The Bentonville Film Festival is one of the most progressive in the world, understanding that elevating different voices changes the artistic landscape for the better. This year’s edition just wrapped yesterday, and included a program of which 71% of the projects were directed by women, 75% by people that are BIPOC or AAPI, and 87%…

If you’re in the right frame of mind, “Naked Singularity” might be the sort of film that you like more than you expect to, and that you find yourself thinking about even though you wished it were better. There’s something off-kilter about it, in a good way. It has a confidence that might not be…

“Swan Song” works best in the small moments it creates for its main character, real-life hairdresser to the Sandusky, Ohio stars, Pat Pitsenbarger. I was moved by these little nuggets of digression; taken by themselves, they add up to a profound statement about how one generation’s struggle made life a bit easier for those who…

Lucy Walker’s “Bring Your Own Brigade” is not the documentary you expect it to be. For years now, climate change warnings have been a documentary genre unto themselves, as new information about what we’re doing to this planet filters through non-fiction filmmaking and to audiences that, sadly, don’t seem to be heeding enough of their…

What begins in lively and vibrant fashion as the title would suggest gets bogged down in a literal and figurative swamp in “Vivo.” The animated, family-friendly musical adventure from director and co-writer Kirk DeMicco (“The Croods”) and co-director Brandon Jeffords offers a rich and colorful sense of place, particularly during its early passages in Cuba.…

In Pascual Sisto’s piercing directorial debut “John and the Hole,” a dark and inventive psychodrama pitched on the vanishing borders of adolescence, 13-year-old John discovers a bunker somewhere in the woods that surround his upscale New England home. That’s the foundation of the film’s title for you in a nutshell, in the most verbatim sense.…