Film Intuition: Review Database: May 2019

5/31/2019

Movie Review: #Like (2019)

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For Now She Dances: Part Two

(Click to Read Part One)

Introduction:

Written and directed by women, two feature filmmaking debuts centered on female vigilante badassery were released this week. Involving not only the same jumping off point of a world — in both, upstate New York — where men who wrong women go unpunished but similar themes as well, the two cathartic films allow us to live vicariously through their anti-heroines as they scream, dance, and fight their way back to life with various levels of success. Come along on their journey and click here to read the review of A Vigilante.

#Like Review:

Rosie has a plan. She's "gonna find that dick" who cyber stalked her talented kid sister into taking her own life and Rosie's "gonna make him pay." But for now she dances, flailing about — burning off flickers of rage — to psych herself up.

Having broken into her sister Amelia's Facebook account, Rosie (brilliantly played by Sarah Rich) unblocks all of Amelia's contacts and starts dutifully recording the evidence by gathering screenshots.

Tracking down one potential lead whose alarming messages imply that he's a local, the high school cheerleader follows him across her sister's accounts until it creeps her out enough that she puts a sticker over her webcam, and lets her sister's YouTube videos put her to sleep.

When the police burst her bubble with the realization that they have little jurisdiction in the legal wild west of cyberspace and that the perp would basically have to walk into the station and confess, Rosie goes into detective mode.

Traveling home from the Woodstock, New York police station, she immediately stumbles upon, and begins pursuing a suspect in one of the film's early plausibility missteps.

Targeting a general contractor (well played by Marc Menchaca) whose language and interests seem to fit the online stalker's personality and profile to a T, Rosie lays a trap for the man while her mom's out of town.

Later, she tells it to him straight: "I'm going to f**k with you." And that she does but she gets more than she bargained for when the man starts talking and she's filled with confusion as well as doubt.

A great set up all around with a pitch perfect name for its subject as well as its marketing campaign, #Like is the type of film that I gravitated to as a young screenwriter early on and doubly so after running away (at age twelve) from two men in a truck.

In fact, one of my first scripts chronicled twenty-four crazy hours in a teenage girl's life after she kidnapped a man to stop him from kidnapping a child. And intriguingly, #Like suffers from the exact same problems that my thematically similar work did. By kicking things off with such an intense first act and a half, anything after — unless just as epically plotted — feels like a letdown.

While #Like manages to deliver a few unexpected twists (which run the gamut of credibility), unfortunately, and just like the other female vigilante movie released this week, the film loses its focus considerably as things continue on.

Still a far better genre centric offering overall than the aforementioned experimental character driven effort, A Vigilante, with a woman writing for and about women once again, it's no surprise that #Like offers a stellar showcase for its young leading lady (newcomer Sarah Rich).

A strong feature filmmaking debut for award-winning writer-director-producer Sarah Pirozek, in spite of #Like's stumbles, the film makes you mighty curious to see what she will do next.

Bolstered by an instantly relatable premise that — as a woman both online and in the real world — definitely hits home, #Like ends on a note of pitch perfect unease that you'll immediately want to discuss with a friend. Needless to say, just like with Rosie and her music, Pirozek's film appeals to our justified anger, and (much like recharging a battery) easily psychs us up.

Click Here to Read - For Now She Dances: Part One - A Vigilante Review

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: A Vigilante (2018)

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For Now She Dances: Part One

(Click to Read Part Two)

"Love, I feel like it was gone, gone, gone, gone

Let's do this like a prison break

I want to see you scream and shake."

- "Black Tongue" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Sadie keeps a fork in the door and a knife under her pillow. Tomorrow she'll fight but for now she dances with abandon to remind herself of her humanity at a time when color has been drained out of her world.

With tight, graphic novel like frames and minimal external light, the hues of writer-director Sarah Daggar-Nickson's feature filmmaking debut are dulled down as if every shot had been captured, filtered, and then washed over by a sea of gray paint.

Keeping us with Sadie (Olivia Wilde) every step of the way, as she keeps moving so does the cinematographer's camera, zooming in claustrophobically close to watch her make her way from one abusive home to the next to deliver a darkly inspiring sense of justice to the world.

"I know what you do to her," she tells a wife-beating husband at the start of the movie in a voice that's loaded with experience.

Facilitating transfers of titles, bank accounts, and job resignations to remove (largely male) abusers from dangerous home situations, Sadie gives the first man we see onscreen a warning that if he bothers his wife and kids again, she'll kill him, adding sincerely, "I want to kill you."

