Test Pattern

This is a film that takes a slim setup, all of it predicated on difference, and runs with it, renders it into something as intellectually persuasive as it is dramatically refined.

Reveals, with fiercely focussed observation, the combined breakdown of public institutions and private life.

This is an important film. It's perhaps even more than timely -- it's urgent.

It doesn't feel small. It packs a lot into that [short runtime].

Michelle Ford's "Test Pattern," with patient specificity, probes the institutional injustices suffered by black women to potent, provoking effect.

An engrossing human drama, one that examines the intersections and inequalities between race, gender, and healthcare in a poignant and powerful way.

Examines not just the broken medical system in Texas, but also toxic masculinity, the murky waters of consent, and the power dynamics in interracial couples - especially between Black women and white men.

Everything in Test Pattern comes back to that idea of authenticity, exemplified by the neorealist approach that Ford takes to putting us through the motions with these characters.

Those words by late civil-rights leader Malcolm X reverberate throughout filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford's white-knuckle debut...

It is not a "message" movie; instead it depicts the gulf between one man's desire to help his traumatized girlfriend, and how she internalizes the realization...