A FANTASTIC WOMAN Opening Friday, March 9 Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman is a melancholy and philosophical portrait of a transgender woman’s fight to mourn her partner’s death with dignity. At the beginning of the film, we meet Marina (Daniela Vega) and Orlando (Francisco Reyes), a happy May-December couple living in a posh apartment in […]
Laura Jaramillo
Bio: Durham's Laura Jaramillo is a poet and film scholar pursuing her doctoral studies at Duke University.Twitter: http://twitter.com/@mtrlgrrrl
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Movie Review: For Better and Worse, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water Is a Beautiful Children’s Movie for Adults
The Shape of Water★★★Opening Friday, Dec. 15 Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a moral tale for troubled times. An Amazonian sea creature held captive in a Cold War-era American research lab is watched over by tyrannical government functionary Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon). He tortures the creature and plans to vivisect it in […]
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Novitiate Is a Quietly Stunning Historical Drama About Nuns Trying to Keep the Faith Against Encroaching Modernity
Novitiate Opening Friday, Nov. 24 Writer-director Maggie Betts’s Novitiate is a quietly stunning historical drama about a group of nuns trying to keep the faith against an encroaching modern worldone which, by 1965, has breached even the conservative Catholic Church. The film follows the spiritual journey of aspiring nun Cathleen (played with wide-eyed brilliance by […]
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Movie Review: Lady Bird, a Winning First Film from Greta Gerwig, Is Alert to Class but Falters on Race
Lady Bird★★★ Opening Friday, Nov. 17 In many ways, Lady Bird is a winning directorial debut by Greta Gerwig, who also wrote the film. It captures the fuzzy nostalgia as well as the pains of coming of age at the start of the twenty-first century, as the Iraq War blares through the television in the […]
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Movie Review: Ferguson Documentary Whose Streets? Portrays a Police Force and Judicial System Obsessed with the Idea of Black Criminality
Whose Streets?★★★ Now playing Three years ago, Darren Wilson, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot unarmed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, whom Wilson was attempting to apprehend for stealing a box of Swisher cigars from a convenience store. Following the police’s destruction of Brown’s memorial, a series of riots ensued that would play out in months […]
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Beatriz at Dinner Is a Sharp Reflection on Class and Immigration in a Society Teetering on the Brink of Fascism
BEATRIZ AT DINNER Now playing Beatriz at Dinner is a sharp reflection on class and immigration in contemporary American societywhich is to say, in a society teetering on the brink of fascism. Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a Mexican massage therapist and healer living in Altadena, California, whose car breaks down at her employer’s mansion. The […]
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Movie Review: Werner Herzog’s Human Touch Lifts Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World Above Tech-Bro Celebration
Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World★★★★ Opening Friday, Sept. 16 As its title suggests, Werner Herzog’s latest documentary is a broad, poetic consideration of technology’s—which is to say, humanity’s—history and future. Through interviews with the likes of Elon Musk and Kevin Mitnick, the director episodically lays bare a series of utopian visions about […]
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Movie Review: If Atmosphere Alone Could Carry a Film, Complete Unknown Would Be Top-Notch
Complete Unknown★★★Now playing In director Joshua Marston’s Complete Unknown, we meet Alice, a chameleonic presence (Rachel Weisz) who embodies a paradox: Who you are is profoundly influenced by context, and yet wherever you go, there you are. This proposition, initially fascinating, is made all the more compelling by Christos Voudouris’s beautiful cinematography, which perfectly captures […]
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Movie Review: Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees Reduces Japanese Culture to a Backdrop for American Angst
The Sea of Trees★★ ½Now playing Director Gus Van Sant’s latest film, The Sea of Trees, tells the story of Arthur Brennan (Matthew McConaughey), a man intent on killing himself in Aokigahara, Japan’s famed “suicide forest.” When he finds a suitable boulder on which to swallow a bottle of pills, he sees Takumi (Ken Watanabe) […]
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Movie Review: Todd Solondz Lightly Links Tales of Abjection and Absurdity in Wiener-Dog
Wiener-Dog★★★ ½ Opening Friday, July 15, 2016Wiener-Dog is a funny, if modest, installment in director Todd Solondz’s series of meditations on the austere cruelty of the American middle-class family. The film consists of several episodes linked by the eponymous creature, a forlorn dachshund shuffled from one tenuous situation to the next. First, the dog lives […]