Abortion: Stories Women Tell
In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade recognized the right of every woman in the United States to have an abortion. Since 2011, over half the states in the nation have significantly restricted access to abortions. In 2016, abortion remains one of the most divisive issues in America, especially in Missouri, where […]
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Thomas Sung relates to George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart’s character in It’s a Wonderful Life. In the 1980s, he was a busy lawyer in New York City, but he saw a need. There was no bank serving the Chinese immigrant community. Institutions were willing to take in millions in deposits from Chinese families but were unwilling […]
78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene
In 78 setups and 52 cuts, the deliriously choreographed two-minute shower sequence in Psycho ripped apart cinema’s definition of horror. With a shocking combination of exploitation and high art, Alfred Hitchcock upended his own acclaimed narrative structure by violently killing off a heroine a third of the way through his film, without explanation, justification, or […]
Strong Island
The best documentary mysteries are rarely about the “who” and more often about the “why.” Strong Island, the debut film from Yance Ford, mines his intense personal history of growing up on Long Island in the ’80s, with a focus on the murder of his brother and the shockwaves it sent through their entire family. […]
13th
The title of Ava DuVernay’s extraordinary and galvanizing documentary refers to the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” The progression from that second qualifying clause to the horrors of […]
The Times of Harvey Milk
A true twentieth-century trailblazer, Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world. The Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, directed by Robert Epstein and produced by Richard […]
The Fits
Eleven-year-old Toni is a tomboy who is drawn from boxing with her brother to a tight-knit dance team in Cincinnati’s West End. Enamored by the power and confidence of this strong community of girls, Toni eagerly absorbs routines, masters drills, and even pierces her own ears to fit in. When a mysterious outbreak of fainting […]
Mountains May Depart
At once an intimate drama and a decades-spanning epic that leaps from the recent past to the present to the speculative near-future, the new film from Chinese master Jia Zhang-ke is an intensely moving study of how China’s economic boom—and the culture of materialism it has spawned—has affected the bonds of family, tradition, and love. […]
Neon Bull
Strange and erotic, with an unexpected view of gender roles, this film is set in the macho world of bull wrangling yet its male protagonist is interested in fashion and designs dresses. In dusty farmland with scattered signs of heavy industrialization in Northeast Brazil, a cowhand, Iremar, nurtures his passion on the side. Drawing clothes […]
Zero Days
When independent Internet technicians discovered a chillingly powerful computer virus unlike anything they’d seen before, signs pointed not merely to recreational or criminal hackers, but to a high-stakes game of cyber warfare between nations. Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney return with Zero Days, a fascinating exposé of American and Israeli covert operations aimed at Iran’s […]