“Hard Times at Douglass High” and “Toe Tag Parole” follow the social through line and the creative methods that the Raymonds established in their seminal documentary “The Police Tapes,” which presciently discerned the making of social and political history.
Philippe Collin’s 1996 film follows the famously abstemious and abstruse philosopher as he’s anticipating his death, yet it’s a physical comedy filled with neo-slapstick intimacy.
Starting from a familiar premise—a teen-ager’s sexual awakening—the director Karen Maine uses composed yet imaginative visual and sonic textures to develop the film into a vivid, varied comedic drama.
The boisterous melodrama, from 1936, is a mysterious outpost of Hawks’s distinctive and original cinematic universe, a tale that seethes with perversity beneath its robust surfaces.
In William Jersey’s 1966 documentary about the efforts of a Lutheran minister to break the racial barrier, church is “a hospital for sinners,” a place where the scourge of white supremacism must be addressed.
Gina Prince-Bythewood’s occasionally poignant drama, on Netflix, seems interested in its characters’ inner lives only as a pretext for advancing the action.