THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ELEANOR RIGBY: HIM & HER is an extraordinary feature debut for its writer/director Ned Benson. Indeed, it’s so remarkable that it comes close to not needing the modifier “debut” to express how good it is–if Benson hadn’t bitten off a bit more than he could chew, this would have been one (or […]
Events on the same-sex rights front have moved so quickly that FREEHELD, which is based on a true story from 2007, and has been in development almost since it occurred, now feels like something of a history story. Not completely, of course–as the current situation of the Kentucky clerk who won’t issue marriage licenses […]
ROMA (Netflix – Dec. 14): Alfonso Cuaron is one of the master filmmakers of this era, and Roma confirms that all over again. It’s a deceptively simple memory piece, a semi-autobiographical story set in the Mexico City of his youth in 1970-71, with most of the action revolving around an upper-middle-class family with three […]
THE WOMAN KING (Tri-Star/Sony – Sept. 16): Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King feels something like what would happen if the Themyscira Island Amazonian sequences of Wonder Woman were feature length. Dana Stevens’ script (from a story by the actress/producer Maria Bello) is set in the 19th-century African kingdom of Dahomey, which is ruled by […]
> Lynn Shelton’s Humpday in 2009 was one of the most engaging pictures to come out of the mumblecore movement (“mumblecore,” for the uninitiated = ultra-low-budget, small scale film with dialogue mostly improvised by the actors), and her new film YOUR SISTER’S SISTER, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last night, confirms that she’s […]
Jacques Audiard doesn’t do sentimental. His last film, A Prophet, had the clear-eyed view of crime and the dramatic heft of a French version of “The Wire,” and his new and very different drama RUST & BONE benefits as well from his refusal to take the road of easy emotion. Lord knows, the bare […]
COLOSSAL (no distrib): Well, you haven’t seen this take on sci-fi spectacles before. In Nacho Vigalondo’s whatzit, party girl Gloria (Anne Hathaway) and her hometown friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) discover that they can cause their actions to be mirrored by a giant sea monster and robot terrorizing Seoul. In other words, if one of […]
FORD VS. FERRARI (20th Century Fox/Disney – November 15): If the Academy decides to award James Mangold’s Ford vs. Ferrari, which is certainly a possibility, it will be able to have some metaphorical cake and eat it too. FvsF is both a first-rate example of Hollywood corporate entertainment and a story that questions what […]