The Best Thought-provoking Movies to Watch on Hoopla

The Assessment is a psychological sci-fi thriller following Mia and Aaryan, a wealthy couple applying to be parents in the strictly controlled New World. Their final hurdle is to pass a seven-day assessment conducted by Virginia (Alicia Vikander), who makes sure to test every grain of Mia and Aaryan’s patience and sanity. The trials get […]

To plenty of countries around the globe, democracy has become so ubiquitous that we forget it’s relatively new, at least relative to the rest of human history. Bhutan is one of the last countries that became a democracy, and writer-director Pawo Choyning Dorji chose to depict a slice of how they made the shift in […]

At two hours and nearly 30 minutes, Stonewalling is quite long. The third film from spouses Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji takes place in slow, slice-of-life moments, centered around a female lead that mostly doesn’t actively make choices for her own life, so it can feel frustrating to watch. But as the film unfolds, Lynn’s […]

Since we live in a society, interacting with authority is inescapable. Terrestrial Verses depict fairly mundane day-to-day interactions– getting a birth certificate, settling a traffic violation, or attending a job interview– but through nine vignettes framed with a static camera, aimed at a person trying to negotiate with someone more powerful just outside the frame, […]

Sophie Compton and Reubyn Hamlyn’s British-American documentary about the harm of deepfakes won the SXSW Special Jury Award for its innovative storytelling and deservingly so. The two filmmakers use a clever and considerate way to let a young woman fictitiously named Taylor share her story of how she found deepfake pornography of herself online. With […]

As a sluggishly paced, three-hour spiritual drama with little dialogue and even less plot, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell certainly won’t convert anybody who isn’t already interested in slow cinema. Even those who don’t mind these types of films in which “nothing happens” might feel that it doesn’t weave its themes of faith and suffering […]

Like many coming-of-age films about films, it’s easy to assume that Last Film Show would be a derivative of all-time film classic Cinema Paradiso. Both films from opposite corners of the world, separated by more than three decades, do share that awe of cinema from a projection booth. However, unlike Paradiso, the awe of Last […]

As its title suggests, Steve James’ documentary isn’t shy about its sympathy for its subject. Physicist Ted Hall was just 18 when he was recruited to the Manhattan Project and underwent a crisis of conscience when it became apparent that the atomic bomb’s ostensible target — Nazi Germany — was on the brink of defeat. […]

You’ll probably never find a film like The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic. The camera is blurry, with lead Petri Poikolainen’s face the only image we see clearly. The audio sometimes goes in and out. There’s even a section that turns completely dark. While this would usually mean that something is […]

Education is a human right, but for many girls around the world, this isn’t necessarily guaranteed– especially if they want to learn past the required years of basic education. Yuni is a coming-of-age drama that depicts a girl in West Java, Indonesia who wants to go to university, but due to the marriage and virginity […]

A road trip movie with an unknown destination, Hit the Road plays with our expectations by avoiding any obvious questions we might have, and making us focus on the real important things. Informed by the censorship and persecution faced by critics of Iran’s government—including director Panah Panahi’s own filmmaker father, Jafar—the film places more focus […]

In Luzzu, tradition and modernity — plus principles and necessity — come crashing up against each other like waves in a raging storm. Trying to navigate his way through the tempest is Jesmark (Jesmark Scicluna), a Maltese fisherman proudly descended from a long family line of the profession. But Jesmark’s work — and his identity, […]

It’s been years since Fahrije and the women of her village lost their husbands to the war. It’s one thing to move on after their passing, but quite another to never be sure about their whereabouts, dead or alive. Hive tells the story of how, in the wake of this inexplicable loss, the women of […]

This insightful and uplifting documentary is about a growing movement within indigenous communities: obtaining food sovereignty by going back to pre-genocide ways of cultivating food. The violent changes that have affected indigenous communities don’t impact just the people, but also the animals, the fish, and the land. All of these are now bearing the brunt […]

