Joe Bell
Joe Bell tells the intimate and emotional true story of an Oregonian father who pays tribute to his gay teenage son Jadin, embarking on a self-reflective walk across America to speak his heart to heartland citizens about the real and terrifying costs of bullying.
Rated R for language including offensive slurs, some disturbing material, and teen partying.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“The entirety of Joe Bell is an awakening not for those who actively harm at-risk youth like Jadin, but those who don’t realize the implicit harm they’re supplying by centering allyship on themselves rather than those they’re supporting.” – Jared Mobarak, The Film Stage
“While formulaic on its face, Green’s film resists the sort of obvious cinematic catharsis expected of such a story, resulting in a final product that earns its emotional beats.” – Kate Erbland, IndieWire
“Green’s grasp of this tender, family-focused story shows equal restraint and compassion, and mastery of a tricky structure.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
Love Is Love Is Love
Love Is Love Is Love is three stories that explore love, commitment, and loyalty between couples and friends. In the film’s first story Two For Dinner, a married couple (Joanne Whalley and Chris Messina) find an unconventional way to transcend long distance through technology, but discover they were farther apart than they knew. In Sailing Lesson, a long-married couple (Kathy Baker and Marshall Bell) tries to reignite their honeymoon-phase heat through a spontaneous sailing trip… and unexpected events arise. And in Late Lunch, a young woman (Maya Kazan) who recently lost her mother gathers together a group of her mother’s friends (including Cybill Shepherd, Rosanna Arquette, and Rita Wilson) to share memories. Surprising revelations ensue.
Not Rated. Contains language, and thematic and suggestive material.
Description provided by Metacritic.
“No one else in Hollywood takes middle-aged women seriously, so Eleanor Coppola’s calm, patience, and insight provide an unusual movie experience.” – Armond White, National Review
“The three vignettes in this at times tender, occasionally amusing adventure in romance, marriage and friendship provide a number of textured moments for their female performers.” – Lisa Kennedy, Variety
The Quake
In 1904 an earthquake with a 5.4 magnitude on the Richter scale shook Oslo. Its epicenter was in the Oslo Rift which runs directly through the Norwegian capital. There are recorded quakes from the rift on a daily basis and geologists cannot be sure, but arguments indicate that we can expect major future earthquakes in this area. When – nobody can say for certain – but we know that the density of people and infrastructure in Oslo is significantly more vulnerable today than in 1904. What if a massive earthquake is looming?
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of peril and destruction, injury images, and brief strong language.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“Director Andersen’s pacing is dynamic, allowing white-knuckled viewers to catch their breaths before he takes it away again. This isn’t a sequel, it’s an after-shock – and a doozy at that.” – Brad Wheeler, The Globe and Mail
“With well-staged action, good character work, and believable progressions from the previous installment, The Quake is the sequel that fans of The Wave deserve.” – Warren Cantrell, The Playlist
“John Andreas Andersen’s The Quake, a sequel to the excellent 2015 Norwegian disaster film The Wave, should be required viewing for all of today’s Hollywood franchise jockeys. It shows you how to make one of these things without sacrificing your characters’ souls (or your own, for that matter).” – Bilge Ebiri, Vulture
Shoplifters
After one of their shoplifting sessions, Osamu and his son come across a little girl in the freezing cold. At first reluctant to shelter the girl, Osamu’s wife agrees to take care of her after learning of the hardships she faces. Although the family is poor, barely making enough money to survive through petty crime, they seem to live happily together until an unforeseen incident reveals hidden secrets, testing the bonds that unite them.
Rated R for some sexual content and nudity.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“Tolstoy got it wrong and Shoplifters gets it right. All happy families are not the same. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s enchanting, subversive masterpiece takes on family values and bourgeois pieties through a Japanese crime family that is not what it seems.” – Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal
“In the past, Kore-eda’s delicacy has at times enervated his movies. Here, though, the family’s toughness, thieving and secrets, its poverty and desperation, work like ballast on his sensibilities. In their grubby imperfections, Kore-eda finds a perfect story about being human.” – Manohla Dargis, New York Times
“For all its gentle groundedness, a quality that suffuses much of Kore-eda’s work, Shoplifters strenuously resists romanticizing its main characters. Its compassion is more convincing for it. So is its brilliance.” – Inkoo Kang, Slate
The Invitation
The tension is palpable when Will (Logan Marshall-Green) shows up to a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and new husband David (Michiel Huisman). The estranged divorcees’ tragic past haunts an equally eerie present; amid Eden’s suspicious behavior and her mysterious house guests, Will becomes convinced that his invitation was extended with a hidden agenda.