Cutting through the drama to reach the truth of the scene at once, with that chilling line delivery, Wilde lets us know that yes, not only is this extremely personal, but she's also dancing precariously to the border of chaos and control.

Alone back in her cheap motel room with a fork in the door and that day's inevitable disguise off, we get our confirmation as to just what life must be like for Sadie when the camera focuses on a series of hellish scars on her upper back right before she has a panic attack.

"We're going to keep it in the family

Yeah, well, even though we're on the run."

- "Black Tongue" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Playing a victim of both abuse and PTSD who travels from one place to another to try and build a better ending to someone else's story rather than dwell on her own, Wilde gives a masterful performance in the film and completely loses herself in her role. Likewise, steeped in authenticity and featuring the stories and words of real support group participants, the film is as haunting as it is riveting.

Swinging like a pendulum from various moments in time in Sadie's life, long before it reaches its inevitable — albeit meanderingly overlong — conclusion, it runs out of narrative gas about midway through. Unfortunately, you get the sense that as well-intentioned as it is, A Vigilante would have been much more successful had the director fallen back on the skills in her past and turned it into a longer short.

Produced by its star and released on disc and demand a week after Olivia Wilde's own female-centric directorial debut Booksmart hit theaters, rather than build the plot like a traditional genre film, we are served up one searing, unflinching look at the worst impulses of man throughout, for better and worse.

And although it's recommended more on its premise than its overall execution as it loses and confuses us in places with its time jumps, Wilde, in her tour de force performance as Sadie stays strong.

Closing herself off with her knife and fork, she reminds herself she's human in between beatdowns, moving with intensity — while losing herself to a Yeah Yeah Yeahs beat — as she waits for tomorrow.

Click Here to Read - For Now She Dances: Part Two - #Like Review

5/23/2019

Film Movement Movie Review: The Third Wife (2018)

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Taking us back to a time when a woman's worth was entirely dependent upon her role as a dutiful wife, a passionate lover, and her ability to deliver male children, Ash Mayfair draws inspiration from her female ancestors who were married into arranged polygamous unions when they were little more than girls for her feature film debut, The Third Wife.

While stylistic and narrative echoes of films like Raise the Red Lantern and especially The Piano are evident on the screen right from the start, perhaps one of — if not the film than Mayfair's — biggest offscreen influences is none other than David Fincher.

Recalling an NYU lecture in an interview about the film and her process, Mayfair notes that he gave students the invaluable advice to, as she says, "tell your story more than a thousand times to everyone...[as] the fat will eventually fall away and you are left with the meat of what really matters."

And all it takes is the first ten minutes of her understated film — centered on a fourteen-year-old girl's coming-of-age and eventual sexual awakening after she becomes the third bride of a wealthy landowner in nineteenth century Vietnam — for us to see how much she's taken Fincher's advice to heart and for better or worse.

Packing each frame with literal and symbolic meaning care of hypnotic visuals, on the one hand, Mayfair's ability to show vs. tell us what our lead is feeling emotionally is especially fitting because this isn't a setting in which women were free to share their thoughts. At the same time, Wife could have also benefited from giving the audience a helping hand, especially considering the fact that it introduces us to virtually all of its main characters during one dinner table scene early on.

Filled with not only a half dozen new principal players but also foreshadowing, it's the definition of chaotic. Using context clues to try and piece together just who everyone is in relation to one another (to the point that I had to watch the scene twice), even if you're able to correctly deduce who everyone is on the first go round, you're so busy making mental connections that the scenes with key exchanges that take place immediately after lose some of their impact.

Needless to say, as a fan of long sentences, I innately understand the urge to just get all of the information out there at once but because our understanding of so much in Wife hinges on that early sequence, a more traditional introduction or segue would've strengthened Ash Mayfair's otherwise powerful film all the more.

Winner of the Spike Lee Production Fund in 2014, the lushly photographed feminist film might be a period piece but it still has far reaching, real world applications, both abroad where child brides are still forced into arranged and/or polygamous marriages and also here in the states where a regression of women's rights is currently taking place at a near frantic pace.

The latest thought provoking female helmed offering from Film Movement, The Third Wife is sure to give viewers much to discuss later on. Whether it's where our young heroine, May — played with poise, presence, and startling maturity by then twelve-year-old Nguyen Phuong Tra My — finds herself drawn to an impossible object of desire or another young girl's confession that she prayed to Buddha to make her a man, Mayfair drives home her points in a variety of ways.

