\n<\/p>\n
Stream it on Mubi<\/a>.<\/p>\n Early in this Georgian feature, Dovydas (Kestutis Cicenas), a sign language interpreter, asks out Elena, a choreographer conducting a workshop for deaf dancers, immediately after their first meeting \u2014 and they hit it off instantly. Something feels a little off <\/em>about it all. His gentle confidence, their spontaneous chemistry; it\u2019s all a bit too <\/em>easy. When movie meet-cutes start out this good, you might as well brace yourself for a twist.<\/p>\n And sure enough, the twist soon arrives in \u201cSlow\u201d \u2014 but it is surprisingly wholesome. Dovydas is asexual, and his forwardness comes from being closely attuned to his emotional desires. Marija Kavtaradze\u2019s drama is a delicate love story that explores a kind of queerness that is widely misunderstood and rarely depicted with such fullness onscreen.<\/p>\n For Elena, who is used to a promiscuous lifestyle but is starved for connection, Dovydas is both thrilling and alienating: a man who is intentional with his feelings, but doesn\u2019t want her in the ways she is used to being wanted. Through tentative conversations and gestures, they unlearn and relearn what it means to love another person. That they\u2019re both professionals who communicate with their bodies adds a beautifully tactile layer to their explorations. Erotic, tense and soft all at once, \u201cSlow\u201d probes into the nature of desire with candor, and not a trace of judgment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Divya Prabha, one of the stars of last year\u2019s breakout Indian movie \u201cAll We Imagine as Light,\u201d offers up another tour de force performance in Mahesh Narayanan\u2019s bleak yet forceful drama. She plays Reshmi, a young South Indian woman who has moved to Delhi with her husband to work at a factory that makes medical gloves; they\u2019re both saving up to go abroad in the hopes of finding better work prospects. From the very beginning, one has the sense that their world is closing in on them. For one, the pandemic lockdown is in effect, though for our protagonists it only means more toil to compensate for their sick colleagues.<\/p>\n They divide their time between a small apartment and the sterile, suffocating factory run by corrupt bosses. Their travel agent has no updates on their visa application and refuses to return their money or their passports. And the city itself is shrouded in smog, lending everything a gray veneer. Then things get even worse: An edited, X-rated video of Reshmi starts making the rounds, and attempts to find the culprit only unearth an even deeper rot in the factory and its management, and in Reshmi\u2019s marriage. But \u201cAriyippu\u201d never feels like an exercise in gratuitous misery. The striking visuals, particularly of rows of plastic hands moving silently past workers at the factory, accord the film a kind of quiet poetry, while Prabha\u2019s turn as a woman cornered in every way, and yet refusing to concede her dignity, makes it a stirring, even rousing watch.<\/p>\n Stream it on Tubi<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A series of eerie images open this Slovakian horror: a girl with a bloody scalp, a woman surrounded by snakes in dark woods, a terrifying tragedy that strikes with the suddenness of lightning. But for all its gothic stylings and witchy themes, \u201cNightsiren\u201d \u2014 which follows a young woman who returns to the provincial hometown she fled as a child \u2014 is less about otherworldly terrors than those of the flesh-and-blood world of men and women. When Sarlota (Natalia Germani) arrives at her mother\u2019s cabin, having received an official letter about her inheritance, she first elicits disbelief and then morbid curiosity from the townspeople, who thought she was long dead. They are secretive and highly superstitious, and whisper stories of murderous hags, evil children and pagan congregations. Sarlota also has secrets of her own, slowly drawn out by her only friend in the village, Mira (Eva Mores), a young woman whose brazenness infuriates the predatory men and conservative women of the town. As it twists and turns, \u201cNightsiren\u201d becomes increasingly delirious in its folkloric visions and sharp in its social critiques, exposing myth as a desperate cover for misogyny, bigotry and the biggest boogeyman of them all: fear of the other.<\/p>\n Stream it on Ovid<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The original French title of Nora El Hourch\u2019s Paris-set drama is too raunchy to spell out in this paper, but it captures the film\u2019s spirit perfectly: a nickname combining \u201cHLM,\u201d the term for low-income housing in France, and a reference to a female body part. It\u2019s an insult lobbed at Djeneba (M\u00e9dina Diarra), by her classmates, which she and her best friends \u2014 Zineb (Salma Takaline), and Amina (L\u00e9ah Aubert) \u2014 reclaim with their indefatigable spunk.<\/p>\n The fact that Amina is actually wealthy and doesn\u2019t live in the projects, or that Djeneba, who is Black, receives the worst of the bullying, doesn\u2019t affect their bond. The three are an indivisible unit: sisters who share in each other\u2019s joys and woes, and new-age feminists unafraid to give back as they get.<\/p>\n But when Zineb starts being harassed by her brother\u2019s older friend, things get darker. #MeToo is in the air, and Amina recklessly takes matters into her own hands using the Zoomers weapon of choice: social media. The consequences ripple. Suddenly, differences of class and race become real, and the stakes of the fight for women\u2019s safety, and the courage and solidarity it requires, are impressed upon our heroines. \u201cSisterhood\u201d is funny, moving and refreshingly angry<\/em>: a tribute to a generation of girls coming-of-age amid a cultural shift, and rewriting the rules for what they can demand from each other and the world around them.<\/p>\n\u2018Nightsiren\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018Sisterhood\u2019<\/h2>\n
\u2018Runner\u2019<\/h2>\n