NewFest — A–Z of films

There’s an intelligent dissection of ideas going on here, and an acknowledgement of the frequent mismatch between ideals and emotions.

La Bola Negra was an unfinished work in a life cut short but the film named (variously) for it is extension and tribute and triumph.

Much more tightly structured than its style might suggest, and much, much darker.

Scott’s beacon of light is swallowed up by Stone and Beresford’s heavy-handedness.

There is throughout this film a driving positive energy, a commitment to turning frustration into action.

Pompeii becomes a place where fantasy is tested against historical violence, and where looking too closely can break the story one came to preserve.

Deberton keeps the camera close and attentive to micro-gestures

Through archival material and present-day interviews, Kroot traces how the Sisters became a crucial presence in San Francisco, particularly during the AIDS epidemic, when joy, care, protest, and mutual aid were matters of survival rather than branding.

Iván & Hadoum announces de la Rosa as a filmmaker with uncommon emotional precision.

Ribeiro finds something beautiful in fragility and rawness.

Gund’s poetic approach enables this documentary to go where others could not, to capture the existential effects on people of colour of day to day life in a white supremacist culture.

Desire does not arrive here as a clean break from domestic life. It appears as a tremor inside it.

It does not explain trans pain from the outside. It sits with it, listens to it, and tries to make room for it without exploiting it.