Jon Bernthal and Aunjanue Ellis in Origin. Photo: ARRAY Filmworks This review was originally published on September 7 out of the Venice Film Festival. We are recirculating it now timed to Origin’s one-week theatrical run in New York and Los Angeles. Ava DuVernay’s Origin is both essay film and melodrama, though neither description quite does it justice. The director has taken Isabel Wilkerson’s influential nonfiction best-seller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents — a sweeping analysis of discrimination that finds the connections among American racism, the Nazi persecution of Jews, and India’s caste system — and turned it into a...