A progressive rage simmers at the despondent heart of Little Woods. It isn’t just that writer-director Nia DaCosta spends a busy 95 or so minutes examining how working-class economic anxiety often begets the toppling chain of dominoes in those trapped in it, but more so that she tells her story through the lens of a…
“You think I am waiting to die . . . But I am waiting to be found” — Samantha Reynolds In a mission from which they have little chance of returning, a group of condemned prisoners elect to undertake a voyage to the deepest regions of outer space to attempt to harness the energy of…
“I’ve been havin’ some hard travelin’, I thought you knowed. I’ve been havin’ some hard travelin’, way down the road” — Woody Guthrie According to Yann Martel, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel “Life of Pi,” “stories are important because everything is in how we perceive it and nothing is really real until we say…
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is a film three decades in the making, and it is not shy about highlighting this fact to the viewer. Beginning with a caption that informs the viewer of the length of time it took to bring this adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel to the big screen, The…
“The catastrophic death of a star brings new life to the universe. In order for us to live, a star must die. We are all stardust.” These are the opening lines in Carol Morley’s film Out of Blue, drawing me in like one those documentaries you might see at a science museum or observatory. Images…
It is clear from the opening scene that The Burying Party, directed by newcomer Richard Weston, is undeniably ambitious — an important narrative about poet Wilfred Owen’s final months during World War I. Its execution, however, is poor. Weston’s independent film runs just an hour long, though the minutes that comprise it feel more laborious…
“It get me down sometime. It get me down but only, a little look around and I find that I am not so lonely. We in the same boat brother! We in the same boat brother!” — Don Cooper, from the song “My Images Come” In his 1948 study “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,”…
