“You guys are soft. You know what makes you that way? You’re up to your necks in IOUs. You’re suckers. You’re scared to get out on your own.”

That’s how the sociopathic hitchhiking kidnapper Emmett Myers (William Talman) differentiates himself from his victims in Ida Lupino’s spare, psychologically kinetic noir. The film is a study of compliance in the face of brutality. The everyman protagonists, Roy (Edmond O’Brien) and Gilbert (Frank Lovejoy), have multiple opportunities to escape their captor, but…

During yesterday’s excellent female filmmaker panel moderated by The Atlantic’s Shirley Li, I noticed a foreign poster for Stanley Donen’s “Charade”—the greatest Hitchcock thriller that Hitch never made—hanging on the wall of filmmaker Chloe Okuno. Sure enough, Donen’s classic plays a significant role in Okuno’s excruciatingly tense feature debut about a New Yorker, Julia (Maika Monroe of “It Follows”), who moves to Bucharest with her fiancé (the ever-fascinating Karl Glusman) and senses that she is being stalked. Okuno beautifully crafts…

Lakes, rivers, and oceans are so essential to my being, with the deepness and the ebb and flow. Watching Haroula Rose's film "Once Upon A River" I felt these connections cinematically through the main character, Margo (Kenadi DelaCerna). Her journey is very different then my own, but with every touch of the water, the submergence through the waves, I felt exhilarated and felt one with the river, like Margo. The river paces the film, and the people she meets take…

Isabel Sandoval is not just about making great films, she is about making meaningful films that express her vision and point of view. Through her personal approach to filmmaking, you feel more connected to her and the world she is in. We love her fresh take on the city of New York, and how she elevates the marginalized through her third feature, “Lingua Franca”. The film is so much more than the premise, but the premise is a strong foundation…

The documentary “Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché” looks at the whole scope of a passionate creative genius punk artist who impacted and represented her musical genre like no one else. The artist is Poly Styrene, a mixed race woman, Somalian and white. She sang about being a woman and a minority in songs like “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” and “Identity”. We are guided through Poly Styrene’s life through her daughter Celeste Bell, who serves as the film’s co-director, and…

Jamie Dack’s shattering debut feature, based on her short of the same name, is anchored by a performance from newcomer Lily McInerny that is sure to rank among the year’s very best. She plays Lea, a teenager eager to escape her surroundings, who finds her ticket in an attractive man twice her age (Jonathan Tucker, whose mere presence evokes memories of Sofia Coppola’s similarly haunting “The Virgin Suicides”). His character provides a meticulous study in the art of grooming, as…