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Holloway
(2024)
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Manuela Lazic
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One is left with the impression that old wounds have been reopened for the spectators’ morbid curiosity at the detriment of the women concerned.
Posted Feb 18, 2025
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Ink Wash
(2024)
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Manuela Lazic
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While the ideas it raises are worth exploring, Ink Wash is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.
Posted Feb 18, 2025
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I Don't Know Who You Are
(2023)
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Angelo Muredda
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Those shaky bookends aside, this is a strong calling card for filmmaker and star, an empathetic character study that effectively balances its punchy genre elements with its human drama...
Posted Dec 04, 2023
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The Plains
(2022)
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Chloe Lizotte
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The Plains’ visual and narrative defiance in refusing to give the viewer a complete picture of Andrew helps it to subvert the clichés of setting a film in a car...
Posted Feb 24, 2023
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Stonewalling
(2022)
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Winnie Wang
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This juxtaposition of different kinds of "labour" skirts contrived academicism, but transcends it through a sense of dramatic urgency: we experience Lynn's story at a distance, but it's no less affecting as a result.
Posted Feb 17, 2023
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Mariupolis 2
(2022)
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Winnie Wang
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Ultimately, Kvedaravičius’ career ends on a high note, his fourth and final film a valuable object that testifies to the courage and resilience of his subjects..
Posted Feb 17, 2023
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The Tragedy of Macbeth
(2021)
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Robert Koehler
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The movie completely loses whatever energy it had to begin with when McDormand exits, because she was bringing the thrust and momentum of pure anger to the drama.
Posted Feb 17, 2023
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The Worst Person in the World
(2021)
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Beatrice Loayza
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Julie is a kind of dream girl for the modern male feminist: a fantasy of liberated womanhood disguised as an exemplar of the “millennial” condition.
Posted Feb 17, 2023
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Alcarràs
(2022)
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Saffron Maeve
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The film’s final beat is devastating, or potentially reassuring, as per the director’s ethos...
Posted Feb 16, 2023
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Aftersun
(2022)
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Jason Anderson
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The Situationists and the Sex Pistols may have had nothing good to say about cheap holidays in other people’s misery, but Wells finds a wealth of beauty and heartache in this one.
Posted Feb 16, 2023
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Nope
(2022)
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Robert Koehler
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This final confrontation is truly a spectacle...
Posted Feb 16, 2023
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Hit the Road
(2021)
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Adam Nayman
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Hit the Road works in enough familiar ways that critics can safely place it within a certain tradition. But it’s also hopefully the start of something new.
Posted Feb 16, 2023
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All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
(2022)
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Guest Haden
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The deplorable current situation stands in stark contrast to an earlier moment, powerfully recalled through archival footage...
Posted Feb 16, 2023
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Women Talking
(2022)
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Winnie Wang
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Women Talking’s articulation of gendered power struggles and feminist reimaginings is finally as muted and grey as its photography in its privileging of affirmation over insight.
Posted Feb 08, 2023
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How to Blow Up a Pipeline
(2022)
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Will Sloan
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How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a pacey, good-looking, and technically adroit thriller with effective suspense sequences smartly modeled on Clouzot...
Posted Sep 29, 2022
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Dual
(2022)
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Robert Koehler
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Riley Stearns’ clone-in-existential-crisis drama Dual suffers from both lazy storytelling and having been beaten to the punch on its high concept by the Mahershala Ali-starring Swan Song.
Posted Aug 02, 2022
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All That Breathes
(2022)
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Robert Koehler
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Sen takes the chaotic world on its own terms, and quietly uncovers a rich metaphor in the bird's tenacity: somehow, even in this place, life can thrive.
Posted Aug 02, 2022
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Riotsville, USA
(2022)
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Robert Koehler
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The film's chronicle acts as a severe indictment of the country and what it owes the people it enslaved—in one form or another—since 1619...
Posted Aug 02, 2022
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The Cathedral
(2022)
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Robert Koehler
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The viewer is asked to be as observant to details, to furtive gestures and to shades of meaning, as D’Ambrose is in adapting his own family story, making The Cathedral a genuinely radical act.
Posted Aug 02, 2022
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Everything Everywhere All at Once
(2022)
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Angelo Muredda
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...the undisciplined product of a pair of spitballing concept artists, who too often find themselves pitching out of hiccups in characterization and allegory and embracing the shiny allure of the new whenever nuance become too much to bear...
Posted Aug 02, 2022
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Living
(2022)
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Robert Koehler
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Living is above all a work of dramatic writing at the highest level, as well as a master class in how to adapt—and improve!—a fine original screenplay from one cultural setting to another.
Posted Aug 02, 2022
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Emergency
(2022)
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Robert Koehler
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Erratically structured as both thriller and comedy, Carey Williams’ Emergency has all the earmarks of being both a Jordan Peele wannabe and a calling-card project for Hollywood, and pulls off neither.
Posted Aug 01, 2022
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I'll Be Your Mirror
(2022)
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Robert Koehler
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Bradley Rust Gray’s blood surely ranked as the most notable failure of all, a lugubrious slice-of-life...
Posted Aug 01, 2022
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Ikiru
(1952)
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Robert Koehler
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Sadness, inside a story of how a single man changes the course of his remaining days, has rarely been expressed with such grace and beauty.
Posted Aug 01, 2022
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EO
(2022)
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Jordan Cronk
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It's a film that doesn't look back so much as point the way forward.
Posted Aug 01, 2022
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Nitram
(2021)
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Michael Sicinski
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Nitram often feels like an exploitation film that simply doesn’t work.
