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Review by Sarah Williams
Actress Kate Lyn Sheil exists in a sort of Brooklyn apartment movie stardom, a household name among mumblecore fans yet virtually unheard of to anyone else. These low-key indies have a sort of cult following, raging from the self-insert talky sex comedy (Joe Swanberg’s Autoerotic and The Zone) to the sensorily overloading, creative art horror of Adam Wingard and Amy Seimetz. Materna rests somewhere in the middle. David Gutnik’s directorial debut, produced by two of its four lead actresses (Jade Eshete and Assol Abdullina) follows in the tradition of films like Short Cuts and Magnolia to blend a pseudo-feminist subway story of four women who meet by chance. The film is divided into four sections, each centering a different woman, and particularly their relationship as either a mother or a daughter.
The weight of these stories varies wildly, everything from passivity to a child’s bigotry, reproductive pressure, and found family, but each of these feels like its own movie. There is something to say for the treatise Materna makes on private lives, on the rich complexities of passing strangers, but the omnibus of short films we are essentially given seems to merely skate the surface. Its attempt to give a unifying scope of womanhood through its packaging is especially strange, given that there is little universality outside a vague idea that they are all connected to the idea of motherhood and maternity. 
In terms of the individual segments, they are all wildly uneven. From a vision and performance perspective, Sheil’s is the strongest, a near horror psychodrama on the pressures of fertility. Though a bit shy on the script, the segment holds a deep weight of pressure between Sheil’s Jean, a VR tech, and her mother who wishes her to start a family or at least freeze her eggs. This pressurized fountain of youth is further confounded by Jean’s unplanned pregnancy, and the suffocation of the situation is clear. Better written, and by the actresses they center, are two others. One, where a woman detaches from her Jehovah’s Witness mother, and finds surrogate family in an older colleague, is strangely touching, while the final segment is quieting, about three generations of Kyrgyz women and the ghosts in their lives. This segment is what Materna should be pushing towards, a clear, cyclical connection to the maternal lineages it teases.
Most baffling is one chapter starring Lindsay Burdge (fans curious about a new collaboration with Kate Lyn Sheil may be disappointed that this is far-flung from the short buddy comedy Super Sleuths). Her conservative mother deals with her son’s suspension from school, and the segment falls into pained New York liberalism as her family gathers to interrogate his racism. It’s the most chronologically rooted segment, Burdge’s out of touch mother taking away the kid’s Fortnite access, and it messily tries to bite at group-think and cancel culture while plodding into message movie territory without having the grounding to do so. Because of its constant grab for social relevance, Materna bites off so much it never quite gets deep into its false-intersectional tote bag liberal feminism to handle the weighty omnibus of motherhood it wants to be. Materna is now available on VOD. Rating: 2.5/5
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Review by Sarah Williams
Sex positivity is all too often centered back to male pleasure. With frank discussions on intimacy and kink often centered on heterosexual structures, films like Kamikaze Hearts, Bloodsisters, and the films of experimental film pioneers document a queer liberated desire, specifically lesbian community, long before Hollywood acknowledged us. Receiving a rerelease from Kino Lorber, Michelle Handelman's bitingly funny documentary about the San Francisco leatherdyke community comes best served at a time where eroticism has been made absent from mainstream cinema. Bloodsisters has a dykes to the front agenda, proclaiming itself to be an A-Z guide to leather, lesbians, and left radicals.
Sadomasochism here is less about personal fantasy, and more a power structure created to build its own society. Domination is used to build trust: BDSM becomes a learning experience for the subjects. They build their communication with each other, and learn to set boundaries. It's a language of physicality, a societal vulgarity that feels truly liberatory in the guide Handelman's camera constructs. In places, the subjects indicate that it's less the fist inside of them or the whip, less the sensation itself than the trust and adrenaline rush that brings them to it. The key to this power play is how different it feels from some heteronormative kink seen today. They are clear that death should never be a risk, that this is pleasurable BECAUSE of consent, and that the danger in this is acknowledged, and given a reminder to check in with your partner. The film is also incredibly quotable. "I'm butch but I primarily identify as a faggot, I'm very effeminate," one dyke says, "You're like a prep school butch," another responds. The refreshment here is the frankness of the language. Crass language, open sexual discussion, and terminology exclusive to this community is on full display, and the comfort the subjects have in this discussion is commendable. The deep dive allows so many voices to chime in their experiences, and there's a sense of camaraderie with the filmmaking team. 