Growing bolder as it heads toward its inevitable emotional conclusion, though full of admittedly important and gorgeously lensed moments, some scenes — especially ones involving characters we barely know — do feel more like feminist sign posting than a gradual plot progression.

As poetic as The Third Wife is cumulatively, much like the aforementioned dinner scene, it's hard to deny that the film would've been far more cohesive from a dramatic perspective if, rather than racing through its plot points, Mayfair had focused more on the development of its leads including May who remains an enigma from start to finish.

While the last thing you want to say — particularly as a carnivore, let alone a film fan disagreeing with Fincher — is that it's best to leave a little of the fat on, in the end, Mayfair's otherwise undeniably lyrical, impressive Campionesque debut might've been better served by giving us all little bit more to chew on . . . not only after the film but throughout.

Movie Review: Frank & Lola (2016)

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In writer-director Matthew Ross’ feature filmmaking debut about a middle-aged Las Vegas chef's obsessive relationship with a recent college grad (played by Imogen Poots), Michael Shannon plunges headfirst into a psychosexual Noir fueled by male jealousy and old school notions of revenge.

Driven by its performances, although at times it feels like an atmospheric update of In a Lonely Place written for a Last Tango in Paris era Marlon Brando, it's Shannon whose eerily calm, controlled rage beneath the surface reigns the film in whenever it begins to spiral off course.

Quickly establishing the rocky, self-conscious start to their relationship and the 747 size baggage both Shannon's Frank and Poots’ world-weary Lola carry everywhere, Ross paints a picture of budding love as much as pain.

Amid the Michael Mann like backdrop of the lights of Las Vegas in the film's opening bedroom scene, Ross heavily foreshadows the turbulence ahead with a moment that starts out romantically but gets dark fast both in not only a startling first sexual request by Lola but especially just how quickly Frank is ready to fulfill it.

A chronicle of the push and pull between truth, deception, and confession, the film wears its Franco-American influences proudly on the screen as Frank journeys to France under the guise of a professional opportunity.

However, like the omelette he makes for Lola early on which hides caviar beneath the surface, behind Frank's professional exterior is a furious masquerade of Travis Bickle like proportions as he uncovers more about his cryptic lover’s past.

Voyaging deep into the heart of darkness of Frank’s sexual jealousy (obviously a recurring theme in Neo Noir that is on steroids here), the sense that his quest is less Arthurian and more ego driven becomes increasingly palpable.

For all of its modern day frank — no pun intended — sexuality and a few straight out of Hollywood plot contrivances, the film's gender stereotypical roles of man as either vengeful tormentor or protector of a woman's sexuality is as outdated as it is inescapably authentic as the worst and best sides of Frank, played throughout with equal abandon by Shannon.

He looks and walks and speaks with purpose. In a tense scene where he meets a man from Lola's past, you know he wants him gone in the worst way, deep down more for having existed before him in her life than anything else.

We know those guys. We've met those guys. Maybe those guys exist in all of us and Frank can no longer suppress their influence or maybe it was there before he even arrived in Vegas.

And after the narrative surrounding Lola's past changes once again — or appears to as the story is told to him by a man vs. a woman — Ross infuses the film with flashes of Othello like hatred. Opting to believe not his own true love but a male stranger he's just met instead, the implications of Frank's self-loathing, misogyny, inadequacy, and mistrust are never fully explored to the level required for it to really pay off the way that it should.

Yet while Shannon is potent enough as an actor to hide the film's flaws (at least for a little while) and still make you want to know more, with Ross uncertain where to go from there in his script, Frank & Lola begins to lose its hold on us as a result.

Sadly, despite her perceived origins as a variation on Lolita (which come out of the shadows as the film continues on into its second act), the supporting character of Lola isn't nearly as complex as not just Nabokov's enigma but Shannon's Madonna-Whore obsessed lead as well.

No stranger to making underwritten women sing, the underutilized Poots adds an extra layer to her scenes. Punctuating a word or a beat with a certain look in her eye, she makes you understand just how and why so many men have fallen under her spell, even if none of them — and Lola most of all — know precisely who she is from one moment to the next.

Squandering some of its earlier potential in a meandering midsection, Frank & Lola alienates viewers whenever Frank trades Vegas for France as we feel as though we've wandered away from a dark romance and straight into a foreign, erotic B-movie version of Eyes Wide Shut.

