Chronicling the harsh reality of Black trans sex work, Kokomo City is a sexually explicit and meditative portrait of four transwomen trying to survive in NYC and Atlanta – yes, survive. Sadly, one of these women, Koko Da Doll, was fatally shot earlier this year. Their stories are raw and …
Czech heart-tugger about a lecherous old cellist who agrees, for a fee, to a mock marriage with a Russian, and then gets stuck with her five-year-old son when she joins her true love in West Germany. (This is 1988.) Schmaltzy, but full of lifelike detail and sensitive observation: e.g., the …
A team-building conference for municipal employees turns into a nightmare when accusations of corruption begin to circulate and plague the work environment. At the same time, a mysterious figure begins murdering the participants.
The latest Kong borrows at least a couple of pages from the script of the latest Godzilla (unsurprising, since Max Borenstein co-wrote both) — notably, the jacking up of the big ape’s size to truly gargantuan (though he does seem to grow and shrink a bit according to the demands …
Five fair-haired Norwegians and a bald Swedish ethnographer spend 100 days and 5000 miles charting the Pacific on a balsa wood raft to prove right adventurer Thor Heyerdal’s (Pål Sverre Hagen) theory that South Americans, not Asians, populated Polynesia. Roadblocks to perfection: a second-act encounter with a shark bordered on …
Orsolya is a bailiff in Cluj, Transylvania. One day she has to evict a homeless man who lives in the basement of a downtown building transformed into a luxury hotel. An unexpected event suddenly confronts her with her contradictions.
East European absurdism set in the Budapest subway, staying underground the entire time and never coming up for air: a dark, dark, dark comedy with a soft spot for its existential drop-out hero, a member of the disrespected class of ticket-checkers. ("Everyone hates us.") Reward for him looms in the …
Not quite a coda to Sebastian Junger's and Tim Heatherington's gripping you-are-there 2010 Afghanistan war documentary Restrepo — more of a commentary track, or a series of annotations. Here, the live-fire footage at outpost Restrepo in the ever-active Korengal Valley is heavily intercut with soldier talk, either in repose or …
The title means “liberty.” The story’s Roma (Gypsies) feel their nomadic freedom being trapped in rural Vichy, France, as Nazis tighten the noose. Local bigots want them eradicated, but some citizens realize that their spirit incarnates, in primal form, the freedom that France has lost. Tony Gatlif continues his cycle …