film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
“Hunger Ward,” an unvarnished vérité look at starving Yemeni children and the medics trying to save them, best encapsulates the human experience of pain and resilience that all the nominees embody.
Was Biosphere 2 scientific adventure or eco-entertainment? This is a gripping portrait of the billionaire’s folly/performance-art project, a hippie SF soap opera with unsettling resonance for today.
The hypocrisy of the world’s expectations of girls gets a gently sardonic knock via an audaciously confident young woman battling to be herself. This is a lovely, goofy movie, easygoing and chaotic.
If you like these sorts of movies, you’ll like this one, a solid SJW drama out to condemn, with plenty of evidence, profit-above-all capitalism that embraces willful negligence and corruption.
Muckraking documentarian Alex Gibney on why Vladimir Putin is so dangerous, via the tale of a Russian oligarch of the post-Soviet era turned dissident. Vital context for the state of the world today.
Strips away the ambiguity of the source story to leave us with lazy jump scares, visual gloom, and a cheap cheat of an ending. Gaslights its protagonist and, incredibly enragingly, the viewer, too.
This true origin story of a literal social-justice warrior is earnest, passionate… and exhausting. We need to keep telling these stories, yet each is but another tiny drop of water in a rough ocean.
Cluelessly simplistic rendering of a 1990s media injustice ignores all the context in which it happened and demonizes the one journalist who acted professionally. Fails even as a conservative screed.
A lazy treadmill of a sci-fi morality play that wastes a terrific cast. A numbingly dull game of mutant checkers that has no idea how to tell a woman’s story except filtered through the eyes of men.
Karen Kramer directs documentary Renegade Dreamers; more… [This post is for Patreon patrons only for the first month.]
