Earth girls are easy movie3/1/2024 Emphasis on “spell,” because first-time feature director Raven Jackson - whose previous shorts “Nettles” and “A Guide to Breathing Underwater” are on the Criterion Channel - certainly casts one. Watching “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” is like dropping into other people’s lives and walking beside them for a spell. Taylor anchors Rockwell’s deft direction and ambitiously time-spanning screenplay with her powerhouse turn tapping into her own hardscrabble backstory as a born-and-raised New Yorker, as well as her palpable kinship with her director, Taylor delivers a performance as fiercely committed to her character as Inez is to Terry - it’s a turn that reflects a massive amount of talent on both sides of the camera. “A Thousand and One” culminates in a gutting conclusion that turns the movie upside down and serves as a sobering reminder of how fucked-up beginnings can hopefully bring about better endings. Piercingly specific in its details, Terry and Inez’s story nevertheless serves as a heart-wrenching microcosm for the greater struggles of Black New Yorkers trying to survive in the face of a rapidly gentrifying city and its police department’s deadly indifference to Black people. But at the end of the movie, after a decades-spanning, bittersweet bond forms and fizzles between them and shattering revelations are had, she tells the older Terry (Josiah Cross), “I fucked up. She has kidnapped him out of the foster care system, which has kept them separated in the aftermath of her stint at Rikers Island beginning in 1993, and now hopes to give him a better life. “There’s more to life than fucked-up beginnings,” Inez, a woman living life in New York on her own terms and brilliantly played by R&B super-artist/actress Teyana Taylor, tells her young son Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola). Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One,” a vivid portrait of Harlem life from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. There are two particularly bruising lines that bookend first-time feature director A.V. The films included here could easily stand as a best-of list of the year, full stop, no superlatives necessary, and we hope that you enjoy them in that spirit.Ĭhristian Blauvelt and Ryan Lattanzio also contributed to this article. And we’re feeling pretty good about 2024.Īmong the best first features of 2023: festival favorites, awards contenders (and, in the case of “American Fiction,” “A Thousand and One,” and “Blue Jean,” already certified award winners), genre offerings, personal histories, and at least one film that hinges on the best fake K-pop band you’ve ever seen. And there are always rising stars worthy of attention. That makes our cheeky little kick-off line - “just how good were this year’s debut features? One of them has already been crowned our best film of the year, and it’s got plenty of company” - both easily repeatable (copy, paste, done) and simply true.īut, more than that, it proves an adage we’ve been touting for years: the art of cinema is alive and thriving.
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