Cuties ‘Mignonnes’ (2020) | Directed by Maïmouna Doucouré

 4.5/5

Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties (Mignonnes) is a powerful and emotionally moving film about Western society’s oversexualization of young girls that also manages to find genuine warmth and humor in the midst of this poignant tale of having the illusions of childhood fade away at much too early an age. That Doucouré manages to balance this all without ever letting the film become a dry, intellectual slog is something of a miracle. She has crafted such an incredibly honest and heartfelt narrative about what it is to be an eleven-year-old girl trapped between two very different worlds. Doucouré contrasts the restrictive and confining spaces in the apartment of her young protagonist’s family with the open and airy spaces she finds when she’s with her new friends. But then she tempers that visual freedom by creating a sense of danger and unease in these open spaces – whether through the use of abandoned train tracks running through the middle of a scene or a decrepit building that intrudes into the frame. Doucouré’s script captures all of the pain and humor and awkwardness of the pre-teen years, and then shows how much harder it is to navigate when you don’t have any parents to help you make sense of the hyper-sexualized images of women that you encounter everywhere. Trapped between a family with harsh and repressive gender expectations on one side and a society that is encouraging her oversexualization at such an early age, the film’s protagonist has to find a different path than the one her family or society have laid out for her. And Doucouré captures this in a denouement that is breathtaking and powerful.

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Blonde Crazy (1931) | Directed by Roy Del Ruth

 4/5

Roy Del Ruth’s Blonde Crazy is a completely surprising and thoroughly delightful pre-Code comedy that is filled with unexpected narrative twists and turns that will satisfy even the most jaded of viewers. Joan Blondell and James Cagney are wonderful leads and have such an easy rapport with on another onscreen – both turn in incredibly natural, compelling performances. The cons that they pull off together are fun to watch, and Cagney’s character is given a really lovely arc. Like many films from the ’30s, it’s refreshing to see classic cinema challenge the sexism of the day with such ferocity. It was a surprise to see just how blatantly the film shows the way men attempted to take advantage of women whom they perceived to be of lower classes. The film’s frank and somewhat brutal exploration of class – especially the ways that the upper class could insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions – feels like shocking thing to see in such an early film. It’s a reminder that I need to watch more films from the early ’30s.

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Golden Eighties (1986) | Directed by Chantal Akerman

 4/5

Chantal Akerman’s Golden Eighties is a lovely, charming, and effervescent film that takes on Western consumerism, patriarchal norms, and the ways women are socialized – all with a delightful series of songs and dances. The film almost plays as if Akerman is doing her send-up of Jacques Demy’s cinema – taking the earnest longing you find in Demy’s oeuvre and playing it all as broadly as possible. But if it’s a send-up, it’s made with love and tenderness. The musical numbers are delightfully outrageous, the comedy pitch-perfect. Working within a tight budget, you can see Akerman using everything she can to get in the razzle-dazzle of ‘80s musicals – her meticulous and precise framing transforming her small soundstage into an expansive shopping mall set-piece. And as light and fluffy and the film first appears, Akerman infuses the narrative with a stinging critique on capitalism and the constant movement toward expansion as every chance for human connection is interrupted by customers and the business of commerce. Add to this a sense that the men in this film are all callow dreamers filled with empty promises, and you have Akerman using the musical form for a pointed political commentary wrapped up in surprisingly sweet confection.

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Antonio Gaudí (1984) | Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara

 4.5/5

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí is a gorgeous and captivating tone poem, a loving tribute to the architecture of Gaudí in an unconventional documentary. Rather than provide a straightforward examination of his life and work, Teshigahara simply shows us the work. There is no narration, there are no talking heads – nothing to distance us from the experience of looking at the work. The way Teshigahara frames Gaudí’s buildings against landscapes and skylines gives us a sense of scale and space, a sense of how these architectural wonders exist in space – the ways they can tower over their neighboring buildings, or stand out in a sea of uniformity. And then he will juxtapose this with closeups, odd angles, or other abstractions that cause us to look at the buildings in a whole new light. Throughout the film we drift from moment to moment, building to building, soaking in the images and letting the incredible score wash over us. It’s an incredible experience if you’re willing to place yourself in Teshigahara’s capable hands as he guides you through some of the most captivating pieces of architecture you’re likely to encounter.

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Time (2020) | Directed by Garrett Bradley

 5/5

Garrett Bradley’s Time is one of the most astonishing documentaries I’ve seen in the last year – a masterful use of the form. This film absolutely gutted me. The film follows Fox Rich, a woman struggling to raise her children and fight for the freedom her incarcerated husband, Robert. Bradley pairs footage that Rich filmed herself over the past twenty years with Bradley’s own contemporary footage, giving us a sense of the weight of time, of the lost time that this family has suffered due to Robert’s incarceration. We see the children – just entering kindergarten one moment, graduating from dental school or living as a sophomore in college the next – and we ’re made aware of the burden that families are made to bear due to the inequities in our criminal justice system. Bradley makes use of so many lovely poetic touches – from shots of the cardboard cutout of Robert that the family keeps with them, her framing of Fox and the rest of the family at key moments (especially at the end of the film), to her masterful use of archival material throughout the film. Bradley’s use structure is essential – she lets us know and come to care for the Rich family before we discover why Robert is in prison, building our empathy and forcing us to confront a broken justice system in a way that no narrative feature or standard documentary ever could. This is documentary filmmaking at its finest.

