Origin

One of the most ambitious films to come out of the US in a long time, Ava DuVernay’s Origin investigates the underpinnings of oppression throughout different cultures and centuries, drawing connections between racism, slavery, the Holocaust, and the caste system in India. It’s the thesis of Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, and Wilkerson is the protagonist here, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. Heady stuff, but realized with authority and conviction.

Ava DuVernay’s Origin is as audacious as it is ambitious. At its core, it concerns an intellectual argument about history and hierarchies of power, but it’s also about the fraught process of making this argument. It’s a daunting conceit that DuVernay has shaped into an eventful narrative that is, by turns, specific and far-ranging, diagnostic and aspirational. It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly.

Manohla Dargis, New York Times

Meditative, poetic, and nearly unfaltering… the character of a truly great film isn’t found in its perfection. Rather it arises from how the narrative moves, challenges, and hugs the heart. Rich in thought, Origin is a dense, forceful masterwork, and, quite simply, the most radical film of DuVernay’s career.

Robert Daniels, rogerebert.com

What this captivating, complicated, and oft-compelling movie gives you is a biopic not of a writer but of a book, from inspiration to publication.

David Fear, Rolling Stone