Building strongly on images shot by prisoners on prohibited mobile phones, the powerful and captivating documentary of Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman is not an easy watch, but it is crucial. The film focuses on corruption and specific abuses of power to the prisons of Alabama – and the heroism of men who have found ways to evolve within a system that has no interest in participating in Their rehabilitation and denies their fundamental humanity in all ways. – Daniel Fienberg
Before his death in 1963, the Wood Scholar Web spent decades trying to publish an encyclopedia on people of African origin. This mission propels the hypnotic beginnings of Kahlil Joseph – a kinetic video test mixing the Afro -futuristic story, archive images and memories – it is like an index of black culture of the last 50 years. Joseph animates the fictitious history of a journalist reporting on a transatlantic conservation project with voiceover, legends and a style inspired by the authors of Jean-Luc Godard in Garrett Bradley. – Lovia Gyarkye
The recent ban on books in school libraries – in particular those with themes related to the LGBTQ or the race – may no longer be strongly presented in the headlines given the tsunami of the new president of decrees in matters of fight against rights. But it always happens. This makes this doc scrupulously assembled by Kim A. Snyder even more. Transparently entangling extracts from vintage films with archival and original images, the film observes a cover of educators, almost all women, fighting prohibitions. It is an essential chronicle full of drama and despair but also small lights of hope. – Leslie Felperin
Removed from 40 hours of interviews and thousands of hours of archive sequences, the two -part HBO Matt Wolf gives Paul Reubens a posthumous projector. By drawing the best party of his subject with his subject and refusing to disinfect the tone of their interactions, Wolf has created an instructive and appreciable portrait of a well -confusing artist. The result can be summed up well alongside the recent series of documentaries “DIORT RIGHT MEN” focused on Garry Shandling and George CARLIN. – DF
In June 2023, Susan Lorincz, a Blanche Floridian, pulled a single deadly shot on his black neighbor Ajike Owens, a mother of four, while the latter struck at her front door. Drawing on images of police cameras, the filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir reconstructs a chronology of the events that have led to date, observing a quiet community torn by a prery quarrel. It is a propulsive report of racist paranoia, police inertia and the consequences of America of your laws on the ground. – LG
A unique experience in biography on the big screen, the study of the characters of Ira Sachs is built from bands rediscovered from a 1974 conversation between the gay photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall) For a book project. Directed by Whishaw’s transfixation performance, the film Diarine turns time in something fluid, expansive, illuminating and emotionally resonant, all this obtained with an elegant restraint. – David Rooney
A palpably real film for those of us who can remember the years of shame, fear and secret, the thriller of the 90s of the first director-director Carmen Emmi follows a cop assigned to a bite operation, stopping Gay men on a cruise for sex in a Syracuse shopping center. His desire to pose as the bait dissolves when he begins to face his own sexual identity while being obsessed with a connection in the same way. Strong turns by Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey keep you glued to this sexy drama, sad and authentically granular. – DR
The directors Lindsay Utz and the Doc of Michelle Walshe about Jacinda Ardern are a opportune and incredibly intimate portrait of a woman in power, examining the work and the life choices of the Left Prime Minister during her mandate of five years as head of government of New Zealand. Skills skillfully in home videos, candid contemporary interviews and archive information clips, the film offers a rare first -hand look at the balance sheet and requests from politicians when crises fly on them. – Caryn James
Working in his native Colorado, as he did in his beginnings, A love songMax Walker-Silverman evokes a powerful visual language of the landscape. This time, however, the Vista is marked by a devastating forest fire which leaves a breeder named Dusty without a house. The heartbreaking heart of this calm drama, he played with an eloquent euphemism of Josh O’Connor, offering the last of a series of remarkable performance – and a matching pace for the poignant rhythm by the other members of the distribution. – Sheri Linden
The revealing documentary of Cristina Costantini on the astronaut Sally Ride magnificently weaves her personal story, told by the woman who was her partner for 27 years, and a detailed account of the conduct of breathtaking sexism as first American woman in space. Affecting and socially relevant, it is the rare film which is deeply sympathetic but which does not hide the sometimes sugar of the thorny personality of its heroine. – CJ
Brittany Shyne Doc silently amazing observes two black farmers in the contemporary South American, building an empathetic portrait of agrarian life while revealing threats to its survival. Use a black and white palette with a magnificent and pointed effect – a scene of tractors plowing cotton evokes memories of a difficult story because of its resemblance to archive imagery – this is not a journalistic survey But a poetic contemplation that recalls the indelible Garrett Bradley by Garrett Bradley Time. – LG
Eva Victor directs, writes and features during his beginnings on the big screen, on a young academic in New England who was gradually recovering from a sexual assault. It is a disarming and intimate intimate turn on female “trauma” – perceptual, funny and supported by moving support that turns from Naomi Ackie as the best friend of the protagonist and Lucas Hedges as a neighbor who has become a Superter. The film positions Victor as a triple threat, with a specific and entirely formed voice, the irony and the seriousness of the attractive effect. – Jon Frosch
How do you unravel a lie and, more difficult, the official story that was built around him? This is the question that propels Bao Nguyen’s quiet bomb of a documentary. At its center is a famous photo of 1972 (known as “Napalm Girl”) which has become a photo heard in the world during the Vietnam War, and the small team of journalists who presented themselves, 50 years more late, to determine if the bad photographer was attributed. A chronicle of Gumshoe Globe -Trotting’s reports is a moving film less on geopolitics than working policy – and finally on the knotted link between the two. – SL
Clint Bentley’s moving drama on a recording from the beginning of the 20th century in the northwest of the Pacific was beautifully adapted from Denis Johnson’s news. Never linked to page, the story is shaped by superb actor characters and finely engraved – the leader Joel Edgerton may give the best performance of his career, and the Co -Star Felicity Jones is bright – which seems to have been Raised for a long time ago, with faces just outside a Walker Evans catalog. It is a lovely and perfectly formed film that raises Bentley (Jockey) in the league of essential American filmmakers. – DR
An act of humor and high thread compassion, the sly charmer of James Sweeney revolves around two young men (played by Dylan O’Brien and Sweeney himself) who form an unusual friendship in a support group in Twin in mourning. O’Brien does an impressive double duty as an Irascible protagonist and, in flashbacks, his extremely gay brother, and the captivating scenario is placed with withering observations on sorrow and loneliness as well as a handful of intelligent twists and turns. – LG
This story appeared in the January 29 issue of the Hollywood Reporter Magazine. Click here to subscribe.
