In all deference to the congregants of the church of Alfonso Cuaron’s stunning but confused Roma, 2018 struck this critic as a truly stacked year of worthy cinema lacking one monolithic landmark. The most financially successful film in my top 10 is currently regarded as the year’s biggest di…
It takes some work to describe the premise, structure, and purpose of Leigh Ledare’s exasperating and wildly entertaining documentary, but the feeling of The Task is familiar. A conspicuously diverse group of 31 strangers sitting in white chairs arranged in a spiral are in the middle of a di…
The Past Isn't Through With Us: Documentary film Bisbee '17 re-enacts a haunting story at the border
Bisbee, Arizona is a haunted city. Once a prosperous copper mining region, the community of 6,000 a few miles from the Mexico border has lived for generations with the memory of one of the greatest humanitarian abuses in U.S. history occurring on its soil.
"Now is the time of monsters,” the saying goes, and of course we’re talking about Damnationland, the homegrown showcase of short Maine-based horror films screening this weekend at the State Theatre and touring the less lit parts of Maine throughout the ghoul-thick month of October.
It’s an appalling irony that among the myriad travesties committed against First Nations people, some of the most egregious and systematic were enacted against children by state child welfare agencies. Across the U.S. — including here in Maine — standardized government policy removed Native …
The gay bar is dying. In Portland, with only one explicitly LGBTQ+ bar left in town (and many folks in the queer community getting sober), some may say it's already dead. Whether it's a temporary generational lull or permanent trend, one thing is for sure: queer space in Portland looks much …
The line-up of this year’s Camden International Film Festival, the Maine all-doc fest now in its 14th year, tackles some phenomena that have been lately on the brain: Fox News. Putin. Race. Democracy. Wildfires. Then there’s the stuff we don’t even know we don’t know: Common ground between e…
In its animalistic spectacle of snot, sweat, and agony from the depths of wounded men, The Work achieves something that borders on bodily horror.
Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. - Oscar Wilde
In 1966, Marvel creator Jack Kirby asked his colleague, the writer and editor Stan Lee, a simple question. ”Why don't we have a Black superhero?”
Though many of us sell the pleasant fiction that we spend our autumn moments outside, embarking on foliage hikes, spooky road trips and bonfire adventures, let’s confront a more likely reality. We’re going to spend a great deal of time in front of a screen.
The Revival: Women & the Word follows the progression of a poetry tour of the same name, as we travel through seven cities with the poets, artists, and volunteers of The Revival. The film lays out in an intricately nuanced way that yes, the world unfolds to women of color when we spread …
Celluloid nitrate, the medium of the first motion pictures, is a direct descendent of a military explosive. Stored improperly, it spontaneously bursts into flame. Most of it has burned or been lost. But some reels in the Yukon have survived an improbable life, death and rebirth. Filmmaker Bi…
A Disney mermaid movie “The Lure” is not. “Help us come to shore,” sing its two young mermaid sisters, Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Golden (Michalina Olszanska), in dulcet duet to three drunk revelers on the shore, and then: “We won’t eat you yet.” We shift to a techno beat and a sparkly, booz…
Some of the most acute and devastating insights on race in America came from African-American writer James Baldwin. He grew up in Harlem, moved to Paris to flee racism, and returned for a time during the American Civil Rights Movement; his analysis of the nation has the depth of a thinker wh…
In the early eighties Jim Jarmusch was part of a wave of filmmakers inspired by punk rock. With its minimalist non-plot and stark, noir-ish texture, his first feature film, "Stranger Than Paradise," was emblematic of the same DIY qualities as the corresponding indie music movement.
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