Posted Apr 01, 2022
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The Tale of King Crab
(2021)
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Jay Kuehner
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Such a formal conceit could easily descend into mere pastiche if not for both the undercurrent of melancholy and the formal rigour with which de Righi and Zoppis render nature, which together hint at immanence amid the absurdity.
Posted Apr 01, 2022
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Night Raiders
(2021)
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Katherine Connell
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Night Raiders insists that any way forward in a world barrelling toward cataclysmic political and ecological destruction must involve the knowledge, self-determination, and, crucially, the leadership of Indigenous peoples.
Posted Oct 08, 2021
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Titane
(2021)
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Phil Coldiron
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Ducournau is not naïve: nothing in Titane leads me to believe she is unaware of the ease with which her film will click into its place in the discourse machine.
Posted Oct 08, 2021
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France
(2021)
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Lawrence Garcia
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Dumont has chosen an ideal milieu in which to explore this principle.
Posted Oct 08, 2021
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Ahed's Knee
(2021)
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James Lattimer
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Nadav Lapid continues to take a scalpel to contemporary Israel in Ahed's Knee, although this particular dissection might leave a bigger scar.
Posted Oct 08, 2021
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The Tsugua Diaries
(2021)
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Robert Koehler
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For this viewer, these images of nocturnal dancing are already becoming the iconic ones of the pandemic: silhouetted bodies in motion, resisting entropy and a destructive virus, fighting back the only way they know how. Working it, with joy.
Posted Oct 08, 2021
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Sound of Metal
(2019)
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Angelo Muredda
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As inconsistent and inherently dubious as this aural gambit may be, it achieves a kind of blunt-force effectiveness in tandem with the earnest, wild-eyed performance by Ahmed.
Posted Jul 13, 2021
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Ghost Town Anthology
(2019)
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Josh Cabrita
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This is Québec, its legacy, its numerous attempts to form a national identity; it is a place literally haunted by its past, and Côté refuses to mourn its forthcoming extinction.
Posted Jul 13, 2021
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Nomadland
(2020)
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Robert Koehler
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Nomadland the movie gets lost in its own drift, and, simply, drops off the map.
Posted Jul 13, 2021
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And Then We Danced
(2019)
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Katherine Connell
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Merab's performance is a testament to the things that queer dance and movement can do: a camp revision of national traditions, a defiance of authority, an exorcism of pain, and a leap into a future that is both uncertain and exhilarating.
Posted Jul 13, 2021
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The Traitor
(2019)
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Celluloid Liberation Front
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The film is dynamically suspended between the pathos of rise and fall and the monotony of daily life, though punctually subdued and understated; it flows like a Homeric poem.
Posted Jul 13, 2021
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Invisible Life
(2019)
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Katherine Connell
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The director proves himself less interested in narrative mechanics and causal logic than in the use of affect as an integral mode of perception, and its translation into expressionistic, emotionally charged, sometimes shocking images...
Posted Jul 13, 2021
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Beanpole
(2019)
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Michael Sicinski
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There is a technical sophistication to Beanpole that's hard not to admire. Balagov's plotting is particularly shrewd.
Posted Jul 13, 2021
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Hillbilly Elegy
(2020)
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Darren Hughes
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The film fails in the same banal ways most biopics fail: by racing too quickly from incident to incident and clumsily conforming a complicated life to the ready-made beats of a script outline.
Posted Jul 13, 2021
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A Glitch in the Matrix
(2020)
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Gabrielle Marceau
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...its strength lies precisely in the way that it neither subscribes to nor debunks any particular theory. As tends to be the case, the question is more interesting than the answer.
Posted Jul 13, 2021
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Azor
(2021)
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Jay Kuehner
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Azor ultimately performs a critical inversion of the film's motif of nomenclature: an indexical reckoning of the belongings, purloined and now bankable, of those disappeared by the junta...
Posted Jul 13, 2021
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Possessor: Uncut
(2020)
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Mallory Andrews
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Cronenberg's germ of a thesis in Possessor about the precarious boundaries between our various identities is still one that I find compelling despite the film's shortcomings in fully exploring them.
Posted Jul 12, 2021
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Siberia
(2019)
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Michael Sicinski
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Siberia represents yet another bold new frontier.
Posted Jul 12, 2021
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Beginning
(2020)
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Lawrence Garcia
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I find myself unable to dismiss a film that so resolutely interrogates its own methodologies, shaking up its dramatic, formal, and philosophical foundations in the process.
Posted Jul 12, 2021
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New Order
(2020)
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Adam Nayman
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The expertly calibrated sound design is a character in its own right, manifesting the rebellion in snatches of background radio chatter and small-talk asides before bringing it ear-splittingly into the foreground. The actors are very good too...
Posted Jul 12, 2021
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Genus, Pan
(2020)
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Jesse Cumming
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Andres' recounting of what became of his companions elicits another layer of Diaz's play with narrative.
Posted Jul 12, 2021
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The Calming
(2020)
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Courtney Duckworth
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Buried within The Calming is an observation, if not a Jia-style critique, of how modern atomization ruptures a sense of community.
Posted Jul 12, 2021
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State Funeral
(2019)
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Bob Kotyk
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Loznitsa's massively ambitious oeuvre, which attempt to process Eastern European history through cinematic conjurings of one kind or another, has a new contender for most engrossing entry.
Posted May 06, 2021
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The Inheritance
(2020)
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James Lattimer
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A playful, erudite, and boundary-blurring examination of what performing Black theory, literature, music, and testimony in a contemporary Philadelphia commune might set in motion.
Posted Sep 18, 2020
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