Moonlight (2016)

It has been eight years since Barry Jenkins' lovely feature debut Medicine for Melancholy (2008), which the Florida-born filmmaker shot while living in San Francisco; it was one of those releases so small that even "under the radar" was too big to describe it. Now he has relocated to Los Angeles, and his second feature film, Moonlight, is getting heavy buzz. It helps that times have changed. Discussions of homosexuality and race have been moved to the forefront, with the recent legalization of gay marriage, and Donald Trump's devil-may-care racism in the 2016 election. In fact, given the recent fizzle of Nate Parker's simplistic The Birth of a Nation, Jenkins's film has an outside chance to fill the void at this year's Oscars. read more...

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Somewhere (2010)

People may view Sofia Coppola as spoiled and privileged, the daughter of Hollywood royalty who stumbled into filmmaking after trying and abandoning several other careers. Her films are not exactly plot-driven, which can further drive people crazy. I suspect that critics and viewers come to her films with a chip firmly planted on their collective shoulders, and not even a masterpiece from Coppola could change their mind. Either way, once you get right down to it, she's one of the most ferociously talented filmmakers working today, and she has indeed delivered masterpieces in her short career. read more...

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• Originality ▶ Different or novel for its time

Let the Sunshine In (2018)

Claire Denis is one of my favorite filmmakers currently working, and here she is with her latest movie, Let the Sunshine In, which is so drastically different in so many ways from her previous work. I find myself struggling for words. Am I disappointed in the movie because of its new direction? Should I go on faith and embrace it? I can definitely say that I liked it, and that it gives my heart tingles to recall it right now, but where does it rank with the rest of her work? Perhaps the best place to start is at the beginning, and worry about posterity later. read more...

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Vagabond (1985)

Agnes Varda's great film about the last days of a drifting, homeless girl is simultaneously beautiful in form and heartbreaking in content. It opens with Varda's own voice, narrating. A girl (Sandrine Bonnaire) is dead in a ditch, frozen, and Vagabond wonders who she was, what might have happened to her and what led her to this end. The film plays out in segments as the girl occasionally works odd jobs for spending money, scrounges a meal, sleeps in her tent, and sometimes makes small connections with people. Varda's camera frequently drifts in long takes from right to left, suggesting someone going the wrong way, or backwards, or perhaps towards death. She makes lovely use of chilly exteriors and sometimes a splotch of color, like a discarded red scarf. In the end, of course, the girl is ultimately unknowable — and perhaps never even knew herself who she was — but Varda's film is nonetheless an act of empathy, suggesting that we never give up trying. read more...

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Embrace of the Serpent (2016)

One of the 2015 nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, Ciro Guerre's Embrace of the Serpent — from Colombia — never stood a chance of winning, but it's a beautiful, stirring, and thoughtful film, well worth seeing. It's set during two time periods, both of which feature the character Karamakate, a shaman in the Amazon jungle, the last of his people. In 1909, young Karamakate (Nilbio Torres) reluctantly agrees to help a sick white man, German explorer Theo (Jan Bijvoet) and his faithful guide Manduca (Miguel Dionisio Ramos), find a special flower that could heal him. Years later, an elderly, and forgetful Karamakate (Antonio Bolivar) meets another white man, an English botanist, Evans (Brionne Davis), who is also in search of the plant. Shot in black-and-white, the mesmerizing movie could easily have fallen into peaching or relied on liberal guilt, but instead it builds a complex character out of Karamakate, who is wise and righteous as well as outraged and untrusting. It's a respectful, poetic movie, and highly recommended. read more...

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