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Wayne Wang has been making films since 1976. They include Chan Is Missing, Dim Sum, The Joy Luck Club and Smoke. His new film, Coming Home Again, is nervy and unsettling.

The Denver Film Festival opens next week for the 43rd time, but, of course, in an unusual pandemic way. Some films will show at drive-ins; others will be streamed, along with filmmaker conversations and discussions. There are lots of films to watch. And KUNC film critic Howie Movshovitz, who teaches film and television at CU-Denver, has three he’d like to recommend.

The new documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead has just been released on Netflix. It’s by a daughter about herself and her father, now stricken with Alzheimer’s disease. For KUNC film critic Howie Movshovitz, who teaches film and television at CU Denver, there’s not been anything quite like it.

Residue is not a happy movie. But it is a beautiful film, and a touching one from a young first-time Black director, Merawi Gerima who grew up in Washington, D.C. but has Ethiopian roots.

Every Labor Day weekend since 1974, dedicated film lovers have gathered for the Telluride Film Festival. It's not happening this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. For KUNC film critic Howie Movshovitz, who teaches film and television at CU-Denver, Telluride is where he fell in love with the movies.

It’s rare that a movie comes along that’s simply thrilling, and The Son of the White Mare by Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics, is just that.

The Painted Bird, by Czech filmmaker Václav Marhoul is not for the faint of heart. The film comes from a 1965 novel by Jerzy Kosinski about a young boy, possibly Jewish, sent from some eastern European city to a village to keep him safe from the Nazis during World War II. What follows is a series of encounters of unbearable barbarity. The boy – who has no name and rarely speaks – is beaten and whipped. He’s attacked by ugly villagers with few teeth and grubby faces radiating hatred, and of course fear.

The Truth opens in Paris, but not the monumental Paris of the Eiffel Tower or the Champs Elysees. The story takes place at one house, a big house, with enough trees and grass around it to insulate it from the city. Through the trees, you can glimpse a bus passing on a busy street. In winter, the city will be more visible and louder. For now, though, it’s a protected space for a family to get on each other’s nerves about the stuff that French movie families annoy each other about, and actual families experience with maybe less drama. The house, by the way, needs paint and work on the masonry exterior. Behind the house, there’s a prison – all of this part of the uneasy setting.

Da 5 Bloods is like a lot of Spike Lee’s films. It can be brilliant and original, and also tedious and commonplace. It’s sometimes thrilling and perceptive, and also dreary and routine. Overall, though, it’s a critically important demonstration of what the war in Vietnam did to the disproportionate number of black soldiers at the time – and by way of fearsome, debilitating PTSD, how that misery continues in the present.

For a good 45 minutes, Joan of Arc looks like it was put together by Monty Python. It’s so stiff and awkward, you figure it’s got to be intentional parody of the many other films about the 15th century St. Joan.