An important distinction made by a few of the documentary's participants is how they wish to be labelled as dykes, not lesbians, asking for an identifier ever further from being socially acceptable. This community is about subversion — it is about looking palatable respectability politics in the eye and saying if you don't want me for what I built to survive under you, you do not get me at all. The line "fist fuck the system" defines what these leather dykes believe. They believe in queer liberation without censorship, that it is better to find freedom in each other than respect in society. Of course, there are limits, in that this is a group that is mainly white lesbians.
Bloodsisters is a rarity because it calls out the dangers of kink without communication, and it makes it clear there are two halves to this equation. Even in all the playful fisting jokes, there are clear conversations about sexual power, and equality. Rarer still is how the film is a celebration of lesbian masculinity, dominant femmes and whiny butches, social roles and dykes refusing male pleasure. 77 minutes in the leatherdyke gives us more butches than the mainstream film industry has in twenty years. This is the kind of film we need to have a return to conversation. Not kink at pride discourse, not sex scenes in cinema discourse, but a clear, open discussion on healthy sex positivity free from a patriarchal structure. Bloodsisters is now available on VOD. Rating: 4.5/5  A dreamy, plotless year in the life, Stop-Zemlia creates an otherworldly parallel reality of the end of adolescence, blending suspended fantasy of the teenage existence created by idealisation, and the near-documentary realism of its naturalistic structure, The Ukranian film is light on exposition, instead choosing a fluid approach to structure, blending past, present, and future in a thoroughly modern coming of age. Where the film falls short is not its lack of structure, but its lack of focus, flitting between a lot of serious mental health topics to the point it feels odd these are left unspoken. Masha (Maria Fedorchenko) is feeling every emotion all at once. She and her best friends Yana (Yana Isienko) and Senia (Arsenii Markov) often have sleepovers all sharing her bed, a natural closeness they don’t realize is going to leave their lives when they grow. Her attraction to Sasha (Oleksandr Ivanov), and a mysterious admirer on Instagram she often confesses to are both hard for her to define, and she is well aware of how messy feelings can be when young. While somewhat fiction, Stop-Zemlia more closely resembles Sébastien Lifshitz’s documentary Adolescentes than the early comparisons to Euphoria it has received. The non-professional actors lead these characters to be played just like teenagers living their lives, so the film feels documentarian as they’re hardly fiction. Of course, anything with teenagers, bisexuality, and pastel-llit parties tends to receive the latter analogue nowadays.  Where the film falls short is that director Kateryna Gornostai has fallen in love with her characters deeper than we ever could. Though two hours is a short time to encapsulate a year of life, even at a time when growing up feels so hurried, this feels like nothing was cut from every idea for a scene that was thrown around. While some scenes — like a class of teenagers throwing bags and classroom things at one another, an exercise in waning childhood they only pretend is ironic — create atmosphere, other elements are remnants of an attachment to sequences we do not need.
The suspension of reality works best here to simulate what it feels like to be young, and to see yourself as a wild creature. The lights of a party strobe, bodies meld into each other, but this comes with an awareness that there is artifice in this indigo-dazed perfection. There is an idea that this is only some teenage dream, that their love can be so idealized, bodies never shallow but spouting poetics about kissing to the beat of the changing colors. What is present is that awareness that Stop-Zemlia is so often that fantasy you build of your teenage years, hormonal egos rushing to create that feeling of the mundane being on top of the world. It's refreshing how natural it feels, however, that the tougher parts of growing up are spoken of as jarringly casually as they are among peers. The films relaxed, ambiguous approach to queerness among girl friends is particularly well done as well. At one point, one of Masha’s classmates says “I just like feeling things, it’s better than feeling nothing,” which just about defines the everything at once scattershot approach and energy that Stop-Zemlia has. Stop-Zemlia is screening at the Berlinale Summer Special which runs June 9-20. Rating: 3/5
Review by Sarah Williams
Seemingly positioned to be the annual male-gazey low-budget horror advertising lesbian leads that inevitably turns up on VOD every year, The Retreat surprises by taking tired slasher tropes and instead giving the power back to its leads. A fairly straightforward cabin in the woods meets The Most Dangerous Game romp is gory, yet has a bleeding, beating heart beneath the surface.
