Popular reviews

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  Review by Lucy ★★★★½ 3

  “i find that i trust him so much, i never realize where he's leading me”

  horrific, but demands to be seen. the only comfort here is that it’s skillfully told by a woman from her own experience and on her own terms. and in her own words. and now more than ever, it’s the time to listen

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  Review by cinéfila... 🕯️ ★★★★ 1

  "The body remembers everything, it really does."
  heartbreaking but necessary. i wish i had an ounce of jennifer fox's courage.

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 2

  “There are no bad horses, only bad riders.” There are any number of unnerving moments in Jennifer Fox’s “The Tale,” a landmark cine-memoir that’s as powerful and profoundly upsetting as any film since “The Act of Killing,” but they all seem to hatch from that tainted pearl of wisdom, passed down from a beautiful riding instructor to her naïve tween student before things go terribly wrong. It’s a coded message from an adult woman to a young girl, a pointed insistence that life is hard for the fairer sex, and that pain is just something they all push through. It’s a sinister ethos that makes victims feel ashamed of the violence they’ve suffered, and inspires them to refashion their worst…

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  Review by lauren ★★★★★ 4

  the worst part is that it took jennifer so long to even realize what had happened to her.

  a short, brave, important film that made my heart race and palms sweat even though i knew, and have felt, what was coming.

  like jennifer, i didn't think it was was it actually was at first, unlike jennifer i was 21. like jennifer, i initially believed i was enjoying it, unlike jennifer it was oral, not vaginal. like jennifer, it took someone else opening my eyes to realize it was rape, unlike jennifer it didn't take decades for me to realize it.

  from false memories, coercion, assault, confronting it head-on, to documenting it -- jennifer fox is one brave and wonderful woman.

  i feel heartbroken for the both of us, but devastated for her.

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  Review by Jacob ★★★★½ 1

  "I was so little."

  An astounding demonstration of how time alters our view of the past. This is not a film about great revelations; Jennifer's mother makes it clear early on that she believes her daughter was abused. Jennifer feels otherwise, and insists that nobody understands her situation, but she soon realizes that the truth she's internalized was one created as a means of survival. While many viewers will struggle with the formal elements here, I was blown away by the use of fantasy to speak to a larger truth. Jennifer speaks directly to her younger self and to the younger versions of her abusers, interrogating and praising them as she sifts through her fragmented memories. It's a process of…

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  Review by saint judas fonda ★★★★★ 30

  "I was younger than I thought of myself to be."

  TW: Sexual abuse

  I'm having trouble breathing as I type this, and my hands are still shaking a little bit. I feel sick watching it and my eyes water every few moments no matter how many times I wipe the tears away. It's too close to what happened and it hurts deeply to think about, even more than when watching Mysterious Skin.

  In my review for Mysterious Skin back in November, I talked about being molested when I was around five years old (I can't remember exactly what age I was but it was give or take a year, five) and how I didn't know that this happened to me…

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  Review by kayla ★★★★½ 4

  Ummmmmmmmmm
  1. WOW 
  2. This made me feel sick 
  3. Loved the ending
  4. WOW

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★★ 5

  Curled underneath the warm sands are the stowed away expressions of previous hours, ghosts enveloped in dust and temporal movement — a peculiar aching. Bodies fuse with the color of the grain, planting their feet firmly as either a symbol of repression, or the loosening of restraints. But the call of the birds, the smell of salt and the summers so far from familiarity are easily erasable, like chalk marks on a blackboard. And watching us from the waves, so very distant, swim children afraid to return to the shore, for fear of being swept in too far; for fear of remembering that the cold embrace of the sea is still an embrace, though an embrace of abuse & abrasion.

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★★ 5

  The director's own struggle to come to terms with her own childhood sexual abuse is the driving force behind this quiet yet compelling and disturbing drama. Jennifer Fox achieves this with an emotional intensity that approaches catharsis. The film's hushed atmosphere and spare score do a fantastic job of highlighting its psychological aspects. She also makes extensive use of her documentary background to enhance the film's realism.

  Like the film itself, Laura Dern's performance is largely understated, but she manages to portray the complex range of feelings that consume her character. Nielssen is also fantastic in the role of young Fox; she perfectly conveys Fox's vulnerability and distress. Debicki does a good job, considering how little screen time she has,…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★

  80

  It's hard to sort through Jennifer Fox's harrowing film at first, and not only because of the personal-account subject matter. The Tale, as a stream of memory corrected and shaped into experience, is frequently halted by inconsistent performances (Common, in particular, doesn't leave the intended impression) and an uneasy sense of the craft, with a few remarkable transitions (an image of snow bridging the present and the past gave me chills) highlighting her potential amidst a flustered, disjointed narrative. Then again, this isn't a normal narrative, but her life, and with that, it seems logical that creating this work had its own hardships and turmoils, as was the process of coming to terms with her abuse. The Tale can't…

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  Review by dani ★★★★

  I really liked complex narrative; the way memories are shown and how they're mixed with the present, how the movie and more precisely Jennifer Fox is honest and fearless to its audience, and also Laura Dern is amazing as always and it's probably her very best performance.

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  Review by Avery Edison ★★★★ 1

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.