Thankfully however, it manages to right itself in time for its pitch perfect ending. Using mirrored surfaces brilliantly to reinforce the idea that these two people — like anyone in love — long to be seen, here Ross is smart enough to know that in the end, their reflections depend on the secrets and lies hiding behind even the best of intentions in their lover's eyes.

Anchored by the unexpected chemistry of Shannon and Poots, this flawed if worthwhile character study of sexual jealousy features a tour-de-force performance from Shannon, which will make you question just what more it will take for A-list filmmakers to make him their leading man at last.

Ultimately more successful for its ideas and the dream of what might have been with a stronger narrative arc, in its intoxicating blend of old and new Noir, just like Lola fascinates Frank, Frank & Lola is sure to do the same for viewers eager to see what writer-director Matthew Ross will do next.

5/16/2019

Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray Review: Summer Stock (1950)

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Coming right after Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's groundbreaking experiments with jump cuts and location shooting in On the Town, the last thing that actor, dancer, choreographer, and director Kelly wanted to do in 1950 was make the same old-fashioned Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland style "let's put on a show" musicals that MGM had produced with assembly line efficiency a decade earlier.

But with Mickey Rooney no longer the box office titan he was back in his Andy Hardy days and Kelly's friend and former co-star Judy Garland going through one of the most difficult personal and professional periods of her life, Kelly happily signed onto Summer Stock alongside director Charles Walters to support the actress.

Although producer Joe Pasternak tried to convince Louis B. Mayer to cut his losses and shut down production as Summer ballooned toward an eventual six months shoot, much like Kelly and Walters, Mayer held fast out of loyalty to the woman who had made their studio synonymous with its most successful genre.

And it's a wise decision indeed as, from the film's breathtaking first shot which travels from the exterior of a farmhouse on up into Garland's second floor bedroom where she belts a song to her most famous Stock number "Get Happy," (which has been paid homage to countless times over the years), Summer is much better than its reputation would have you believe.

A delightful yet admittedly thinly plotted trifle, the film finds Garland's headstrong Jane Falbury struggling to keep her late father's failing farm afloat.

When Jane's spoiled kid sister Abigail (Gloria DeHaven) arrives with an entire theater troupe in tow headed up by boyfriend Joe Ross (Kelly), Jane forms an uneasy alliance with the group by agreeing to let them stage their musical in her barn if they'll help out around the farm.

Filling her songs with startling emotion, Garland's vocals are heightened all the more by veteran cinematographer Robert Planck's floating camera that — in one mesmerizing shot — swirls around a romantically conflicted Garland only to reveal Kelly sitting nearby in a scene sure to appeal to fans of Russell Metty's work on Douglas Sirk's 1954 masterpiece Magnificent Obsession.

And it's the surprisingly lush visuals that command a great deal of our attention in this vibrant new Blu-ray transfer from the Warner Archive Collection, which serves up animated shorts and shortcuts to all of the film's songs right from the menu.

Yet while the film is known as a labor of love for Garland, in the end, it's the innovative Kelly that makes Summer Stock one of my favorite underrated musicals.

Unable to shoot with his costar as often as expected as she struggled both onscreen and off, Kelly worked on a handful of numbers sure to make jaws drop, starting with the physically demanding group tap number "Dig-Dig-Dig Dig for Your Dinner," which showcases his athleticism and ups the film's energy level when it needs it the most.

In one of the star's best solo efforts, "You, Wonderful You," the dancer doubles as his own choreographer to create the beat of the song — which will eventually ease into the background — with only the sounds of his tap shoes, a creaky board, and a discarded newspaper onstage to guide him.

A great wistful Gene Kelly number, "You" is a reprise of an earlier scene with Garland. Beginning casually, much like his performance of "Singin' in the Rain," "You" eases into an awe inspiring middle section where it's clear to see how much joy he's getting out of blowing everyone's minds before he adds in a sentimental Chaplinesque close.

Yet although Kelly's "You, Wonderful You," number might look laid back, it required a painstaking search from the prop department to find a certain set of newspapers published several years earlier to achieve the precise sound and tear needed for perfectionist Kelly's musical execution.