Not Rated. Contains strong language, violence, drug use, and brief nudity.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“Psychological thrillers just don’t get any better than this.” – Calvin Wilson, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Kusama ratchets the story’s tension masterfully, building to a final shot that’s as chilling as it is perfect.” – Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly
“Kusama’s handling of point of view is diabolically shrewd. She maximizes the terror potential of the vapidly ostentatious modernist mansion without fetishizing it. She intensifies the monstrosity of some of the characters by making them all too human. And as for guessing the ending — good luck.” – Peter Keough, Boston Globe
Hot Money
With wit, satire, and historical context, Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, General Wesley Clark and his son Wes Clark Jr. take us on a journey through the financial circulatory system connecting farmers, homeowners, bankers, academics, and business professionals in a tale that explains the knot of economic forces that can lead to collapse and how to untie it.
Not Rated. Contains language.
Description provided by IMDb.
“Hot Money is an eye-opening trip to the Wild West of finance – and we could all be goners.” – Tim Appelo, AARP Movies for Grownups
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
Anna is too busy with schoolwork and friends to notice Hitler’s face glaring from posters plastered all over 1933 Berlin. But when her father (Oliver Masucci) – based on the prominent theater critic Alfred Kerr – suddenly vanishes, the family is secretly hurried out of Germany. Anna begins to understand life will never be the same as she and her family navigate unfamiliar lands and cope with the challenges of being refugees.
Not Rated. Contains thematic material.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“Kerr’s book (and this adaptation) are ultimately a testament to resilience and family love.” – Sandie Angulo Chen, Common Sense Media
“Link brings handsome period production values and a lyrical, restrained sensibility to a narrative that might not qualify as riveting, but exerts its own unmistakable emotional pull.” – Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
“Faithfully brings the autobiographical novel to the screen for younger generations. A poignant way to bring the emotional difficulty of becoming an exile to a child’s level.” – Nora Lee Mandel, Maven’s Nest
The Wanting Mare
In Whithren, a line of women pass a recurring dream through multiple generations.
Not Rated. Contains thematic material.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“It’s remarkable how fully fleshed out Bateman’s hell-scape is, given that much of this movie was shot in an empty storage facility. There’s something haunting and poetic too about the simplicity of this story, which is primarily about how people find reasons to persevere once they find a companion.” – Noel Murray, Los Angeles Times
“It’s as if Nicholas Ashe Bateman is commenting on a distinctly American suburban malaise, using a fictional place, digitally made, to get at a real, painful truth about being stuck in a place you didn’t choose, amid circumstances you didn’t create.” – Henry Stewart, Slate
“Bateman’s worldbuilding introduces stranger elements that are always counterbalanced by more grounded emotional developments, keeping the audience engaged as hard as the esoteric mythology pushes them away. In that delicate balance it bypasses the logical parts of the brain and speaks purely in quiet emotional truths.” – Richard Whittaker, Austin Chronicle
Together Together
When young loner Anna (Patti Harrison) is hired as the gestational surrogate for Matt (Ed Helms), a single man in his 40s who wants a child, the two strangers come to realize this unexpected relationship will quickly challenge their perceptions of connection, boundaries and the particulars of love.
Rated R for some sexual references and language.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“It’s bright and witty and packed with laughs, but those laughs stem from real empathy and understanding of its characters.” – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap
“Stuffed with bombastic bit parts from a roster of recent television’s greatest comedic talents and casually incisive dialogue that lays waste to media empires and preconceptions of women’s autonomy alike, the film is an unexpected, welcome antidote to emotional isolation and toxic masculinity that meanders in and out of life lessons at a pleasingly inefficient clip.” – Shayna Maci Warner, Paste
“It’s a lovely sort of chemistry that develops in fits and starts over the course of the film, with both Helms and Harrison giving carefully modulated performances that are full of delightfully specific verbal tics and terrific comedic timing.” – Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune
The Innkeepers
After over one hundred years of service, The Yankee Pedlar Inn is shutting its doors for good. The last remaining employees – Claire and Luke – are determined to uncover proof of what many believe to be one of New England’s most haunted hotels. As the Inn’s final days draw near, odd guests check in as the pair of minimum wage “ghost hunters” begin to experience strange and alarming events that may ultimately cause them to be mere footnotes in the hotel’s long unexplained history.
