Fred Hampton’s work with Black Panther Party and Bill O’Neill’s work with the FBI to surveil Hampton, King and his screenwriters have almost created two separate films that overlap and merge as the characters’ lives becomes more intertwined. It’s a technique that works surprisingly well, giving us the tender and powerful moments of a Hampton biopic while we watch him form the Rainbow Coalition and fall in love. And in O’Neill’s story, we’re given the beats of a political thriller as we watch a young man in over his head, manipulated and coerced by his handlers to make choices that will haunt him the rest of his life. The two central performances are stellar – Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield each bring such a different and unique energy to their respective roles that keeps us fully invested in both characters’ arcs. King’s use of archival material at the beginning of the film is highly effective, especially in the way it transitions us into the main plot, showing the ways that images of Black solidarity are immediately threatening to white authorities. Like a few other films that have been released in the last few years, the film’s depiction of police racism and brutality is a necessary corrective to Hollywood’s near-constant glorification of the profession. There’s also a timeliness in the way the film shows how uncomfortable it is for the established powers that be (as well as white, paternalistic liberals) when the Black community (or any BIPOC community) demands equality rather than waiting to be granted equality out of beneficence. It’s a powerful film – hopefully just one of many necessary correctives to decades of popular cinema’s demonization of the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement.

Where to Watch

Two of Us (2019) | Directed by Filippo Meneghetti

 3/5

Filippo Meneghetti’s Two of Us is an overwrought, sensationalized LGBTQ melodrama with two really strong performances at the center that keep the film from getting too emotionally unbelievable. The film ends up falling squarely in the tradition of LGBTQ trauma theatre. While it may be understandable that two older French women might have difficulty revealing their relationship to their children, Meneghetti keeps needlessly piling on the suffering in ways that smack of cruelty and arise out of misunderstandings that could have been cleared up with characters being honest with one another. This causes the plot to feel more mechanistic, functioning more in service of the director and his co-writer’s whims and caprices, rather than anything that arose from genuine character or relational motivations. Meneghetti does make use of some fantastic close-ups throughout the film to highlight his two leading performers, showing how much they can convey with the simplest flicker of emotion across their faces or the smallest darting of their eyes. Similarly, the production design is quite evocative and used to beautifully (and painfully) illustrate the characters’ isolation from one another during the film’s second act. But Meneghetti throws in unnecessary and heavy-handed dream imagery that, while beautifully shot, is entirely out-of-place in this film that wants to be more grounded in genuine relationships. And he also can’t resist adding unnecessary, and at times pulpy, complications to what could have been a beautiful and simple narrative, taking the film well past the point of credulity by the time the credits roll, so that we have lost much of the emotional connection we have with these characters. It’s a film with so much promise, but it ended up a convoluted mess.