Happening
Feminist French director Audrey Diwan’s ground-level 1960s drama follows a headstrong student (Anamaria Vartolomei) through a period of confusion and fear.
The film, which takes audiences back to a time when abortion was illegal in France, serves as a timely reminder of just how scary and alienating the process (and procedure) could be for someone determined to terminate her pregnancy, but unable to find the necessary support and guidance.
Hello, Bookstore
A.B. Zax’s documentary follows the life and fate of a beloved independent bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts, and so you might expect it to be the sort of movie that expands into a larger statement about the cherished and precarious state of independent bookstores in the digital/corporate/chain-store era. It does, but only by implication. For 86 reverent minutes, the movie, without ever leaving the premises, simply peers into the nooks and crannies of one deceptively quiet bookstore — which is called, incidentally, The Bookstore — and traces the daily existence of its missionary owner-curator, Matthew Tannenbaum, a jaunty boomer who runs the place as if it were a library, a cocktail party, and a projection of his literary dreams. Can he raise the funds to save the store? Can the oasis of a community bookstore live on in the age of TikTok? “Hello, Bookstore” is the documentary as hang-out movie, yet by the end Tannenbaum has come to seem a vérité version of George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” —OG
