Origin is the latest gift of essential filmmaking from Ava DuVernay. Don’t pass it by, as some have, maybe thinking that DuVernay’s take on Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction bestseller, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, sounds more like homework than a fun time at the movies. Origin, though not a documentary, is still a social history, a spellbinding provocation that takes on weighty themes in drawing parallels among the caste systems in India, Nazi Germany and the American South. How do you make a movie about an intellectual argument? By putting a human face on it. DuVernay’s idea was to thrust Wilkerson herself into her own thesis. All praise then to King Richard Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who brilliantly nails every nuance as Wilkerson, the first woman of African-American heritage to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. To heighten the intimacy, DuVernay dramatizes Wilkerson’s grief — the deaths within a year of her white husband Brett Hamilton (a terrific Jon Bernthal), and her mother Ruby. 

“One of the most thought-provoking movies in recent years — the kind of film you’ll find impossible to forget, the kind of film you’ll want to discuss and debate with friends and colleagues.”–Chicago Sun Times

“Origin’s virtues are many: vivid characterizations, a global perspective and a narrative that plunges into the hero’s journey of a brilliant Black woman.”–AARP