Sarah Allen and Tommie-Amber Pirie star as new couple Valerie and Renee, who spend a weekend at a Canadian bed & breakfast, enticed by a professed atmosphere of inclusion, and the friendly gay married hosts that are advertised, on a trip to help plan a wedding. What they find, however, is a trap many before them have fallen into, where hunters are out for blood, and they have to fight their way through the night. So much queer horror exists in character only, not commentating on any intersection between identity and the coming action, or worse, does so in a ham-fisted manner. The Retreat is an oddly clever take on the ‘rainbow-washing’ brands use to obtain a niche of customers, plastering on a facade of acceptance, pride, and solidarity just to corner another niche of the market without any radical action of tangible support. Here, it’s not just quarters spilled, but blood. 
Hunters out for blood of the visitors, prominently a gay audience drawn in by promises of community, await them, and a You’re Next-style slasher progresses. It's formulaic at times, and sometimes falls into some predictable story beats, but solidly bloody. Though a clever social satire, there are some moments that feel like they’re poking fun at the class of some of the ‘white trash’ locals, but this isn’t exactly unusual in genre film. Allen and Pirie have an easy chemistry, and its lovely to watch their relationship strengthen through the night. Both play atypical final girls, smart and well-versed on the classic horror movie mistakes, and its nice to have heroines who act like they’ve seen Halloween and Scream at minimum.
What elevates The Retreat is the potential secondary metaphor, that it can be read as a satire of how queer horror fans are baited with promises of seeing ourselves onscreen, only to be mocked, fetishized, or have the characters placed there for us brutally slaughtered at the start. I’d worried this would be exactly like so many of these films, only to be pleasantly surprised that the gays get to win, and poke fun at this a bit in the end. The Retreat is now available on VOD. Rating: 3.5/5
Review by Sarah Williams
The long-take opening shot of Amundsen, The Greatest Expedition, a thrilling plane crash, is a high that's not quite returned to. The Roald Amundsen biopic by Norwegian Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man Tell No Tales and Kon-Tiki director Espen Sandberg is a road to an adventure that's never truly felt. Charting the lead-up to the explorer's renowned (and dangerous) polar exploration, the film falls flat when it eventually reaches the end of the world, with a danger that's never felt like that first aeroplane.
Leading the first expedition for the South Pole in 1911, and reaching both poles in 1926, Roald Amundsen (Pål Sverre Hagen) is given the Spielbergian-lite biopic treatment. Most of the film's strengths lie in galas and dinner meetings, scenes building anticipation for the expedition that feels far lower stakes than it should. Perhaps the focus isn't on the trip, but on the life leading to it, but with a team who is strongest with idolized heroes and glamorous set pieces, introspective, moody, character studies don't quote work. What does shine in these more mundane sections is the outside world around Amundsen. The period setting is beautifully assembled, and for a more minor release, one that's taken two calendar years from premiere to US release, it's startlingly detailed and accurate. The supporting performances are worth noting, with appearances from Christopher Rubeck and Katherine Waterston livening the affair. 
What's baffling here is making a film where the selling point is the expedition, and then trying to study a character that's left dull instead. Amundsen's strained family relationships, and the romantic subplot, don't give any of the actual interesting aspects of his character, the lack of fear and why he would want to go where no man has before. The men on the expedition aren't particularly characters we care about, and it all feels far too low stakes. The film is part adventure saga, part slow period drama, and it doesn't quite stitch together. All we know in the end about Amundsen is that he is driven by ego, something that can be extrapolated watching countless other works about the renowned men of the time.
With set pieces like a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and the storyline of a Thanksgiving day release, Amundsen is a film that would have replayed the best at a Sunday afternoon matinee, the kind of harmless but forgettable film you see with your parents, shrug, and learn a few history facts from. It's hard to hide that it feels like a relic from fifteen years back, dated and formulaic, destined to be played in a freshman year geography class's end of year explorers unit. It's hard to judge it as a bad film, because it's not all that poorly made, this just feels like deja vu of years past, and the few highlights and surprises are never quite allowed to shine. The issue isn't poor craft, or an offensive misstep, Amundsen just that brings so little to the table that doesn't call back a forty year old formula. Amundsen, The Greatest Expedition is now available on VOD. Rating: 2/5 |