Rated R for some bloody images and language.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“Ghost movies like this, depending on imagination and craft, are much more entertaining than movies that scare you by throwing a cat at the camera.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
“West, who demonstrated a penchant for extensive build-ups in The House of the Devil and Trigger Man, continually makes it unclear if the inn actually harbors a ghost or if his heroine (Sara Paxton) has simply imagined it.” – Eric Kohn, IndieWire
“What makes The Innkeepers such an unnerving experience isn’t the outright horror but rather the lack of it. West mines every single floorboard creek and shadowy corridor for maximum frisson; this film ventures far beyond creepy and into the rarely explored land of genuine, incremental fear.” – Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle
Drunk Bus
Michael (Charlie Tahan) is a recent graduate whose post-college plan is derailed when his girlfriend leaves him for a job in New York City. When the bus service hires a security guard to watch over the night shift, Michael comes face to tattooed face with Pineapple, a 300-pound punk rock Samoan.
Not Rated. Contains strong language throughout, sexual content, mild violence, and drug use.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“It becomes something heartfelt yet funny—a truly hard balance to strike—but Drunk Bus pulls through for our enjoyment.” – Monica Castillo, RogerEbert.com
“Here is the rare kind of often sweet college comedy with good-natured laughs that captures a side of the process rarely seen in frat comedies: the divide between those in the service industry and those that have the luxury to party eight days a week.” – John Fink, The Film Stage
“Drunk Bus straps you in for a semi-wild, uplifting ride out of somber darkness and into speedy reclamation.” – Matt Donato, /Film
Jallikattu
A portrait of a remote village where a buffalo escapes and causes a frenzy of ecstatic violence.
Not Rated. Contains violence, bloody images, sexual content, language, and smoking.
Description provided by Metacritic.
“The film spans about a day and runs a mere 90-minutes, but in that time, it undergoes a stunning metamorphosis, from a naturalistic depiction of rural Kerala to a winking, expressionistic nightmare.” – Siddhant Adlakha, Observer
“When Jallikattu lets it rip, it’s as exciting and unusual an experience as you’re likely to get this year. Grab it by its horns and don’t dare let go.” – Barry Hertz, The Globe and Mail
“A fever-pitch, adrenaline-soaked vortex of social issues drama, deconstruction of the male id, and hokey, hubristic descent into hell, this crazed howl of human brutality morphing inexorably into bestial savagery deserves, and feels destined to find, a willingly cultish following on the festival circuit.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety
Undergods
An otherworldly journey through a Europe in decline, Undergods is a collection of darkly humorous fantasy tales about a series of men whose worlds fall apart through a visit from an unexpected stranger. Set to an original, synth score featuring ‘80s electronica, Undergods journeys through disparate eras and realities fusing failed 20th Century utopias and 21st Century Ikea nightmares.
Not Rated. Contains violence, disturbing images, language, and sexual content.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“Moya’s vision may be bleak — and ‘vision’ is the right word to describe the Spanish-born director’s stunning capacity to create images and atmosphere — but there’s something unnervingly familiar about the world he creates in his feature debut.” – Peter Debruge, Variety
“A riptide of surrealism runs through Chino Moya’s ambitious debut feature, a fantasy suite of tales that don’t so much interlock as butt into one another and blurt out alarming, dreamlike correspondences.” – Phil Hoad, The Guardian
“This arresting first feature blends sci-fi and fantasy to create a worldview which is at once savagely grotesque and alarmingly familiar.” – Wendy Ide, Screen Daily
The Guilty
When police officer Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) is demoted to desk work, he expects a sleepy beat as an emergency dispatcher. That all changes when he answers a panicked phone call from a kidnapped woman who then disconnects abruptly. Asger, confined to the police station, is forced to use others as his eyes and ears as the severity of the crime slowly becomes more clear. The search to find the missing woman and her assailant will take every bit of his intuition and skill, as a ticking clock and his own personal demons conspire against him.
