Maybe Watch This: A United Kingdom
In 2014, director Amma Asante – former actress turned filmmaker – hit the scene in a big way with one of the most underrated films of that year, Belle. Actually her sophomore feature, she’d previously been named Most Promising Newcomer at the BAFTAs in 2005, a prescient prediction. This week, Asante returns with her latest film, A United Kingdom, the true story of a ground-breaking, continent-crossing interracial marriage built around a top-caliber cast that ultimately saves it from slipping into risky Hallmark-movie-schmaltz territory. It’s 1947 and David Oyelowo and Rosemund Pike are Seretse Khama and Ruth William Khama, the heir to the throne of Bechuanaland (later Botswana) and his white British…
Watch This: The Salesman
For years promoting the U.S. releases of foreign films, again and again I heard them described as “quiet.” Quiet and compelling. Quiet and taut. Quiet and affecting. It’s no wonder so many worthy imports fail to reach a large audience. Who wants to spend two hours watching a lot of quietness – which is to say, a lot of nothing – on screen? Which is why, even though it is in many ways, I will not describe Asghar Farhadi’s arresting new drama The Salesman as quiet. Yes, it employs more than one long stretch of dialogue-free action, and yes, the power of the film is in its nuances, the reaction…
Watch this: I Am Not Your Negro
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” -James Baldwin The hardest part about watching I Am Not Your Negro, easily 2016’s best documentary and most essential viewing, is watching it. More than once, I cringed, winced, looked away, closed my eyes; it was all I could do to keep watching, keep facing the stark reality Raoul Peck brings to the screen through James Baldwin’s words. In 1979, Baldwin proposed a book, Remember This House, that would chronicle his friendships with Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, each murdered for their activism. He wrote a proposal letter to his publisher,…
Maybe Watch This: The Founder
There’s a family story I’ve heard at holidays and cookouts since I was a kid. A joke, really. And that’s the story that my great grandmother went to high school with Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s. Had she played her cards differently, we might all be in very different circumstances today. Imagine! Heirs to the Golden Arches! Revisiting the story after seeing The Founder, the film version of how Kroc (Michael Keaton) ushered McDonald’s from a single burger joint to, well, world domination, it’s clear the whole Boyle clan dodged a bullet. The Founder has been on my radar for at least six months now, and for a brief moment it was slated…
Bechdel, DuVernay and Me
In 1985, Alison Bechdel included a few simple questions in her thoughtful, often poignant comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Far from mainstream then, that single strip has gone on to inspire a litmus test for all media – though it’s most commonly used in regard to films. Distilled to its essence, it is a series of three simple questions: Does the film in question have two women in it? Who speak to each other? About something other than a man? If the answer is yes to all three questions, congratulations! Your film passes the Bechdel Test! More recently, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis proposed the DuVernay Test,…
Watch This: Amy
She had an intimate relationship with music, like it was a person…she would die for it. In ten or twenty years, my kid siblings may come across Amy, the new documentary that chronicles Amy Winehouse’s meteoric rise to fame in the first years of the millennium, and watch it much the way I recently watched What Happened, Miss Simone? That is, with a certain familiarity with the subject, but enough remove that the film’s revelations are brand new information to the uninitiated. Watching Amy myself, though, felt like a brutal rehashing of a life I remember quite clearly watching play out as an addiction-fueled roller coaster to its sad, premature end. The…
