Every month, Film Comment highlights some new (and old) films that we feel deserve a little extra  attention.

Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019) by Nicolas Rapold

“A glib formula might describe Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood as combining the middle-ager, last-chance gambit of Jackie Brown and the lurid revisionist urge to punch up history in Inglourious Basterds. But it’s something at once mature and madly, deeply, and now less collector-ishly in love with Hollywoodland and, even more, its far-flung margins—and here, in the most artificial of settings, Tarantino achieves something genuine and heartfelt.”

 

Aquarela (Victor Kossakovsky, 2019) by Fatima Naqvi

“In Aquarela’s central segment on a sailboat, the film sets us adrift to inspire awe, evoke terror, and—at 48 frames per second—induce vertigo.”

 

One Child Nation (Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang, 2019) by Devika Girish

“Simple, direct, and never sensationalistic in their approach, the co-directors maintain their focus on the theft of autonomy—especially that of women, over their bodies and lives—that has left a whole generation feeling helpless.”

 

What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (Roberto Minervini, 2019) by Tayler Montague

“What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? is at its best an archival document of a group of people at a particular time in their lives . . . Minervini shows what Black people have always done when the world is on fire: live, organize, protect one another, and keep our history at the forefront.”

 

American Factory (Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, 2019) by Eric Hynes

“Julia Reichert’s latest film is both an apex of her practice as well as a departure, attempting to craft a fair, balanced, and dexterous narrative of the entire ecosystem of the factory without forsaking the filmmakers’ underlying values or ultimate loyalties.”