Shut Up and Paint (2022) | Directed by Titus Kaphar and Alex Mallis

 4.3/5

Titus Kaphar and Alex Mallis’s Shut Up and Paint is a compelling short doc about the artist Titus Kaphar and the crossroads he finds himself at as his work is selling for exorbitant sums of money but isn’t being seen by Black audiences and isn’t being sold to Black homes or Black institutions. This is an insightful rumination on just how white the traditional art market truly is, and how hard it is for Black artists to work within the art world and reach Black audiences. There are also essential conversations throughout about the ways art institutions attempt to muzzle activist-artists. In addition to the film’s piercing and thoughtful interviews, it’s also comprised of lovely breaks for poetry and a behind-the-scenes look at Kaphar’s first film project – a work designed to help his art reach more viewers. This is a wonderful short documentary.

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The Garbage Man (2022) | Directed by Laura Gonçalves

 2.5/5

Laura Gonçalves’s The Garbage Man is a sweet story about an eccentric, generous, and warm man, told through a series of reflections from his family. The animation is pleasant and flows nicely from one anecdote to the next. However, the narrative is a bit formless. The anecdotes meander and the film doesn’t really give us much in the way of a good entry point or endpoint. It’s a sweet film filled with loving stories, but there just isn’t much for us, as the audience, to hold onto.

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Stranger at the Gate (2022) | Directed by Joshua Seftel

 4/5

Joshua Seftel’s Stranger at the Gate is an incredibly compelling short documentary about one man’s journey from hate to love. Seftel wisely focuses on the community that accepted this would-be domestic terrorist and contrasts their open acceptance with his wife’s tactic of hoping that his anger and rage would simply get better on their own. This is a film that rests on the strengths of its strong interviews and wise editing choices. There may be some questionable b-roll footage throughout, but when the rest of the film is so strong, that’s a minor complaint.

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The Flying Sailor (2022) | Directed by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby

 3.5/5

Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby’s The Flying Sailor is an incredibly beautiful short film with stunning animation. The mix of styles and techniques is mind-boggling – especially seeing how seamlessly these seemingly disparate techniques are blended together. While there isn’t much below the surface of this short, it is a lovely way to explore what happens when your life flashes before your eyes. It’s charming, light, and clever.

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It’s Nice in Here (2022) | Directed by Robert-Jonathan Koeyers

 3/5

Content Warning: This film contains depictions of police violence toward the Black community.

Robert-Jonathan Koeyers’s It’s Nice in Here is a gorgeously animated short film that makes an attempt at nuance but isn’t quite as effective as could have been. The first half of the film is a haunting and poignant reflection on loss, and the second half of the film makes an admirable attempt to capture the tragedy of police shootings and just how easy it is for officers who think they’re “good cops” to murder Black youth because of the racism that is baked into policing. However, to be truly effective, the film needed to show more of the socialization that embeds racism into policing and trains officers to murder members of the Black community. The most effective sequence in the film is the scene of the shooting, the way the animation shifts and changes as the narrative shifts between the different witnesses’ perspectives. The film’s switch to live-action at the end doesn’t quite work, and the political pundits who politicize the shooting is a little too on the nose. It’s an interesting attempt to show more nuance in a police murder, but it doesn’t fully work the way the filmmaker is intending it to.

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The Debutante (2022) | Directed by Elizabeth Hobbs

 5/5

Elizabeth Hobbs’s The Debutante is an outstanding, incredibly disturbing, but very funny animated short film about breaking free from familial and societal expectations. The animation style is truly wonderful – lines and watercolors blend into one another across a variety of background materials. The narrator gives a lovely performance, and the rest of the voiceover work is stellar. It’s a grim short, but it’s utterly delightful and charming.

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Sideral (2021) | Directed by Carlos Segundo

 3/5

Carlos Segundo’s Sideral is a decent short film – beautifully shot with some lovely performances and stunning imagery. At the heart of the film is the story of an overburdened mother looking for escape; it’s a compelling narrative with themes that will resonate for quite a few viewers. But as beautiful as the film looks and as compelling as the film’s themes, the film needed to provide at least a few more details about the protagonist’s situation and family life so that we could fully understand her decision and the consequences for the rest of her family by the end. There’s a lot of potential here, but it just needed a little more fleshing out.

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Anastasia (2022) | Directed by Sarah McCarthy

 3/5

Sarah McCarthy’s Anastasia is a solid, if disappointing short documentary that had the potential to be so much more than it was, even with its lovely moments. Anastasia’s mother is a delight, giving us the most candid and honest moments in a documentary that can at times feels too stage managed. The film barely scratches the surface of any of the subjects that it covers – Anastasia’s activism, the death of her daughter, her grief, her relationships with her surviving children, or her role as a dissident in Russia. This is a film that is trying to do too much, trying to cover too much, so every idea feels truncated. There are good and beautiful moments throughout, there’s just not enough depth to be as satisfying as it should.

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New Moon (2022) | Directed by Jérémie Balais, Raul Domingo, and Jeffig Le Bars

 4.5/5

Jérémie Balais, Raul Domingo, and Jeffig Le Bars’s New Moon is a lovely short film – beautifully animated and full of magic, vibrance, and wonder. Animation is a wonderful medium to use when adapting a one-person show and bringing it to life – it allows the performer to inhabit all of the characters in a slightly different manner than they would onstage or in a live-action film. While this might just be a short snippet, a short story, it is such a loving tribute to the performer’s (Coleman Domingo) mother and a wonderful reflection on opening yourself up to possibility.

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Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) | Directed by David Yates

 1.5/5

David Yates’s Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore was marginally better than the previous entry in the Fantastic Beasts series – mostly likely because a competent screenwriter was brought in to give it a semblance of a story. However, it still suffers from many of the same issues that have plagued this prequel series since its beginning. Once again, characters are reset back to their previous state, and any pretense of growth has been magically erased – this may be the greatest magic spell of all in the franchise. Once again, the CGI is sloppy, and the action sequences are chaotic and poorly constructed. And once again, we have more of the series’ sexism on prominent display here. The entire film feels like an attempt to play on the nostalgia viewers have for the original Harry Potter franchise – from the overuse of the theme music to the reliance on “saintly” Dumbledore to the many CGI shots of Hogwarts. That said, Mads Mikkelson is wonderful as the villain (taking over the role in this installment) and brings more to the table than he’s given to work with. Likewise, Jessica Williams understands the assignment she’s been given as a performer and is delightful as a screwball comedy-era witch. The two central settings for this film are rather distasteful – Germany during the rise of Nazism especially feels inappropriate given how unwilling the film is to engage with the gravity of this situation, just using it as fascistic window dressing. And the use of Bhutan as the location for the final scenes also carries an air of white, European filmmakers exploiting and exoticizing the locale and making it into a “magical paradise.” This is a franchise that continues devolve into tedium and self-importance.