film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
Pure joy. It is singing and dancing, life and love, food and family, heritage and community in all its complexity. Harnesses Golden Age Hollywood verve and style in breathtaking, enrapturing ways.
An electrifying philosophical fantasia that imagines four towering figures of 1960s America arguing over how to navigate racism as Black men. Enraging, but also thrilling, bursting with cinematic joy.
A deeply compassionate, deeply unnerving portrait of a man suffering from dementia and losing his grip on reality. The empathy machine of cinema has rarely been put to such uncomfortably intimate use.
The internal monologue that modern women have with ourselves gets externalized in this audacious and absolutely brilliant dramedy. Poignant, vulnerable, and almost shocking, in the best possible way.
Intense, uncomfortable family drama morphs into psychological suspense in a challenging tale of racial and cultural identity eliding the biases and delusions of its characters with the viewer’s own.
A movie as generous and as nonjudgmental as its protagonists, as frustrated yet as gently questing as they are. Claire Danes and Jim Parsons are extraordinary.
Not an anthology of complete short tales but the highlights from much longer stories only briefly sketched and left maddeningly unfinished. Barely a movie at all, more a tease of one.
Quick takes from the 25th Raindance Film Festival, with public screenings in London through October 1st, 2017.
Furious, funny, and deadly serious, this is an audacious, searing satire that swells into a raw, electrifying fantasy about how we might put aside savagery.
This true story falls down a bizarre rabbit hole of gentle condescension about how to solve the problems of poverty and drug addiction.
