Per Wikipedia, “The Martha Mitchell effect refers to the process by which a psychiatrist, psychologist, mental health clinician, or other medical professional labels a patient’s accurate perception of real events as delusional, resulting in misdiagnosis.” Per Sundance, Full Frame, Hot Docs, and ultimately Netflix, The Martha Mitchell Effect is one must-see doc. Running at just under a brisk 40 minutes, Anne Alvergue and Debra McClutchy’s all-archival short – which recently screened at the virtual Full Frame in the NEW DOCS section and is set to play in the Persister Shorts: Mother’s Day program at the hybrid Hot Docs – spotlights the […]

“Men are only good for two things: for nothing, and for money.” So sayeth the titular, straight-talking matriarch at the heart of Laura Herrero Garvín’s La Mami, a gloriously female-centered portrait of the hardworking dancers of Mexico City’s Cabaret Barba Azul. Told entirely from a female POV – with no men in sight to hijack the narrative – the film takes place almost exclusively in the cloakroom/bathroom/dressing room of the legendary nightclub, where Doña Olga (aka “La Mami”) presides. It’s in this safe space that the cabaret world vet, who in the past 45 years has transitioned from party girl […]

Hit the Road, the debut feature from writer/director Panah Panahi, is a 93-minute long goodbye of aptly sweet sorrow. Panah, 38, is the son of Jafar Panahi, one of the undisputed titans of Iranian art-house cinema. Having served as an assistant on his father’s films and edited his most recent feature (3 Faces), Panah emerges with Hit the Road as a filmmaker with a slyly unclassifiable take on the family road movie. Panah has called Hit the Road in many ways “the opposite of Jafar’s cinema,” but the film shares at least one key quality with his father’s work: It’s […]

The central promotional image for We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is of a young girl, covered in glow-in-the-dark paint, holding up a googly eye to her face as she barrels toward a laptop camera. This is Casey: She is a kid, and she is on the internet and she is in her bedroom, alone. The film takes its name from its own invented World’s Fair Challenge, an internet myth that causes something dark to alter within its participants. Sources vary on what exactly happens: Some people appear to be sucked into their computers, some turn to plastic, some […]

In 2012, after months in Buenos Aires helping care for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, Gaspar Noé traveled to Cannes and saw Michael Haneke’s Amour, about a husband dealing with his wife’s stroke. “Oh my god, I cried watching that movie,” he says. “Even if that movie had nothing to do with my personal life, it was about someone who needs to die, and at that time we were considering how my mother could die peacefully.” After the festival, Noé returned to Argentina; his mother died a few weeks later. When the Palme d’Or–winning, and quite brutal, Amour went on to international […]

Soft-spoken but direct in his goals, Robert Eggers is dedicated to precise historical accuracy—even though the filmmaking process can prove painful. The director’s previous two films, the 19th century-set The Lighthouse and the 17th century horror film The Witch, were released by A24 to critical acclaim. Now, Eggers travels further back in time for his largest production yet, The Northman, a bloody 10th century Viking epic that’s equally brutal and poetic.  In the opening minute, young Amleth (Oscar Novak)—son of King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) and Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman)—is horrified to witness his mother kidnapped and his noble father slain […]

Love and revolution fuel Neptune Frost, an Afrofuturist musical that condemns injustice as much as it inspires joy. The project is a co-directing effort between American poet, musician and actor Saul Williams and Rwandan playwright, actress and filmmaker Anisia Uzeyman—the film’s DP and also Williams’s wife. Chronicling the passionate union of Neptune, a runaway intersex hacktivist (played alternately by Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja), and coltan miner Matalusa (Burundian-born, Rwandan refugee rapper Kaya Free, credited in the film as Bertrand Ninteretse), the film takes place entirely in Rwanda (the world’s largest coltan exporter) and also features actors from the nearby […]

In 2017, the formerly obscure Pavement B-side “Harness Your Hopes” became their number one track on Spotify. It currently has 70 million plays, over twice the amount of “Cut Your Hair,” the group’s highest charting and arguably most popular song during their original run. At Stereogum, Nate Rogers looked into why exactly “Harness Your Hopes” became as prevalent as it had and all signs point to Spotify’s Autoplay feature, which “cues up music that ‘resembles’ what you’ve just been listening to, based on a series of sonic signifiers too complex to describe.” At this point, “Harness Your Hopes” has crossed […]

Ahed’s Knee, Nadav Lapid’s latest feature, takes its title from the teenage Palestinan activist who became a media sensation (and was then imprisoned) for squaring off against Israeli soldiers in 2017. Heralded for his Gold Bear-winning Synonyms and The Kindergarten Teacher, a tw0-hander that produced a Netflix-distributed American remake, Lapid’s work remains consistently critical of, and in opposition to, the oppressive Israeli government. Even so, he remains, in J. Hoberman’s eyes, “the most internationally acclaimed Israeli filmmaker in recent memory…and perhaps ever.” While promoting The Kindergarten Teacher in 2018, Lapid was invited by Israel’s Ministry of Culture to participate in a […]

“We call them dumb animals, and they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.” – Anna Sewell, 1877 Andrea Arnold, director of Fish Tank and American Honey, chronicles the travails of dairy cows in her first documentary feature. Upon giving birth—shown in viscous detail in the film’s opening scene—Luma and her calf are immediately separated. For 98 minutes, the camera, low to the ground, scuttles closely after them, as they’re herded from pen to pen, fed, milked, dehorned and even bred to establish the intimate, diurnal rhythm […]