Featuring fun supporting turns by Phil Silvers, Eddie Bracken, and Marjorie Main, while the last act of Summer Stock forgoes the plot by devolving into another great collection of mini numbers for its predictable big show finale, it's easy to overlook the contrivances when you have Kelly and Garland ready to keep things "Wonderful" and "Happy" in two of the strongest musical numbers of their careers.

Movie Review: Photograph (2019)

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Lasting roughly as long as it takes for street vendor photographer Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) to snap and sell pictures of tourists at the Gateway of India, there's a tentative seven note refrain that plays throughout award-winning filmmaker Ritesh Bantra's Photograph.

Heard whenever our protagonist is about to put his heart and ego on the line to risk making a human connection, as just one subtly symbolic touch in a film that's full of them, the delicate sound of those seven keys highlights onscreen what seems to be the writer-director's favorite theme off-screen as well.

Another lovely ode to our need for companionship in an increasingly far-flung, lonely, and chaotic world, Photograph marks Batra's return to India after two English language forays following the breakout success of his smash hit, The Lunchbox.

When Rafi's dominant grandmother Dadi (the scene-stealing Farrukh Jaffar) lays the grandmother of all guilt trips on the hardworking middle-aged man by refusing to take her medicine because he has yet to get engaged, he decides the fastest way to remedy the situation is to invent a fictional fiancée.

Hoping to put an end to Dadi's concerns which have spread throughout the streets of Mumbai, he encloses proof of his attachment in the form of a gushing letter as well as a photo he'd taken of a beautiful young woman who'd posed for the picture on a whim but rushed off before she could collect it and pay. Unfortunately, just as his best friend and the audience predicted, Rafi's lie is put to the test when he gets word that Dadi is coming to meet the couple right away.

Managing to track down the woman he'd dubbed Noorie after a Bollywood heroine from a song that had been playing nearby, it's only when Rafi tries to work up the courage to speak to the shy, studious, middle class twenty-something we know as Miloni (Sanya Malhotra) that composer Peter Raeburn's seven note query kicks into gear.

Settling into something more melodic once she agrees to pose as Noorie, the strangers embark upon a courtship that, much like Raeburn's notes, starts tentatively before their friendship strengthens and the two begin to bond — meeting up on a daily basis — with or without Dadi in tow.

And although the old romcom trope of a fake fiancée is usually played for laughs in America, Batra opts for realism in his Mumbai set love story, letting us into the lives of the characters away from one another to focus not only on their similarities and differences but most importantly the effect that they have on each other when apart.

Centered on a relationship we fear might be as fleeting as a photograph taken by a stranger that reminds us of that one perfect day (or piano notes striving to build to a song that isn't there), Batra's film is as hopefully yearning as it is melancholic and bittersweet.

Hindered by a rushed, staccato final act and some clunky edits, while it isn't as narratively successful or as palatable as The Lunchbox, it's still a moving look at two introverted strangers who strike a chord by accident and strive to stay in tune.

DVD Review: American Exit (2019)

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Say what you will about Dane Cook. If you've seen Mr. Brooks — where he managed to not only hold his own but actually steal a few scenes away from Kevin Costner — you know that with the right role and the right material, the guy can act.

And while we never buy him as an influential art dealer, Cook is quite good in a key scene late into American Exit where he takes his estranged son to his late mother's favorite place to paint and delivers a heartfelt monologue about art and life that's so strong, it's probably why he accepted the role in the first place.

I say "probably" because at some point he would have had to have read the rest of the script, which somehow takes a premise involving the theft of a million dollar painting originally stolen by the Nazis in WWII and uses it as a mere two minute long inciting incident for a half-baked melodrama.

Heist wise, watching Cook pull one over on his shady boss Anton (Udo Kier) is about as exciting as watching a kid try to steal a candy bar from a gas station. And while there's no gas station in sight, a kid is indeed involved as, before he boosts the painting, Cook's Charlie does the same to his teenage son.

A father at the end of his rope — plagued with crippling health problems and debt — in writer-directors Tim McCann and Ingo Vollkammer's Exit, after Charlie picks up Leo (Levi Miller) at school without his ex's permission, he uses him as a distraction with Anton before heading south on a road to nowhere.

Neither thrilling as a genre movie nor compelling as a drama, the film veers wildly from one moment to the next, unsure of not only what it wants to be but also who its main characters are. Asked to swing for the fences, within his first thirty minutes of screen time Miller inexplicably moves from hating his father on behalf of his mother to getting excited about thrift store clothing to insulting strangers to asking Charlie if he can drive with little to no warning.

