Sara Clements

Lee Daniels chooses to open his biopic on Billie Holiday’s life provocatively – with an image of grotesque violence and inhumanity. A lynching. A horrifying act of hatred that Holiday lyricized in the song “Strange Fruit.” In 1937, the year where a bill to ban the lynching of African Americans was put forward and denied, Jewish American writer, Abel Meeropol, wrote the poem “Bitter Fruit.” It would later be a song of protest, one that would tie itself inseparably to Holiday forever as her mos...

A narration opens Tiller Russell’s Silk Road. A young man in a hoody, shades, and flip-flops walks San Francisco’s streets and discusses the barriers between the world as it is and the world that he wants. The world he wants is one of total autonomy and freedom from government control. “Every action we take outside government control strengthens the market and weakens the state,” he says. As a result, and as a way to “take back our liberty,” he creates Silk Road, a website where anyone can bu...

​In "Breaking News in Yuba County," Wanda Sykes' character, Rita, says that life is just "doing the same boring shit and then you die." And that's certainly what it seems like for the film's main character, Sue Buttons (Allison Janney). She lives a monotonous suburban life, working at a customer service desk job by day and going home to her cheating husband at night. But what's missing from her life is something we all crave: attention. The film opens on her birthday, but there's no celebration. On the contrary, she's buying her own cake, making her own dinner reservations, and not receivin...

PASSING
As the daughter of a light-skinned biracial woman, and whose African American maternal side had been passing as white for generations, it’s fitting that Rebecca Hall chose Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, to both adapt to screen and make her directorial debut. Racial passing was a way for African Americans to try to evade discrimination against them, to seek better lives, and freedom. But as Passing shows, leaving your community and stripping away a piece of your identity comes at ...

CODA
It’s difficult to capture the beauty of Coda in words. It’s something that needs to be experienced as a stepping stone for more deaf representation in film. Siân Heder’s writing and direction make the audience wonder why we’ve never had a story like this before. And that question is pondered even more so by the heartwarming, powerful performances by its cast.
The importance of its title may not be obvious at first, but Coda stands for Child of Deaf Adults. In a film about a community of ...

In Land, Robin Wright foreshadows the acting masterclass that's to come from its very first scene. In the first glimpse of her character, Edee, her face is out of focus behind an hourglass. She's in a therapy session. "How are you feeling?" her therapist asks. There's a pause. It's a question that's difficult for her to answer and it looks as though tears are swelling up in her eyes and she's about to burst.
Land is a portrait of a lonely woman carrying ...

I’m not big on lists. But in the past couple of years, whenever I found myself having to write a listicle, they always had women as the subject. During a time when most writers are making their recaps of their top 10 films of the year, I thought, “Why not do something different?” So, this year, my list is an ode to my favorite female performances of the year. I tried to stay away from the obvious (yes, Elisabeth Moss is outstanding in The Invisible Man) and give shoutouts to performances you ...

For this week's second podcast film review, I am joined by Nicole Ackman, Ryan C. Showers, Sara Clements & Danilo Castro. Today, we are reviewing "Wonder Woman 1984," which premiered in theaters and on HBO Max on Christmas Day. The long awaited sequel to the critically acclaimed and box office hit "Wonder Woman," this sequel reunites Gal Gadot and (controversially) Chris Pine with director Patty Jenkins, while adding Pedro Pascal and Kristen Wiig as this film's villains to the cast. How does ...

The year 1984 had many victories: the first solo transatlantic flight, the first untethered spacewalk, the identification of the AIDS virus, and the introduction of technologies like Apple computers and CD players. But there was also, as it seems every year, turmoil and violence. Famine in Ethiopia, a deadly shooting at a Mcdonald's in California, the San Juanico disaster, the Milperra Massacre. Every year could use a mysterious figure flying high in the sky with a golden lasso looking over...

In Charles Laughton’s, The Night of the Hunter, the film’s misogynistic serial killer protagonist, Rev. Harry Powell, says, “Not that you mind the killings. Your book is full of killings. But there are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smelling things. Lacy things. Things with curly hair.” Writer-director Emerald Fennell perfectly places this clip in her debut feature, Promising Young Woman. A bold film about the nights of a hunter that doesn’t give a fuck about what anyone thinks or will thi...

George Clooney is a director of much ambition. Unafraid it seems to tackle any narrative of any genre, and The Midnight Sky feels like the closest thing we may ever get to his magnum opus – at least where scale is concerned. After his misfire Suburbicon, many were curious and maybe even hotly anticipating his return to the director’s chair. While it’s his most ambitious directorial work to date, The Midnight Sky falls short of other odysseys succinctly connecting space and earth. It often fee...

In the essay, "Sigmund Freud's Archaeological Metaphor and Archaeology's Self-Understanding," Julian Thomas explains that "archaeology encapsulates a series of evocative themes: of repression, of loss and concealment, of discovery and revelation." These themes are fittingly present in writer-director Zeina Durra's sophomore feature, "Luxor." It also highlights what Thomas touches on: Freud's archaeological metaphor. As a man obsessed with Egypt, he made a connection between the excavation of ancient Egyptian sites and psychoanalysis. As archaeologists dig through the earth to bring forth ma...

The sound of water moving to the gentle kiss of wind normally signals tranquillity. Our favorite lake, favorite beach, the place we want to run to for respite. But in an introduction with a score resembling Tibetan meditation music rising to create something much more piercing, and Aubrey Plaza’s blank yet expressive eyes with the hint of tears against her pale visage, Lawrence Michael Levine’s sophomore feature reveals itself to be anything but tranquil. Black Bear is a film open to interpre...

The yuletide has never been gayer. The release of Happiest Season is a big moment for the closeted lovers of women out there who get stuck watching Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas with their mom every year where each film is either about a regular girl falling in love with a seemingly normal guy who’s actually a prince or about a rich city boy returning to his hometown and rekindles a romance with an old flame. While Hallmark will be airing their first film featuring a gay couple this seaso...

In 2016, a Buzzfeed News article titled, “Dee Dee Wanted Her Daughter To Be Sick, Gypsy Wanted Her Mom Murdered,” was being obsessively read by everyone I knew. I couldn’t find anyone on Facebook who wasn’t sharing it; I couldn’t find anyone on Twitter who wasn’t tweeting about it. It’s an insane and unbelievable horror story about a mother who made her daughter out to be gravely ill and scammed people out of money for her daughter’s “treatments.” Her list of medical conditions, according to ...