New York Film Festival

Gone, Baby, Gone: Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike Kiss Deadly in David Fincher’s Killer Thriller

October 4, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Pike’s Peak with a side of Affleck

There hasn’t been a soignée blonde so flat-out hate-able since Gwyneth bitched about the burdens of motherhood. Welcome to the A-list, Gone Girl star Rosamund Pike! The tall, slender, Oxford-educated actress who made her feature film debut in Die Another Day in 2002 would have made a great Hitchcock obsession, pecked by birds or poked in the shower.

Pike escapes playing go-to girlfriend roles (Jack Reacher opposite Tom Cruise) to rule as the title anti-heroine in David Fincher’s highly anticipated adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s marriage-gone-wild thriller, which opened last Friday following its world premiere at the New York Film Festival. Flynn, a former journalist, also scripted, tweaking an ending that never quite satisfied on the page.

For novel fans, there will be few surprises (read here for my review of the book on Goodreads: Amy Dunne (Pike), whose parents irksomely exploited her childhood in a profitable children’s book series titled Amazing Amy, disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary to Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck doing an Affleck). Nick, who has retreated with Amy to his Missouri hometown after they both lost their Manhattan writers’ jobs, is at first the bereaved and befuddled husband. And then, thanks to some helpful clues, and the doggedness of Detective Rhonda Boney (a tart Kim Dickens), the trail begins to point at imperfect Nick and suggest foul play.

Out, out damn spot for Pike’s Appalling Amy.

As Amy’s parents arrive from New York and generate a media frenzy to find their daughter as much as whip up flagging book sales, Nick begins to appear increasingly suspicious. [Read more…]

Critic’s Pick: NYFF Edition ‘The Immigrant’

October 27, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Mation Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix come to America (courtesy of The Weinstein Company)

Must-See Movies Beyond the Blockbusters

James Gray weds personal ancestry and opera in a drama about a Polish sister, Ewa Cybulski (Marion Cotillard), who walks off the boat at Ellis Island in 1921 into the arms of a well-dressed shyster, Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix). Having left behind her coughing sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan) at the island infirmary, and fearing for her own deportation, the beauty will now do nearly anything to raise the money to rescue Magda and weather the false promises of the promised land of America.

Oscar-winner Cotillard (“La Vie en Rose,” “The Dark Knight Rises”), speaking flawless regional Polish as well as English, pulls the camera toward her in every scene. There is not a wasted movement so that when she suddenly draws a pair of seamstress scissors in self-defense, the audience awakens to how tightly wound Ewa has been, how completely on her guard. It is a performance of operatic feeling, with the control of her instrument that only great singers have: capable of reaching the audience in the farthest seats with an emotion as small and fragile as an eyelash.

As fraught as Ewa’s arrival in America is, when she steps between Bruno, who has plucked her off the boat like a pimp looking for Midwestern flesh at the bus terminal in Manhattan’s Penn Station, and his cousin/rival, Orlando the Magician (Jeremy Renner), her situation darkens. She becomes the canary between these two tomcats.

It is fun to see Renner out of the action of “Avengers” and playing a puckish period performer with a sly mustache who first meets Ewa when levitating himself before a ragged group at Ellis Island. Even in drama, there is the opportunity to “meet cute” – but there will be no romcom resolution.

“The Immigrant” extends Gray’s tight body of work. From his brilliant 1994 debut feature, “Little Odessa” (rent it!) set in the contemporary immigrant community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, the director (and co-writer) has told stories of complicated America citizens, often with roots in the old country. He is a studious and compassionate filmmaker with a strong knack for directing actors with grit. One of his trademarks is his fearlessness in peeling back male emotion.

“The Immigrant” is Gray’s fourth collaboration with Phoenix and, like the better known teams of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, or Wes Anderson and Bill Murray, or Howard Hawks and Cary Grant, they play each other well.

Phoenix, despite his off-screen antics, remains an actor of profound depth and range: “The Master,” “Walk the Line,” and “Gladiator.” He surprises. He has wells of tragedy, yes, but also the capacity for comedy both broad and specific, and great charm.

