The characters we see belong to four different communities, but Minervini shows them to us with such honesty and empathy that we soon understand that the struggles they face are very similar and very real.

| Nov 2, 2023

Staggering...a vital snapshot of African American life as it's being lived on the margins of society...one of the best films I've seen by far this year.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 4, 2020

...weaves together a quartet of narratives about resilience in the face of mounting pressures.

| Apr 17, 2020

There is no one out there quite like Minervini, who hopefully one day will be looked back on as one of, if not the most, important documentarians of the decade, and What You Gonna Do is a stunning example of this importance.

| Dec 14, 2019

World's on Fire never manages to bring the different elements of the narrative together. It's neither truly immersive nor is it able to establish a critical distance from its subjects

| Original Score: 6 | Nov 15, 2019

Beauty and chaos collide in this documentary by Roberto Minervini.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 20, 2019

In the film, shot with elegiac finality in black and white, Minervini makes subtle communitarian and intergenerational connections between the stories.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 17, 2019

A wake-up call to the cold, hard reality of racism.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 16, 2019

The title asks a pertinent and provocative question, which the film answers with intimate footage that acts as compelling testament to the power of the human spirit.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 14, 2019

Never once does his camera feel manipulative or judgemental, instead turning what could be your typical message documentary into one whose existence feels utterly essential

| Sep 12, 2019

A ambitious piece of documentary filmmaking...What we are left with is chaos but maybe that is what the filmmaker wants us to feel the chaos of that world.

| Sep 11, 2019

It's shot in black and white -- beautiful black and white, poetic black and white -- which is exactly the contrast that [director Roberto Minervini] means to present to put a poetic sheen on these very distraught stories.

| Sep 9, 2019

In answering the call, the film proposes that only concrete actions make a dent in apathy.

| Sep 5, 2019

The charisma of Minervini's subjects is powerful enough to cut through the ethnographic vibe...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 30, 2019

A devastating but honest observation. Accomplishes a story more interesting than plain, but plain none the less.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 25, 2019

In the end, I'm not sure that What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire? really "says" anything, and that's OK. Sometimes, the simple acts of looking and listening trump any attempts at eloquence.

| Aug 23, 2019

While content is important, it is context that is king in a documentary, and this film could do with a lot more of it to orient viewers, especially those who don't have a full working knowledge of the American South.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 23, 2019

The film's mixture of political rhetoric and a respect for its subjects' experience of everyday life, while showing the connections between the two, offers some implicit hope. So does the way it finds beauty in situations guaranteed to cause trauma...

| Aug 19, 2019

...expressly concerned with the relationship between boldness and fear, between self-display and concealment, between the sally and the retreat.

| Aug 19, 2019

For all the director's panache in finding captivating subjects and fleeting moments of vivid grace and profound sadness, the end result is rather frustrating

| Original Score: C | Aug 17, 2019