Rated R for language throughout.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“The film’s narrow visual focus – much of the drama plays out in the face of police officer Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) – accentuates the crackling cleverness of a screenplay that allows us to unravel a mystery in real time.” – Wendy Ide, The Observer
“The Guilty is an absolute workout that pulls the rug out from under you just when you think you have it figured out. The last ten minutes will keep you rattled long after you’ve left the theater.” – Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly
“The Guilty is smartly constructed and tautened with regular twists, but, if it were merely clever, it wouldn’t test your nerves as it does. Its view of human error is rarely less than abrasive, and most of the adult characters, visible and invisible, are enmeshed in a hell of good intentions.” – Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
Sophie Jones
Stunned by the untimely death of her mother and struggling with the myriad challenges of teendom, Sophie (Jessica Barr) tries everything she can to feel something again, while holding herself together.
Not Rated. Contains strong language and sexual content.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“In the overstuffed indie coming-of-age subgenre, Sophie Jones makes an unassuming, honest contribution. Which is exactly what it needed to do to stand out among the endless pomp and quirk.” – Lena Wilson, The Playlist
“It would be nice if there were more movies like this, but few have the talent to make them this well — to take a human scale story and make it feel, not bigger than life, but as grand-scale as life actually is.” – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
“Director Barr’s intimate filmmaking finds the space to cover a multitude of moments in Sophie’s life that add up to something profound, from the mundane sequences that see her fully engaging with her grief to brief moments of respite.” – Kate Erbland, IndieWire
Aniara
Aniara is the story of one of the many spaceships used for transporting Earth’s fleeing population to their new home-planet Mars. But just as the ship leaves the destroyed Earth, she collides with space junk and is thrown off her course. The passengers slowly realize that they’ll never be able to return. The protagonist, MR, runs a room where a sentient computer allows humans to experience near-spiritual memories of the Earth. As the ship drifts further into the endless void more and more passengers are in need of MRs services. Pressure builds on MR as she is the only one who can keep the growing insanity and lethal depression at bay. In Aniara’s inexorable journey towards destruction there is a warning that cannot be emphasized enough. There’s only one Earth. It’s time to take responsibility for our actions.
Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, disturbing images, and drug use.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“With Aniara, the Swedish writing-directing team Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja deliver a cold, cruel, piercingly humane sci-fi parable that’s both bang on the zeitgeist and yet also unnervingly original.” – Leslie Felperin, The Guardian
“The bleak warning of this environmental parable notwithstanding, this is arresting, frequently unsettling, cinema.” – Wendy Ide, Screen Daily
“This tale of a spaceship stuck wandering the cosmos after being forced off course is both impressive in its scope and intimate in its portrait of human nature under long-term duress.” – Dennis Harvey, Variety
Project Gutenberg
The Hong Kong police are hunting a counterfeiting gang led by a mastermind code-named “Painter”. In order to crack his true identity, the police recruit gang member Lee Man.
Not Rated. Contains strong violence.
Description provided by IMDb.
“Chong’s plot-heavy script has its share of pleasures, chiefly the opportunity for Chow to be more charmingly badass and threatening than he’s been in a long time (and clearly loving it).” – Elizabeth Kerr, Hollywood Reporter
“Derivation is rarely as entertaining as this slick Hong Kong effort about a high-stakes counterfeiting operation – and rarely comes with such compelling and engaging performances…” – Sarah Ward, Screen Daily
“For all the incredulity its storytelling induces, the film affords screen legend Chow [Yun-fat] the most intriguing part he has played in years.” – Edmund Lee, South China Morning Post
Preparations to Be Together For an Unknown Period of Time
After 20 years in the United States, Márta, a Hungarian neurosurgeon, returns to Budapest for a romantic rendezvous with a fellow doctor she met at a conference. When the love of her life is nowhere to be seen, she tracks him down only to have the bewildered man claim the two have never met.