All About My Mother (1999) | Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

 4.5/5

Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother is a beautiful, joyous film about connection and the families we choose for ourselves, not just the families we’re connected to through biology. It’s surprising how this exuberant joy pervades so much of the film – even in the midst of all the tragedy, grief, and melodrama. And just as the film explores the ways that our notions of family can be fluid, it’s also honest about the fluidity of gender and sexual orientation within this close-knit family of women that forms in late-90s Barcelona. At twenty-years-old, there is a clumsiness to the ways Almodóvar addresses trans issues, yet the film is still filled with so much warmth and empathy for all of its characters – gay and straight, trans and cis – something that was almost unheard of in such a popular film of its time. Almodóvar’s colors saturate the screen, as they often do, bringing us into this heightened reality that runs parallel to our own, a world that acknowledges the struggles of his female characters, yet provides them with miraculous moments of grace, connection, acceptance, and agency that they would never get in our own bigoted and misogynistic reality. The more I watch Almodóvar’s films, the more I see them – not as strict melodrama, but as adult fairy tales filled with wonder, awe, tragedy, and so much beauty.

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Bad Hair (2020) | Directed by Justin Simien

 3.5/5

Justin Simien’s Bad Hair is a deliciously campy, sharply political, incredibly fun horror satire. Simien is a filmmaker who wears his politics on his sleeve, and there’s something refreshing about how upfront the film is in its exploration of the ways white society forces Black women to conform to white beauty standards. The film is a pointed reflection on what it means to compromise in order to achieve success – especially in a culture that doesn’t believe you can succeed because your race and gender. The film’s texture and use of color and lighting helps set the ’80s horror aesthetic perfectly, and the jagged editing techniques – especially as the weave is being sewn in – work to amplify the terror and discomfort. The final act descends into a bit of a chaotic mess with plot holes that are never resolved in a fully satisfying manner, and the computer generated effects never have the weight and solidity you need to make the horror truly crawl under your skin. Still, it’s an enjoyable first foray into horror from Simien, and a great followup to his Dear White People film and TV series.

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The Monster Squad (1987) | Directed by Fred Dekker

 1.5/5

Fred Dekker’s The Monster Squad is a terribly dated bit of ’80s nostalgia that tries to capture of the magic of The Goonies and Gremlins, but settles instead for gaping plot holes, juvenile humor, casual homophobia, blatant misogyny baked into key plot points. At less than 90 minutes, it feels like there are large chunks of the films missing that would have helped the story make a little more sense, but at the same time, any longer would have felt like an even longer slog. The best moments are either lifted from better films or handled better in films that were released around the same time, and the constant attempts by the screenwriters to relate to younger viewers results in some of the worst one-liners in an adventure-comedy ever. Even with all of its many issues, it is fun to see kids fight off all our favorite movie monsters – it’s kind of like The Goonies crossed with Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. But with its overwhelming number of narrative problems and a sexism and homophobia that pervades every frame of the film, it’s just not enough to make this a time capsule worth excavating.

The Wolf Man (1941) | Directed by George Waggner

 3/5

George Waggner’s The Wolf Man used to be my favorite of all of Universal monster movies, but in revisiting this nearly 20 years later, I’m struck by how clunky and disjointed the narrative is. What begins and ends as a tragic story of fathers and sons has an awkward and poorly executed romance subplot shoehorned in (complete with our hero spying on his romantic interest through her bedroom window with a telescope, harassing her at work, and continuing to pursue her after she rebuffs her advances). And the fact that our protagonist’s romantic interest seems uninterested in him until the very end of the film – when she decides she’s willing to run away with him – leaves that part of the narrative feeling flat and lifeless – an invention of the writers rather than a choice that a living, breathing human would make. This shift away from the more intriguing father/son dynamic to a romantic plot that has no real shape or structure is a missed opportunity and dilutes any emotional impact or payoff the film could have achieved. Still, the practical effects are compelling, the woodland sets atmospheric and beautifully shot, and the performance by Claude Rains as the father is magnificent – in fact, it’s the reason I remember the film so fondly all these years later.

Entre Nous (1983) | Directed by Diane Kurys

 4/5

Diane Kurys’s Entre Nous is a tender, beautifully constructed, and emotionally honest film about the deep friendship between two women in the years following World War II. The plight of women at that time is made evident through little moments from the very beginning (the death of a first husband at a young age, marriage as the only means of escaping a dire situation) and the growing dissatisfaction with the compromises forced by marriage in a patriarchal society is portrayed with sympathy and understanding. The three leading performances are exquisite, and it’s especially impressive to see the ways in which Kurys refuses to paint any of her characters as blameless heroes or easy villains. And the ways Kurys uses simple editing tricks to elide time and link us from one moment to the next feel effortless – almost as if we’re privy to the strands of someone’s memory. It’s a lovely film, and one that has me eager to see more of Kurys’s work.