REVIEW: Ailey [2021]

Sometimes your name becomes bigger than yourself. As someone who knew nothing about Alvin Ailey before watching Jamila Wignot‘s documentary Ailey, it surprised me how relevant the film proves to what’s happening today. How can you watch this man’s trajectory towards the height of his profession and subsequent fall towards a stay in a mental institution without thinking about the mental wellness conversations surrounding Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles? He lived in a time where strength as an outward appearance became a crucial piece to success whether it was a…

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REVIEW: The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 [2021]

What we can hear is often more powerful than what we can see. With an “it’s the friends we met along the way” type of mantra, documentarian Joshua Zeman uses his latest film The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 to take audiences on a quest towards the unknown … or, at least, the misunderstood. He knows his endeavor is a fool’s errand. Everyone he asks to estimate the feasibility of finding a whale nobody has ever seen before and that hasn’t even been tracked in a decade to know…

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CANNES21 REVIEW: H6 [2021]

Laughter is a good remedy. Some hospitals are better suited for your needs than others no matter where you reside. Maybe you’re lucky and the best is local in case of emergency. Maybe you need to take the night train just to reach it for the opportunity to find a bed days later. And depending on insurance, you’re always forced to weigh your options with family before even beginning to think about attempting the services they offer. To therefore set a camera inside one of the busiest medical establishments within…

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REVIEW: Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) [2021]

It was the ultimate Black barbecue. 1970. That was the year Michael Wadleigh‘s epic film showcasing the August 1969 Woodstock Festival debuted. Woodstock won the Oscar for best doc, was nominated for best editing (Thelma Schoonmaker), and entered the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in 1996. It took five months for this counterculture phenomenon that occurred near Bethel, New York to be seen by the world. Five months. And yet it’s taken until in 2021—50 years—to finally get the chance to see a different concert series (the…

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REVIEW: Sisters on Track [2021]

Run through the line. You must always be hesitant about stories dealing with the charity of multi-millionaires that never questions the systemic issues behind such “selfless acts” because they can often make it seem like those acts are a part of a working system. They’re not. Is it great that Tai, Rainn, and Brooke Sheppard‘s lives were forever changed after Tyler Perry gifted their mother Tonia Handy a Brooklyn apartment with two years’ worth of rent covered? Yes. Is it great that their Junior Olympic track and field victories landed…

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REVIEW: Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer [2021]

Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer The fact that southern states’ attempts to ban the New York Times‘ “The 1619 Project” from their school curriculums are so transparent proves its thesis. We want to think white supremacy has become emboldened via the GOP’s steady transformation into evangelical fascism since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, but the truth of the matter is that white supremacy has been baked into the American experiment since the beginning as evidenced by the project shining a light on the patterns of abuse, oppression, and suppression of…

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REVIEW: All Light, Everywhere [2021]

The act of observation obscures the observation. The concept at the back of Theo Anthony‘s documentary All Light, Everywhere shouldn’t be lost on anyone who understands the concept of art itself and the notion that its impact on the viewer is inherently subjective regardless of the artist’s intent. It harkens back to the old joke social studies teachers in middle school use about history being “his story” with historical truth formed by the victors’ eyes. That Anthony draws the through-line straight through our own ability to see as a mechanical…

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REVIEW: Woman in Motion [2021]

She changed the space program forever. It’s inspiring to hear Nichelle Nichols speak about the moment she realized things weren’t as they were supposed to be because she realized it within a moment of awe. Comprehending how something too crucially important to be missing from the magic of what she was shown isn’t an easy feat because we too often get caught up in excitement to think through the next steps or look beyond the superficial veils of marketing by acknowledging the deficiencies that manufactured sheen was meant to cover…

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REVIEW: Tiny Tim: King for a Day [2021]

It’s all ambiguous with Tiny Tim. Context is everything. That’s the first thought that came to mind at the beginning of Johan von Sydow‘s Tiny Tim: King for a Day (written by Martin Daniel) since I was born in the 1980s and knew the subject only as his “has been” self at the tail end of both his career and life. In my mind the celebrity he won was therefore always of a complicated sort: toeing the line between laughing at the “freak” and laughing with the entertainer. What I…

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REVIEW: Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street [2021]

We simply show it. You always wonder about the behind-the-scenes dynamics on projects in any medium that prove themselves profoundly revolutionary because you hope such great work wasn’t created on the backs of under-appreciated laborers for a totalitarian figure hording all the praise. You don’t want to find out about emotional and psychological warfare masked by smiling faces or a need to toe the company line so as not to get blacklisted from the industry—especially when the topic of discussion is as groundbreakingly inclusive as “Sesame Street” was (it first…

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