Tomris Laffly With his breathless, soul-piercing “The First Wave,” director Matthew Heineman makes a tough cinematic proposition.
He asks his audience to travel back to March 2020 and relive the early, frightening days of the COVID-19 crisis in New York City, when the Big Apple quickly became the world’s coronavirus epicenter through four deadly months.More graphic in its approach than two similarly themed nonfiction films — Nanfu Wang’s “In the Same Breath” and Hao Wu and Weixi Chen’s “76 Days” — Heineman’s documentary is indeed a hard one to consent to at first, considering that the globally ruinous pandemic is far from over.
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