'Lovers Rock': Film Review | NYFF 2020

Even without yet having seen all five of the original films in Steve McQueen's riveting Small Axe anthology for Amazon and BBC, which surveys two decades of West Indian experience in London, it seems appropriate that the series concludes with a story of Black resistance embodied in the determination of one idealistic man.

Steve McQueen's ravishing Lovers Rock summons a potent sense of a community gathering that caresses and cocoons those present, shutting out the hostilities of the city outside. The second movie to premiere at the New York Film Festival from the director's Small Axe anthology for Amazon and BBC, Mangrove, which is set a decade earlier, in 1968-70, shows how another regular gathering place for the same immigrant community provides a cherished home away from home.

Machetes, myths and murky storytelling all find their way into Tragic Jungle (Selva Trágica), the lushly made, if highly enigmatic, fifth feature from Mexican writer-director Yulene Olaizola (Fogo), which screened in the main slate of the New York Film Festival after premiering in the Horizons section in Venice.

It's become unfashionable to express fondness for vintage Woody Allen films, but think back to how pleasurable they could be before all the off-camera baggage muddied those memories and you have some idea of the warmly satisfying experience of On the Rocks.

Not since Jeff Goldblum stocked his penis in a jar or Bryan Cranston tore apart his meth lab has a fly played such a pivotal role on screen as in Mandibles (Mandibules), the latest comic whatchamacallit from French one-man-band Quentin Dupieux.

When his girlfriend can’t get pregnant, a trans man decides to carry the child in her stead in the French drama A Good Man. This is the latest feature from writer-director Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar.

A coming-of-age drama set against true events that roiled Quebec in 1990, Beans is a story of awakening and identity for its title character. She's a smart and high-spirited resident of the Mohawk reserve Kahnawà:ke, and her single-syllable nickname comes in especially handy in the opening scene: The principal of the private high school she wants to attend stumbles repeatedly, and unapologetically, over the girl's given name, Tekahentahkhwa.

Two sisters from a Northern Irish town close to the border with Eire, played by Nika McGuigan and Nora-Jane Noone, feel the long shadow of both the Troubles and their own troubled past when they're reunited after a long estrangement in British-Irish co-production Wildfire.

Veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, one of Venice’s two Career Golden Lion recipients this year alongside Tilda Swinton, brings prewar Hong Kong to exquisite if restrained life in her latest historical drama, Love After Love (Di Yu Lu Xiang).

Facing his mother's worsening leukemia, a boy turns his curious mind from detective stories to supernatural lore in David Oyelowo's The Water Man, a family adventure set against a lush Pacific Northwest backdrop. Doing double-duty behind and in front of the camera (playing the boy's father) Oyelowo is sure-footed in his feature directing debut, delivering a smart and wholesome picture with about as little sentimentality as such a tale can have.

In a time of dramatic political unrest, film has a unique opportunity to look toward the past for insight on our present. Sam Pollard’s searing documentary MLK/FBI retells the story of the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of the government, showing how FBI founder J.

Given its pedigree, expectations were undeniably lofty for Wolfwalkers, the final installment in Tomm Moore’s gorgeously animated Irish folklore trilogy, following Oscar nominations for 2009’s The Secret of Kells and 2014’s Song of the Sea. The beautifully rendered result proves to be even more than one had hoped for: a visually dazzling, richly imaginative, emotionally resonant production that taps into contemporary concerns while being true to its distant origins.

"Horses ain't the only thing that needs breaking around here," says one of the Fletcher Street Stables riders in Concrete Cowboy. She's referring to the wayward teenager who's been exiled for the summer to acquire some discipline from his estranged father.

There are still idealistic young writers out there aiming to transform the world, at least in China, and the newsroom drama The Best Is Yet to Come (Bu zhi bu xiu) catches the viewer up in the fast-paced story of an untutored youth from the provinces who breaks a scoop on hepatitis B.

Eight years after making the Oscar-nominated The Hunt together, Mads Mikkelsen and writer-director Thomas Vinterberg have reunited for Another Round, a tragicomic portrait of midlife crisis and alcohol abuse. Since their previous collaboration, both director and star have mostly worked on bigger international features, but they are back on comfortable home ground here with a modestly scaled Danish-language production full of familiar faces.

Fifteen years ago, Saul Williams was a heavy metal-sampling hip-hop poet whose fiercely political live shows called for reparations at a time when that was not very fashionable. He now projects a much more subdued urgency in the title role of Charles Officer's Akilla's Escape, playing a man raised up amid violence who has never stopped trying to avoid it.

Inching forward on a rocky if deeply felt cinematic path that has rarely strayed far from reflections on himself and his mother, Azerbaijan filmmaker Hilal Baydarov opens up his vistas, somewhat, in the fiction feature In Between Dying (Sepelenmis Olumler Arasinda). It’s beautiful to look at, but the story of a young man on the run who encounters death at every turn of the winding road doesn’t really make much sense even in metaphorical terms.

No man is an island in Limbo, a glumly comic drama about a group of misfit refugees stranded in surreal exile in a remote Scottish backwater town. Building on the promise of his festival prize-winning debut feature Pikadero (2016), Scottish writer-director Ben Sharrock displays a winning flair for small observational detail and minor-key mirth in his warm-hearted second feature, whose deadpan ironic tone invites comparison to Aki Kaurismaki or Jim Jarmusch.

The 2003 documentary The Corporation was that rare political doc with the power to claw scales off eyes. Rather than simply asserting that big companies were destroying the world, it looked at the legal frameworks that created them and saw that, wittingly or not, the system all but guaranteed they would behave badly.

Rarely does a logline predict a viewer's response as accurately as in Glendyn Ivin's Penguin Bloom. If the following summary sounds to you like a good way to spend an hour and a half —nursing a rescued bird helps a newly paralyzed mother move past self-pity and rejoin her happy family — you'll be moved.