Awards season is Darwinian, often placing two titles in direct competition that have only general traits in common. Last year we had the British biographies The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game, which might have canceled each other out in the end. This year brings two excellent stories about journalism, Truth and now […]
HER SMELL (no distrib – TBD): Writer-director Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip) is a fan of invective, and the punk rocker Becky Something (Elizabeth Moss), when she’s in the full flower of her moderate success, lets it fly in a way that even Natalie Portman in Vox Lux would find […]
THE GOOD NURSE (Netflix – Oct. 26): An unusually serious thriller about a serial killer. Tobias Lindholm’s film, from a script by Krysty Wilson-Cairns (who wrote 1917 and Last Night In Soho) and based on a book by Charles Graeber that recounted a true story, has a deliberately ambiguous title. It seems at first […]
> If you were going to describe the films of Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The House of Mirth) in one word, that word would not be “dynamic.” Or “kinetic.” Or, well, “exciting.” Davies directs stately tableaux, impressive and sometimes moving, but rooted in nostalgia and regret. Which is why […]
Oscar buzz has been trailing THE SESSIONS (which was then called The Surrogate) since it was unveiled at Sundance in January, and with good reason. For Academy members, it doesn’t get much better than a warm “based on a true story” about someone with a serious disability who nevertheless maintains his sense of humor and […]
NIGHTCRAWLER (Open Road) – Opens October 31 – Worth A Ticket Over the past few years, Jake Gyllenhaal has seemed determined to scrub the wholesomeness out of his screen image, in movies like Zodiac, Brothers, End of Watch and Prisoners. He achieves true creep-ness in NIGHTCRAWLER, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival before […]
Note: this will be our final installment of Toronto reviews, although the festival runs on until Sunday. It’s been a good if not classic festival, with a trio of legitimately great presentations in La La Land, Jackie and Moonlight, as well as the enormously fun if not particularly artistic Sing, and other strong titles […]
HIS THREE DAUGHTERS (no distrib): The premise of Azazel Jacobs’ film is simple enough to be staged as a play: as their father Vincent (Jay O. Sanders) lies dying in an unseen room of his Bronx apartment, Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) get in each others’ ways as they wait […]