Is it the responsibility of art to provoke or to please? Is it a cheap stunt to use suffering as a subject, forcing viewers to stare into the abyss and recognize that life is full of real tragedies and horrors? Are the best works those that combine all of these elements, or those that find another path of expression and refuse to follow preconceptions of what representation means in the first place?

Over the decades, the artworks by German-born Anselm…

With Occupied City, Steve McQueen delivers a haunting ghost story that navigates the past through the echoes that those who’ve been long dead leave upon the present. We all walk in the shadows of what came before, but in the city of Amsterdam, where McQueen and his wife and creative partner Bianca Stigter (Three Minutes: A Lengthening) have lived for many years, the recent past was a particular heinous episode.

In some ways, it’s very simple to describe this film…

This extraordinary portrait of a woman haunted and scarred by abandonment turns into a tale of real strength and joy. That’s because as poet and activist Staceyann Chin searches for her mother, we experience the writer’s wondrous relationship with her own daughter Zuri and her growth into a mature woman who can accept her mother’s flaws.

Chin tells her story mining old photographs, video she shot as an adult, online posts she created with Zuri, and scenes lensed by OYA…

“It’s like a horror movie,” exclaims a man from Zhengzhou, China as he records himself gingerly walking along the side of a flooded train tunnel with other passengers. Although his words speak to the treacherous realities of his current circumstance, he could easily be speaking directly about Greg Jacobs and Jon Siskel’s latest documentary The Here Now Project.

A chilling work, The Here Now Project captures the effects of climate change in a visceral way. Instead of incorporating talking head…