​Shirkers – Beginning with images of a swan swimming backwards and ending with a montage of a car wash, Sandi Tan’s film, Shirkers, is one of the most idiosyncratic documentaries of 2018. Logically, the film shouldn’t work––it’s an avant-garde film within a film, a nostalgic look at childhood, and an unsettling mystery all in one, narrated by a dryly humorous narrator with an undying passion for cinema.

​

Hunt for the Wilderpeople - Taika Waititi’s “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” shouldn’t work. It’s the kind of project that’s difficult to describe without making it sound clichéd and sentimental. It’s another coming-of-age tale, this one of a troubled teenager finding his place in the world deep in the mountains, with a man who never thought he’d be a father figure.

​

Victoria & Abdul – A cheerfully naïve clerk from India visits England to bestow a gift on Queen Victoria, then strikes up an unlikely friendship with the lonely monarch.

​

Knock Down the House – Four working class women run for Congress, overcoming adversity to battle powerful political machines in very different American landscapes.

​

Barry – Barack Obama arrives in New York in the fall of 1981 for his junior year at Columbia University. He struggles to stay connected to his mother, his estranged father and his classmates.

​​

​

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is a 2016 by J. D. Vance – This shares Appalachian values of Vance’s Kentucky family and their relation to the social problems of his hometown of Middletown, Ohio.

 

Crip Camp - A groundbreaking summer camp galvanizes a group of teens with disabilities to help build a movement, forging a new path toward greater equality.

 

Come Sunday - A drama about Bishop Carlton Pearson, who was ostracized by his church for preaching the belief that there is no Hell.