Not Rated. Contains disturbing images, nudity, and strong sexual content.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“The second feature by Hungarian writer-director Horvat plays in the thin space between love, madness and consciousness. There are pleasing overlaps with Alain Resnais’s Je T’aime Je T’aime and An Affair to Remember, but Preparations is unique.” – Tara Brady, The Irish Times
“As its delightfully loquacious title suggests, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is both methodical and enigmatic. It’s a movie that sees no real contradiction between the rational and irrational, only degrees of difference. The instinctive intelligence and curiosity that Márta brings to her emotional investigation, tempered by the kind of humility that only comes with great knowledge, is what makes her such an involving protagonist — someone you naturally want to follow down any rabbit hole that may present itself.” – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
“This crystalline tale of memory, love and brain surgery from writer-director Lili Horvát (who made 2015’s The Wednesday Child) is a treat – sinewy, seductive and beautifully strange.” – Mark Kermode, The Observer
Queen Marie
Devastated by the First World War and plunged into political controversy, Romania’s every hope accompanies its queen on her mission to Paris to lobby for international recognition of its great unification at the 1919 peace talks.
Not Rated. Contains nudity and sexual content.
Description provided by Rotten Tomatoes.
“Queen Marie is an intriguing portrait of a determined woman struggling to hold both her family and her country together.” – Nicole Ackman, Next Best Picture
“Whether you’re obsessed or repulsed by royalty, [Roxana Lupu’s] performance will leave you in awe of the power of the crown when it is wielded by the right woman.” – Bennett Campbell Ferguson, Willamette Week
“It’s a complex story told simply, that pings the intense misogyny of the times, but celebrates Marie’s early feminism and bravery, and tireless efforts on behalf of a country not her own.” – Anne Brodie, What She Said
Dark Blood
A prisoner endures abuse from guards and inmates while serving a sentence for a brutal revenge crime.
Not Rated. Contains strong violence, language throughout, thematic material, nudity, and sexual content.
Description provided by Rotten Tomatoes.
“John Leguizamo gives a powerful performance in this grim, intense Colombian prison drama.” – Josh Bell, Crooked Marquee
“Thanks to Trompetero’s almost documentary-like direction and a career-best performance from Leguizamo, what we witness, what Misael endures, is too real, too painful, too tortuous at times to watch.” – Douglas Davidson, Elements of Madness
Tyrel
Tyler (Jason Mitchell) joins his friend on a trip to the Catskills for a weekend birthday party with several people he doesn’t know. As soon as they get there, it’s clear that (1) he’s the only black guy, and (2) it’s going to be a weekend of heavy drinking. Although Tyler is welcomed, he can’t help but feel uneasy in “Whitesville.” The combination of all the testosterone and alcohol starts to get out of hand, and Tyler’s precarious situation starts to feel like a nightmare.
Not Rated. Contains strong language throughout, drug use, and brief nudity.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“It’s painful, paranoiac stuff, and your heart breaks for Tyler, who feels increasingly trapped among a crew of rowdy, drunk, irreverent white dudes, as these little injustices mount.” – Emily Yoshida, Vulture
“The stranger Tyrel gets, the more accurate it feels. The ecosystem of behaviors and attitudes on display is so unnervingly sharp that some of us may well find ourselves wincing in recognition.” – Bilge Ebiri, New York Times
“Tyrel works best as an examination of masculinity and race. It’s fascinating and Silva is smart enough to let the camera just observe his subjects and let the audience make their own conclusions about what’s unfolding on screen.” – Maria Lattila, Film Inquiry
My Fiona
Following the suicide of her best friend, Jane finds purpose in helping her friend’s wife with their child. In doing so, she becomes inadvertently drawn into an intimate relationship bound by grief that’s potentially catastrophic to the healing for all those involved.
Not Rated. Contains language, sexual content, and thematic material.
Description provided by Rotten Tomatoes.
“[A] kind-hearted look at the ugly, uncomfortable routes through mourning and self-discovery.” – Carmen Paddock, One Room With a View
“The growing closeness between Gemma and Jane is framed sensitively, their shared love for Fiona entraps them in each-other’s orbit.” – Emily Maskell, Flip Screen
The Inheritance
After nearly a decade exploring different facets of the African diaspora — and his own place within it — Ephraim Asili makes his feature-length debut with The Inheritance, an astonishing ensemble work set almost entirely within a West Philadelphia house where a community of young, Black artists and activists form a collective. A scripted drama of characters attempting to work towards political consensus — based partly on Asili’s own experiences in a Black liberationist group — weaves with a documentary recollection of the Philadelphia liberation group MOVE, the victim of a notorious police bombing in 1985. Ceaselessly finding commonalties between politics, humor, and philosophy, with Black authors and radicals at its edges, The Inheritance is a remarkable film about the world as we know it.
