Assuming they can get through writer/director Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman without it triggering a PTSD reaction, scores of women who have a part of their brain unwillingly dedicated to the memory of their own sexual harassment or assault will relate to lead character Cassie (Carey Mulligan). So too will the friends of those who experienced that …
Rémi Chayé returned to the latest Annecy Festival, where his first full length feature Long Way North won the Audience Award in 2015, with the film Calamity, A Childhood of Martha Jane Cannary, where the film won the Cristal Best Feature Award, the fest’s highest honor. He had his hand in many aspects of this colorful and arty …
It’s a good thing Phyllida Lloyd felt it was high time to helm a small indie film. She’d already broken all box office records with the feature film version of Mamma Mia, only to subsequently direct The Iron Lady, which garnered yet another much deserved Best Actress Oscar for Meryl Streep. Lloyd had been directing for theater …
It has been clear for a while that Regina King was headed for feature film direction, and she found a great and compelling subject in the historic night in 1964 when Cassius Clay (soon to be Mohammad Ali), Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown spent the evening together after Clay defeated Sonny Liston at …
It’s quite the achievement to create a movie that feels as fluid as a dance. Writer/director Ewa Msangi achieves just that with Farewell Amor, a film that tackles the challenge of articulating reintroduction, second chances, and the risks and rewards of chosen intimacy for a family reuniting after 17 years. It is a rich character study …
Horror movie lovers owe a debt of gratitude to Jason Blum and all the folks at Blumhouse for valiantly aiming to distract from the real life horrors of 2020. That production company has been all over the streamers and theaters this fall. Now the new horror comedy Freaky lands in time to splash cinematic blood …
“I believe art cuts across time. Art lives forever”, says abstract and pioneering photorealist artist Audrey Flack, in an interview during her one woman show at renowned New York gallery Hollis Taggart. Flacks work expresses some of the deepest struggles and commonalities in humanity, like mortality and a yearning for belonging and love. Flack’s life …
Smile, you’re on covert camera. No, this is not referencing an episode of Black Mirror. Director Shalini Kantayya brings us Coded Bias, a documentary that rightly feeds fears on a subject many have blithely ignored, the increasing control technology is having over the world, and in every aspect of life. Worse, it is pervasively anchored in bias, …
Nomadland, which has already garnered a lot of Oscar buzz for both writer/director/editor Chloë Zhao, and lead and producer Frances McDormand, was featured at the recent Middleburg Film Festival. Based on Jessica Bruder’s award-winning 2017 nonfiction work Nomandland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Nomadland examines the phenomenon of travelers going across the country in search …
For those who know and revere the novel by Daphne Du Maurier, which is one of the great classics of gothic romance, this new incarnation of Rebecca, from director Ben Wheatley, is a valiant reinterpretation that is truer to the book than it is to the Hitchcock film, which is as is should be. While some …
