Film

A recent world premiere at the Hot Docs Film Festival, Faceless is a vital slice of 21st-century dissent portraiture, a nonfiction work that paradoxically locates a reservoir of humanizing empathy chiefly through its focus on masked protestors. An engaging directorial debut from Jennifer Ngo, the movie provides a gripping look at the 2019 Hong Kong demonstrations against a controversial Chinese extradition bill, as seen through the eyes of various young women and men seeking to protect what they view as their way of life.

Ever since director Davis Guggenheim's nonfiction distillation of former American Vice President Al Gore's deeply personal slideshow about the dangers of global warming, 2006's An Inconvenient Truth, galvanized viewers en route to racking up $50 million in the worldwide box office and two Oscar victories, environmental documentaries have had to grapple with its enormous cultural footprint. Previously seen as a niche market cinematically speaking, environmentalism has now gone mainstream.

In May 2019, Taiwan became the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage, embracing a world of non-binary and gender equality. Last year, director Patrick Liu’s Your Name Engraved Herein became the first LGBTQ-themed film to surpass NT$100 million in Taiwan’s domestic box office.

“I saw its birth, its golden era, and its declining years and I am convinced that Hollywood’s decline from glory is in no way the result of senility. On the contrary, it is a relapse (temporary, I hope), into the immaturity of adolescence.

Fully ceding the microphone to its loquacious subjects, both onstage and offstage, Hysterical shines a spotlight on female comedians in a manner that illuminates both the occupational similarities they share with their male counterparts as well as the many unique challenges they face in carving out a career in stand-up comedy. Unflaggingly earnest and positive-minded, and undergirded by a deceptively simple structure, Hysterical nevertheless achieves a lot simply by giving expanded voice to a wide range of highly articulate creative types whose observations carry punchy, trenchant emotional truth.

Drama rooted in tabloid-worthy family secrets meets colorful labyrinthine plotting of the type which might be at home in a Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard novel in the documentary The Lost Sons, which recently enjoyed its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. A stranger-than-fiction slice of investigative self-discovery, director Ursula Macfarlane’s movie serves in many ways as a complementary bookend to the earlier Three Identical Strangers – no great surprise, given that it is produced by RAW Productions and slated for release via CNN Films, the same company and distributor, respectively, behind that Emmy-nominated 2018 movie.

The fear of how old age erodes our faculties and the way we perceive and treat our elders invariably reveals something about ourselves. In her charming, off-kilter documentary, The Mole Agent, Chilean director Maite Alberdi confronts that fear directly and honestly.

Paris. Summer of 1928.

La Habana, Cuba, década de 1920 a 1930, los supuestamente felices y así llamados años 20. Rachel, una muchacha nacida con el siglo, trabaja como corista en un local de mala muerte, donde se le ofrece una sola posibilidad, ser prostituta.

At one time regarded as a fad, and then a niche industry, videogames have boomed to a $135 billion-plus annual business, on par with the cumulative total of the global film box office and home entertainment businesses. And when final numbers from 2020 are tallied, aided no doubt by last year’s pandemic stay-at-home orders, MarketWatch indicates that the global videogame revenue is expected to further surge an astonishing almost 20 percent over 2019 figures, to more than $179 billion.