Contains strong language and thematic material.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“…like anyone who’s spent countless hours making something (anything) happen, Asili knows the most profound gift any of us can give is our labor, both mental and physical. In the perfect final shot we see an honest, monotonous depiction of the latter after 100 minutes of basking in the intoxicating glow of the former. Unquestionably one of this year’s great films, The Inheritance seeks to position them both on equal planes of historical and individual experience, one invariably informing the other.” – Glenn Heath, Jr., The Film Stage
“The Inheritance, Ephraim Asili’s debut feature film, beautifully abandons genre to consider questions about community, art and Black liberation.” – Lovia Gyarkye, New York Times
“The Inheritance is a metrical, stunning piece of cinema. There’s so much to unpack within its layers, and its vision and dissection of what Blackness means for Julian and his community is absorbing, perceptive, and stirring. Asili is truly a talent worth keeping an eye on.” – Jenny Nulf, Austin Chronicle
Akilla’s Escape
In a crime-noir about the urban child-soldier, Akilla Brown captures a fifteen-year-old Jamaican boy in the aftermath of an armed robbery. Over one grueling night, Akilla confronts a cycle of generational violence he thought he escaped.
Not Rated. Contains strong language, thematic material, and violence.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“Akilla’s Escape recasts the monolithic narrative of gang involvement as one that rejects a trope of Black peril in order to tell a multi-dimensional story of resilience – one where keen strategists are developed through unsolvable situations, where the enduring love of Black mothers demonstrates what it means to walk into the line of fire and where, amidst abject tumult, moments of tenderness and triumph persist against all odds.” – Melissa Vincent, The Globe and Mail
“Akilla’s Escape offers few answers when it comes to ending the generational traumas its characters carry, but the unique force with which it expresses the life-altering weight of such burdens meaningfully moves the conversation around them forward.” – Isaac Feldberg, Paste
“A mature crime picture whose decades-hopping action makes the effects of generational poverty obvious without having to spell it out, it lacks some of the flash expected in commercial genre pictures, but makes up for that in seriousness.” – John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter
Closed for Storm
A documentary detailing the history of a massive American theme park that was eventually left completely abandoned.
Not Rated. Contains mild language.
Description provided by IMDb.
“Closed For Storm is a great film for those keen on urban exploration and abandoned places, but who want a deeper dive into the backstory with a more informative experience. It’s clearly made by people who are passionate about the history of modern ruins and the nostalgia it serves.” – Jordy Reviews It
“This story is bananas. I had no idea that a theme park of this size could just, nearly overnight, become abandoned. Lately, I’m rethinking a lot of things I didn’t think were possible, but this kind of exploration is endlessly fascinating.” – Christopher Stipp, /Film
Woman at War
Halla is a fifty-year-old independent woman. But behind the scenes of a quiet routine, she leads a double life as a passionate environmental activist. Known to others only by her alias “The Woman of the Mountain,” Halla secretly wages a one-woman-war on the local aluminum industry. As Halla’s actions grow bolder, from petty vandalism to outright industrial sabotage, she succeeds in pausing the negotiations between the Icelandic government and the corporation building a new aluminum smelter. But right as she begins planning her biggest and boldest operation yet, she receives an unexpected letter that changes everything. Her application to adopt a child has finally been accepted and there is a little girl waiting for her in Ukraine. As Halla prepares to abandon her role as saboteur and savior of the Highlands to fulfill her dream of becoming a mother, she decides to plot one final attack to deal the aluminum industry a crippling blow.
Not Rated. Contains mild language, disturbing images, thematic material, and brief nudity.
Description and score provided by Metacritic.
“Woman at War is a beautiful hoot.” – Steve Pond, The Wrap
“With a masterful melding of the serious, the comic, the ridiculous and the musical, Woman at War is joyful to experience though difficult to sum up.” – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
“Erlingsson’s genius lies in how he puts it all together with such witty intelligence, arranging beautifully shot picaresque episodes around a central figure who lives the ideals of the heroes she has hanging on her wall, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.” – Jay Weissberg, Variety