Lana Wilson at MoMI

“It would be nice to believe that a movie like this could provoke civil and respectful dialogue about an intensely polarizing issue, but let’s not kid ourselves,” wrote A. O. Scott in the New York Times eleven years ago, two years before After Tiller won an Emmy and nine years before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In 2009, George Tiller, the medical director of one of only three clinics in the country that provided late-term abortions, was shot and killed while serving as an usher during the Sunday morning service at his church in Wichita, Kansas.

After Tiller is a portrait of four doctors who were at the time the only remaining providers of third-trimester abortions in the U.S., and at RogerEbert.com, Christy Lemire wrote that the film takes a “politically divisive, emotionally charged issue” and “portrays it with grace, understatement, and humanity.” At Slant, Andrew Schenker wrote that Shane and Wilson “focus on the day-to-day activities of its quartet of physicians, observing them in consultation with patients, reflecting on some of the thornier ethical aspects of their work, and trying to maintain a normal life while the threat of death at the hands of fanatical pro-lifers looms large over their everyday existence.”

Saturday at MoMI is given over to two celebrity portraits and a Tsai Ming-liang musical peppered with production numbers powered by mid-twentieth-century hits sung by Hong Kong pop idol Grace Chang. Handpicked by Wilson, The Hole (1998) “takes the implied apocalypse of self found in all of Tsai’s films and jumps at the chance to make it literal,” wrote Reverse Shot coeditor Jeff Reichert in 2004.

As the child star of Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby (1978) and the teen star of Randal Kleiser’s The Blue Lagoon (1980) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love (1981), Brook Shields was “a living contradiction, conveying both doll-like innocence and premature, sexualized knowingness,” writes Rhonda Garelick in her NYT piece on Wilson’s “thoughtful and moving” two-part series Pretty Baby (2023). As an adult, Shields has retaken control of her life. “At its heart, though, this is the story of the terrible toll that sexual and commercial objectification takes on women,” writes Garelick. “As triumphant and moving as Ms. Shields’s story is, Pretty Baby is also a cautionary tale.”

Miss Americana (2020) is “eighty-five minutes of translucence with Taylor Swift,” wrote the NYT’s Wesley Morris four years ago. “There’s more in it—and more to it—than you usually get with these pop superstar portraits.” Wilson’s film is “also about an apolitical star waking up to herself as a woman and a citizen,” and it reveals how “her creative and personal maturity come with a cost, obviously. But its most exhilarating disclosure is that Swift finds herself determined to pay it.”

Sunday offers two episodes from the online series Mind/Trip (2021), a study of mental disorders, and all four fourteen-minute episodes of A Cure for Fear (2018), which explores the implications of medically eradicating our phobias. The Departure (2017) centers on Ittetsu Nemoto, a former punk who became a Buddhist priest who guides visitors to his temple in rural Japan away from their suicidal tendencies. “Wilson’s film, a quiet wonder, emphasizes the courage it takes to choose the hard work of living,” wrote Alan Scherstuhl in the Village Voice.

Putting together her Criterion Top 10, Wilson noted that Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998) served as an “important inspiration” for Look into My Eyes, an unobtrusive view into one-one-one readings conducted by psychics in New York. Dispatching to Sight and Sound from Sundance, Nicolas Rapold wrote that the “genius” of Wilson’s film “is that she doesn’t ask us to believe, but to feel. Exquisitely shot, with consultation sequences mostly showing mediums and their clients head-on, Look into My Eyes faces people in all their lostness and yearning, sharing in what resembles therapy, confession, and detective work all at once.”