It's so ridiculously uneven, it's like they told the kid to watch Three Faces of Eve about three hundred times in preparation for a character revelation that is never expressed on the screen. Although undoubtedly used to help drive not the car this time but the aimless film forward, the histrionic hoops that Miller is asked to jump through are so annoying that as a viewer, you actually get to a point where you wish Charlie would just leave the kid on the side of the road.

Trying his best to bond with his son amid the chaos (and what we quickly gather is his own failing health), the screenwriters build a fascinating backstory in Charlie's past centering on his own relationship with his parents and his ex that would've made a far more interesting tale than the one we see here.

Interrupting any attempt at dramatic momentum in a series of cliched mini showdowns with Anton and his fellow art goons, although Cook fares better than Miller (who deserves hazard pay for playing a new role at the drop of a hat), Exit continues its series of starts and stops for the rest of its eighty-six minute running time.

Unable to change lanes for longer than a few minutes at a time, sadly by the time we reach Cook's moving speech, most viewers will have already longed for a real exit and turned the damn thing off.

Text ©2019, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

5/03/2019

Film Movement Movie Review: Rafiki (2018)

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Senses and nerve endings heightened, when you fall in love, the world glows brighter, energy burns hotter, Earth spins faster on its axis, and songs sound like they were written especially for you.

A discovery process that lets you see not only someone else but also yourself mirrored back to you with laser-like focus, like a drum that goes off deep within your chest, love resonates long after the beat has been struck, mixing with the environment like paint still drying on the canvas to create something at once both familiar and new.

And this is precisely the feeling that writer-director Wanuri Kahiu captures in her jubilant Kenyan coming-of-age romance Rafiki, which floods the viewer's senses with a celebration of color, cheer, and song in the "fun, fierce, frivolous" style of what the filmmakers dubs Afrobubblegum, which has also become the name of her company.

Black Orpheus by way of Monsoon Wedding with a little of Do the Right Thing seasoned throughout its neighborhood scenes, based on Monica Arac de Nyeko's short story Jumbula Tree, Kahiu's Rafiki, which was initially banned in its native Kenya, is centered on the headstrong young woman, Kena (Samantha Mugatsia).

Dedicating her days to hanging out with her best friend, who declares his intentions by stating that she'll make a good wife (even while he hooks up with other girls) and his circle of friends who treat her as one of the boys, Kena suddenly finds herself drawn to Ziki (Sheila Munyiva), the alluring daughter of her father's political rival.

First spending time together tentatively after Kena catches Ziki and her friends pulling down her father's campaign posters, soon, away from the influence and watchful eye of their friends and family in their tight-knit Nairobi neighborhood, the young women dare each other to do something more with their lives than just go from good Kenyan girls to good Kenyan wives as expected.

Pulled together like a magnet by an undeniable attraction they're not initially sure what to do about — especially in a country where homosexuality is against the law — as lingering looks grows into something more and a romance develops, Kena and Ziki’s burgeoning relationship is threatened by the oppressive homophobia surrounding them.

An upbeat story nonetheless, at its core Rafiki is a sweet-natured romance about finding out exactly who you are and what you're capable of while simultaneously falling in love.

Bold and beautiful, with a keen sense of time and place, Kahiu has created something truly special with Rafiki, which despite its very straightforward plot and limited character development (perhaps stemming from its origins as a short story), serves its audience both as a terrific film as well as a reminder to the home country Kahiu cherishes that love is love.

A truly feminist work, Rafiki is as anchored by female talent on its pop song heavy soundtrack as it is via the behind-the-scenes crew who helped bring the first Kenyan film to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival to life.

From the way Kahiu plays with splashes of color and texture to give her picture an ethereal pastel hue as a nod to Ziki's hair to Rafiki's overall ambitious world-building which drops us right into the neighborhood of Slopes and treats us like a resident, the film announces an exciting voice in world cinema for us to keep an eye on.

Successfully suing the government by arguing that banning the film infringed upon her freedom of expression, in a smash week-long engagement, Rafiki played to packed houses and managed to outgross huge Hollywood hits like Black Panther.

Exceedingly well-acted in a thoroughly naturalistic style, although it ends a moment too soon to adequately pay off on its otherwise moving build-up, it's a minor misstep in an otherwise powerful movie.

Perfectly capturing the heightened sensory state of falling in love — and world be damned — Wanuri Kahiu's Rafiki is as vivacious as it is courageous.