The awkward moments in this movie where Bruno emcees a cheesy girlie revue that recalls “Cabaret” have inspired some criticism of Phoenix’s acting. But Bruno the emcee is not Joel Grey’s accomplished cabaret performer. Phoenix intentionally plays these performances within a performance badly. (Remember he nailed Johnny Cash in “Walk the Line.”) For Bruno, being on stage is a hustle not an art. He is an immigrant himself, who as a boy had to peddle any skill he had to survive, even if that meant tacking bottle caps to the soles of his shoes and dancing in the street.

So who is the immigrant of the title: Ewa or Bruno or even Orlando the Magician? They all are.

Bottom Line: All-stars Cotillard, Phoenix and Renner sail back in time for a deeply moving melodrama

O Captain! My “Captain Phillips!”

October 13, 2013 By Thelma 6 Comments

Tom Hanks knows how to use a walkie talkie as Captain Phillips, everyman hero

Perhaps it’s unfair to critique a movie based on a Danish film that virtually nobody in America has seen, “A Hijacking,” so let’s just begin with this: I caught up with “Captain Phillips” yesterday at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, with my son. Its conventionality surprised me given that it was the opening night film for the prestigious New York Film Festival and Paul Greengrass (“The Bourne Ultimatum,” “United 93”) directed.

True, “Captain Phillips” succeeds as an edge-of-your seats thriller with Tom Hanks (or TOM HANKS) as the real-life Maersk Alabama captain Richard Phillips. The good Massachusetts-born merchant mariner survived the vicious 2009 attack by four seriously undernourished Somali pirates armed with automatic weapons en route to Mombassa, Kenya — aided in the end by a team of brick-built Navy SEALS who arrive like the cavalry to save the day.

So, is this “Zero Dark Thirty” off the Somali Coast? No, and that’s because, in the end, while the event itself plays out with horror and urgency, and an American everyman showed courage under fire, the point-of-view is so generic. So generic, in fact, that Oscar buzz for Hanks, with his studied if inconsistent Boston accent, seems misplaced, particularly in this competitive year with outstanding performances by Chiwetel Ejiofor (“12 Years a Slave”), Matthew McConaughey (“The Dallas Buyers Club”), Bruce Dern (“Nebraska”) and Robert Redford (“All is Lost”).

Battle of the budgets: if a tree falls in a foreign language must we ignore it?

Although Hanks’ captain does sweat and grunt and speak into a walkie talkie, the performance seems of a piece with his role as Robert Langdon in the big-budget puzzler/adventure “The Da Vinci Code.” Yes, Hanks doesn’t change his underwear for the entire movie, removes his shirt (really?), gets splashed with blood — and pulls off one good weep. One could argue that his cry moment deserves a place at the Best Actor table but I would counter that, for actors, crying is easy, taking us deeper inside a character is difficult.

Still, Hanks serves more-than-adequately as the star engine powering this ship-at-risk story. However, the star’s super-appeal in the face of his adversary, the projectile-toothed pirate Muse (Barkhad Abdi), is a great big cotton-ball smothering the question: who is right, and who is wrong on the far side of the world. Both movies, “Captain Phillips” and its Danish little brother “A Hijacking” deliver a tense movie-going experience, although certainly in “Phillips” that is blunted by the knowledge that the captain survived to write a book and return to sea. (Amazingly, “Zero Dark Thirty” remained tense even though viewers knew the final act.)

What made “A Hijacking” so haunting was the ambiguous tensions beyond the incident between Europe and Africa, haves and have-nots. In that movie, the action shifts between deteriorating conditions on a hijacked Danish ship in the Indian Ocean held for ransom, and the ship owners’ sleek Copenhagen glass and steel corporate HQ. When the Somali pirates ask for $12 million ransom, back in Denmark,the arrogant CEO begins with a low ball offer of $250,000, initiating a bleak standoff where, ultimately, corporate greed holds both the seaborne captives and pirates hostage.

As I wrote earlier this year about the foreign film at Yahoo! Movies; “On one hand, this is a painstaking thriller about what happens when an act of piracy on a distant sea upsets the balance between East and West. On a larger level, as it shifts between the wealth evident in Denmark and the desperation reflected in the pirates’ behavior, “A Hijacking” raises the provocative question: Who is hijacking who?”

While “Captain Phillips,” to its credit, honors the pirates with more back-story, and they evolve as characters — the leader, the angry one, the boy pulled into the fray, the fourth man as ballast — the end still lands squarely in a Hollywood space. The Yanks win with the help of technology centuries beyond the Somali’s manufacture, and crush the outnumbered pirates to make the world safe for commerce. Hurray?

