Kokomo City (18)
Directed by D Smith
★★★★★

DOCUMENTARY of the week is a work that follows brazenly in the great US tradition of DA Pennebaker (Dont Look Back) of observational documentary that unfolds without any commentary. But rather than Bob Dylan, here we are plunged headfirst into the lives of black trans prostitutes and their clients, a strange and marginal subculture of New York.

But you need your wits about you to watch this dazzling and sexy film. It presents itself as a no-holds-barred exploitation of isolated trans women who live in a hyper-sexualised world, and treads a fine line between empathy and voyeurism. It offers few comforts.

But the camerawork, the high contrast black and white picture and the writhing soundtrack mark Kokomo City out as black film-making, like Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, made from within an oppressed black community and searching for survival stories from among the double (or triple?) exploited.

You need to be patient and attentive because these black trans women (Daniella Carter and Koko Da Doll, to name just two) are highly conscious of the nature of their rebellion and have a voluble capacity to grasp and express their own experience of oppression. The most eloquent of these tirades demonstrates how their own experience is inevitably reflective of their position in a culture that is founded on slavery.

While this is probably not a film to watch with your mum, it offers a brilliant insight into the character of a black community under capitalism and it makes its points with artful curiosity, and without judgement.

Excellent.
AR
Out in cinemas today

You Hurt My Feelings (15)
Directed by Nicole Holofcener
★

THERE’s one good joke in this drab potboiler about a lightshade and how grotesque it is, but nothing more to leaven the feeling that this is like a dud script from mid-career mediocre Woody Allen. Jews, psychiatrists and no slapstick.

It purports self-consciously to be about the small lies that maintain and betray the relationship between a duff psychotherapist and his arty wife of questionable talent, but it is so marooned in the middle of the road that you long for a black trans prostitute to erupt into it.

To spin a tale of stifling white middle-class rituals and hypocrisies that occupy the entire lives of these characters to exclusion of anything else, and to do so in dreary wide shots and medium close-ups is to give the audience an experience that is like watching neurotic gerbils, but without the animal magic.

I regret wasting 90 minutes on it and urge you to avoid it.
AR
Out on Prime Video today

Just Super (U)
Directed by Rasmus A. Sivertsen and Jean-Luc Julien
★★

A NORWEGIAN animation for kids, with fjords and improbable folk law, is such an oddity that it holds the attention through the sheer weirdness of ingredients that have resulted in this tasteless mayonnaise.

Daddy has an alter ego — a Norwegian lion (does such a thing exist?) Daughter is a maladroit gamer and Mummy is dead. Granny plays cards with a drooling inmate in the care home and the troll rock threatens the village. And the only available super-power of any note is the capacity to foresee the outcome of computer game scenarios.

The fact that everyone in this isolated place seems to be related leads to both genetic oddities and sibling rivalry.

It’s like eating an over-laden open top sandwich.
AR
out in cinemas today

Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd (12A)
Directed by Storm Thorgerson and Roddy Bogawa
★★★

 
The story of Barrett, Pink Floyd’s acid casualty former frontman has been told so many times that it has become urban legend, so why a new documentary on the musician?  
 
This new film answers this question by delving deeper into Barrett’s true nature through interviews with those who knew him. The film is also a de facto tribute to the legendary sleeve designer Thorgerson who died before the film was completed by co-director Bogawa.
 
In the film Thorgerson chats with the interviewees, so that one feels as if one is eavesdropping on personal conversations. More subtly, it also feels like the terminally ill Thorgerson is saying goodbye to the people he and Barrett knew from London and Cambridge in the sixties.
 
It is Thorgerson’s conversations with Barret’s sister, Rosemary Breen, that are particularly moving, as she reveals the vulnerabilities of her brother, Roger, the human being behind the image of the psychedelic pin-up, that he no longer wanted to be. 
 
Over the course of the film being made and released, many of those interviewed have died. The themes of life and loss, central to the later Pink Floyd, are present here. 

It is odd that a film about Pink Floyd, one of history’s best-selling bands, should be given a mere limited release through distributors Everyman, and although the film moves to cinemas in the USA and Canada in June the producers state that a streaming and physical release is “hoped for.”
SH
Pending release in the UK