Rather than talking about what it takes to get to the other side of the border, Identifying Features instead focuses its attention back home. It’s part of the reason why the film actually highlights how difficult this actually is– Before even reaching it, people hoping to enter America go through a dangerous journey, many of […]

How far would you go for the people that you love? Regardless of the answer, whether that would be one mile, five hundred, or five hundred more, the distance won’t matter if there’s something that blocks you. 200 Meters is a drive with the titular length, it’s not even longer than a mile. But it […]

Almost more like an audiobook than a traditional movie, the first and unfortunately final film from Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson pairs soothing narration by Tilda Swinton with surreal images of alien structures on a desolate planet for a piece of sci-fi that may very well be un-categorizable. As a “story” ostensibly meant to carry some […]

Unlike in other films that only seem to evoke a previous era to make a target demographic feel warm and fuzzy inside, there’s something vaguely artificial about Death of Nintendo’s air of nostalgia—which is exactly what helps it tell its story. There isn’t anything particularly novel about this movie’s plot or characters, but Raya Martin’s […]

This earnest documentary is about filmmaker and actress Maryam Zaree’s journey to unravel the truth about her birth. Her parents are part of a generation of Iranian revolutionaries who were jailed, many executed, and now have taken exile in Europe. The torture and difficult prison conditions they experienced are cause for so much trauma that […]

Frank Zappa’s creative scope could barely be defined –  a mix of rock, composition, design, and in his early days even filmmaking.  This documentary does its best to summarize the un-summarizable, starting with Zappa’s last time playing guitar and going back to early details like an infatuation with explosives as a kid.  Zappa’s overwhelmingly full […]

The real life situation behind this harrowing drama is quite extraordinary, so adapting Daniel Rye’s captivity straightforwardly would already intrigue viewers into watching it. However, Held for Ransom does more than depict his torture. Alternating between his captivity and the fundraising efforts back home, the film examines the way they have all responded to the […]

The sooner you adjust your expectations for Nomad—and realize that this isn’t a travel documentary but Werner Herzog’s own wonderfully offbeat way of remembering his dear friend—the better. Any uneven moments in this film’s construction are smoothed over by the sheer authenticity of what Herzog puts on screen, from his own distinctive narration, to gorgeous […]

The question mark in the title represents the central idea of this fascinating documentary: what if worshipping Satan is the only way of ensuring religious freedom for everyone? That’s what a group of young members known as The Satanic Temple believe, led by a determined and well-spoken Harvard graduate. They embark on a journey across […]

In Motherwell, you either “get locked up or knocked up,” or so says Gemma, a teenager on the cusp of adulthood growing up in an old Scottish steel town. Gemma runs among a tight-knit group of friends, at the center of which is ordinary mischief, routine, and roughhousing. And beneath that lies a certain kind […]

This mortifying stop-motion fairy-tale is inspired by the very real horrors of Chile’s Colonia Dignidad: a cult colony turned torture camp under the Pinochet regime. Presented as colony propaganda, the tale tells the story of Maria, a girl who runs away from the safety of the colony into the forest and takes refuge in a […]

A nostalgic look at ’90s Belarus brings to bear a sharp generational divide. Evalina is a young DJ living in Minsk with her mother, but dreaming of Chicago, the birthplace of House music. Her attempts to gain a US visa land her in a small factory town, where the tensions between her modern lifestyle and […]

The Square is a peculiar movie about a respected contemporary art museum curator as he goes through a few very specific events. He loses his wallet, his children fight, the art he oversees is does not make sense to an interviewer… Each one of these events would usually require a precise response but all they […]

This coming-of-age story starts in the present time, where Elle Marja, now a grandmother, reluctantly goes to her sister’s funeral held by her old indigenous Sámi community in Northern Sweden. Understanding her reluctance requires going back to when Elle Marja was 14 and was preparing to go to boarding school with her little sister. These […]