Booksmart
Bold, brassy, and hilarious, Olivia Wilde’s feature directorial debut has all the makings of a new teen classic. The comedy follows two smart girls, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) as, final grades submitted, they attempt to turn up at their first high school party the night before graduation. The one-night-only teens-on-the-loose hype fest is reminiscent of both Superbad and Sixteen Candles, and as expected, not everything goes according to plan. There’s a lot to enjoy in this rollicking, casually progressive take on female friendship, but the cast of breakouts is its greatest asset. Feldstein’s valedictorian Molly is tightly wound with a plan for everything, while Dever’s Amy is a shy lesbian goofball, and both Billie Lourd and Skyler Gisondo steal scenes as cool kids who turn out to be as uproariously odd as the lead duo.
Clemency
Chinonye Chukwu’s bleak death row drama won’t be released in US theaters until the end of December, but it’s already won accolades, including the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. The film is a tough sell but a worthy watch. It follows a prison warden, Bernadine (Alfre Woodard), as the reality of her job supporting and witnessing the sanctioned killing of others finally gets to her. Stories about death row can be tough to pull off, but Clemency succeeds by telling a narrow story that communicates the small ways in which capital punishment slowly strips away a person’s humanity and willpower despite all efforts to the contrary. Woodard is Clemency’s greatest strength, giving a naturalistic performance that’s largely restrained with the occasional spot of bled-through humanity.
The Farewell
Lulu Wang’s comedic drama about family, illness, and tradition is exceptional even before you realize it’s based on a true story. In it, Chinese-American would-be writer Billi (Awkwafina) finds out her grandma is dying of cancer but doesn’t know it. Her family, in an attempt to keep her free from worry, is hiding her test results and planning a visit to China to see her under the pretense of a young cousin’s wedding. Billi isn’t invited for fear that her soft heart for Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen) and her Westernized values will lead her to tell the truth. Wang treats her subject tenderly without pulling any punches when it comes to portraying the large, cross-continent family and the tension inherent in their gathering.
Fast Color
One of the year’s best superhero films isn’t a major studio film but Julia Hart’s surprising, layered narrative about three generations of powerful African-American women and girls. Part thriller, part family drama, the film takes place in a dystopic version of America that hasn’t seen rainfall in years. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Lorraine Toussaint, and Saniyya Sidney are a trio of well-cast actors whose performances as family members who each see their hidden talent — the ability to rearrange matter — in a different light. Fast Color unfolds at a pace that serves its imaginative arc, but it also grabs hold of you from the very beginning, and it’s no wonder the story has since been optioned for series development at Amazon.
For Sama
One of the best personal looks at war since Waltz With Bashir, For Sama shows the Syrian Civil War in a way that you’ve never seen before, even if you watched the slew of other noteworthy docs about it. Waad al-Kateab is a journalist and Syrian activist who refused to leave Aleppo after bombings began in 2011. During the course of five years under attack, we not only see her fall in love with and marry a friend, Hamza — a prominent doctor who builds and then rebuilds hospitals in which to treat hundreds of victims of war crimes — but also give birth to a daughter, Sama. The presence of love blossoming amid so much death is almost as jarring as the image of children playing in a bombed-out shell of a city, yet For Sama brings this and many other contradictions to life. Relentless and often terrifying, al-Kateab (with co-director Edward Watts) shows us a city on the brink of extinction, displaying the desperate claustrophobia of a slowly lost war side-by-side with the unbeatable humor and selflessness of a cause that refuses to be extinguished.
Related Topics: 2019 Rewind, Booksmart, directors, little women, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Women
