Clare Coulter

A complex portrait of a city and its inhabitants, this urgent documentary from Brett Story (THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES) gives us a window into the collective consciousness of the present. The film’s point of departure is New York City, including its outer boroughs, during the month of August 2017. It’s a time heavy with the tension of a new president, growing anxiety over everything from rising rents to marching white nationalists, and unrelenting news of either wildfires or hurricanes on every coast. The film pivots on the question of futurity: what does the future look like from where we are standing? And what if we are not all standing in the same place? THE HOTTEST AUGUST offers a portrait of a society on the verge of catastrophe, registering the anxieties, distractions, and survival strategies that preoccupy ordinary lives.

Monica’s ploy to get back into the graces of her childhood church goes awry when she steals a pair of wings and joins the annual Christmas procession.

In the wake of his father's death, a plumber with small-town views leaves his east coast village and drives 1000 miles to bail out his estranged, gay brother from a Toronto police station.

In Patricia Rozema’s lesbian love story, Camille, a professor at a Protestant college, meets Petra, a wry and flamboyant performer in a modern Felliniesque circus troupe. She is inexplicably drawn. Camille pursues this sensual, dream-like woman, throwing her whole conservative life, not to mention her engagement to a respected minister, into disarray.

Instincts both maternal and carnal clatter like shards of glass in a blender in this uncompromising portrait of a woman on the edge from director Lynne Ramsay. Starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson in a frenzied pas de deux, Die My Love inflames the exposed nerves of delirium and desire.