mother! (Paramount – Sept 15): It may come as a shock to people who have been following the marketing for Darren Aronofsky’s mother! to find out that it isn’t a horror movie at all. It uses thriller grammar from time to time, and in the early going you might think you’re going to see […]
DISOBEDIENCE (no distrib): Sebastian Lelio’s adaptation (with Rebecca Landiewicz) of Naomi Alderman’s novel is one of the surprises of the festival. It would be perfectly reasonable for the idea of Rachel McAdams as a Chassidic woman to bring back memories of Melanie Griffith in the camp classic A Stranger Among Us (and at least […]
THE CHILDREN ACT (no distrib): It’s not intended as disparagement to Ian McEwan’s novel and screenplay adaptation, or to Richard Eyre’s film, that THE CHILDREN ACT feels much of the time like it could be the pilot for a high-toned television series featuring Emma Thompson as a compassionate jurist specializing in family law who […]
MOLLY’S GAME (STX): Aaron Sorkin is a celebrated (or notorious, depending on your point of view) control freak, so it’s surprising that it’s taken him this long to decide to direct his own work. His first venture as writer/director MOLLY’S GAME is completely assured, not fancy with its visuals but not timid, either. By […]
KODACHROME (no distrib): AKA that page of the indie movie playbook marked “Dysfunctional Family Road Trip To Redemption.” Jonathan Tropper (This Is Where I Leave You) wrote the script, and it has his novels’ mix of damaged-man soap and rom-com. This one features a dying dad (Ed Harris), who has the kind of incurable […]
ON CHESIL BEACH (no distrib): Ian McEwan’s longish novella/shortish novel has been adapted by McEwan himself into a fluid and extremely English film, the first feature directed by stage director Dominic Cooke. The main action takes place during the honeymoon night of Florence (Saorirse Ronan) and Edward (Billy Howle) in 1962, with copious flashbacks […]
AMERICAN HORROR STORY: CULT – Tuesday 10PM on FX We find ourselves in boom times for killer clowns. They’re the main vehicles for terror in the new installment of FX’s Ryan Murphy anthology AMERICAN HORROR STORY, dubbed CULT (including a cameo from Freak Show‘s Twisty), and one of the granddaddies of the genre, Stephen King’s […]
Debates about what, if any, garments a television emperor has been wearing have rarely been as polarizing as the ones surrounding Showtime’s reboot of TWIN PEAKS, 25 years after the ABC original arrived in a blaze of glory only to be canceled a season later. The emperor in this case was David Lynch (along […]