The Hottest August

Story’s an original, and the film is a revelation — a movie that’s as deep as we’re willing to read into it, and an invaluable time capsule for summers far in our future, assuming we ever get there.

This collection of interactions with ordinary people is a cinematic gift both simple and multilayered, an intellectual challenge and an emotional adventure.

The documentary represents a city ground down by inequality and division, where millions of selves who have by and large given up on one another.

While it never feels completely defeatist, her film offers scattered snapshots of an uncertain society in its dog days.

Sometimes an experiment feels like just an experiment, and that’s where the well-intentioned query The Hottest August ultimately lands.