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 […]
THE FORGIVEN (Focus/Universal – TBD): In 1963, Pauline Kael famously wrote a piece entitled “The Sick-Soul-Of-Europe Parties,” and almost 60 years later, if you add the US to the guest list, John Michael McDonagh’s The Forgiven presents a bash in the same vein. McDonagh’s script, based on a novel by Lawrence Osborne, underlines in […]
> TIFF’s Midnight Madness program is exactly what you think it is: 10 flat-out, unapologetic genre movies that premiere each night at midnight in front of a raucous crowd at the 1200-seat Ryerson Theatre. In any given year, the Madness may include unexpected gems like last year’s Insidious and 2006’s Borat, interestingly weird pictures such […]
At this point, with 3 first-rate films to his name, it’s time to stop remarking on how surprising it is that Ben Affleck is a major American filmmaker and just accept that he is one. His latest, ARGO, is his best yet, one that has a broader palette of tones and a larger sense of scale […]
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 […]