Skiffing ahead

Yahoo! Movies: Five Must-See Movies at the New York Film Festival

October 2, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

(Left) Lee Daniels’ “The Paperboy” with Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron; (Right) Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” with Suraj Sharma (Photos: Nu Image/20th Century Fox)

The 50th New York Film Festival premieres this Friday with Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” and closes on Sunday night, October 14, with Robert Zemeckis’s “Flight.” Along the way, it will make a pit stop to honor “The Paperboy” actress Nicole Kidman for refusing to play it safe in her cinema choices, and program director Richard Pena, who is retiring after 25 years. The prestigious festival, held at Manhattan’s Lincoln Center, cherry-picks the best films from European film festivals like Cannes and Berlin and adds a broad sweep of international films, spiced up with a few star-heavy Oscar hopefuls and unexpected independent finds. Past festivals have led with Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” Pedro Almodovar’s “All About My Mother,” and David Fincher’s “The Social Network.”

“Life of Pi”: Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (“Brokeback Mountain”) opens the fest with a daring 3D adaptation of Yann Martel’s magical best-seller about an Indian boy named Pi Patel (newcomer Suraj Sharma) shipwrecked on the Pacific Ocean en route to Canada with a tiger, an orangutan, a hyena, and a zebra. Irrfan Khan (“Slumdog Millionaire”) plays the mature Pi. This is the adventure’s world premiere and it’s rumored that the print will arrive “wet” to the first screening on Friday.

“Frances Ha”: Bedmates Noah Baumbach (“Greenberg”) and Greta Gerwig (“To Rome With Love”) collaborate on a black-and-white comedy that plays like “Annie Hall” as if penned by a woman. Gerwig, who co-wrote the script with Baumbach, stars as Frances, a happy-go-lucky Manhattanite coming to terms with the fact that her dream to be a dancer may fizzle, and that financial instability is only romantic for so long. Gerwig’s writing adds a beneficial lightness that blunts Baumbach’s bitter edge without sacrificing the insight into contemporary Left Coast life. Add in Mickey Sumner (aka the daughter of Sting and Trudie Styler) as Frances’s BFF, and we’ve got a sophisticated “Girls” gone wild without the self-pity.

“The Paperboy”: “Precious” director Lee Daniels goes crazy-town in this much-hyped Southern Gothic about a journalist (Matthew McConaughey), his brother (Zac Efron), a colleague (David Oyelowo), and a felon-lover (Nicole Kidman) trying to free a Florida death-row inmate (John Cusack at his most raggedy). Recalling the scene in “Precious” where Mo’Nique’s vicious mom drops a television on the head of her daughter (Gabourey Sidibe), this overheated thriller is out-there nuts. The scene where Kidman’s older woman urinates on jellyfish-stung swimmer Efron is an instant camp classic.

“Caesar Must Die”: Italy’s pick for this year’s foreign-language Oscar features actual inmates mounting a production of William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” at Rome’s Rebibbia prison. Concentrated, intense, and largely in black-and-white, this modern look at betrayal, murder, and justice gives life to the text, and meaning to the reality of living life behind bars. From brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (“The Night of the Shooting Stars”), the drama-within-a-drama earned the Golden Berlin Bear at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.

“Flight”: Director Robert Zemeckis returns to live-action filmmaking for the first time since “Cast Away” in 2000 with a supercharged thriller. Denzel Washington stars as a pilot who makes a daring emergency landing — and then comes under intense scrutiny when it’s revealed he was flying high. The closing-night film makes its world premiere at the New York Film Festival.

Oscars 2012: Best Actress Roundtable

September 18, 2011 By Thelma 11 Comments

Viola Davis,The Help,Bestseller,Kathryn Stockett,Best Actress,Oscars 2012,Best Supporting Actress

Davis has a lot to smile about…including being an Oscar frontrunner

For our first Oscar roundtable, I welcomed Sasha Stone of Awardsdaily.com, and USA Today film reporter Susan Wloszczyna to lay out the early shape of the Best Actress race. And, having posted a list of the serious contenders, I tossed out the first question: Is Viola Davis going to be considered a lead role, and is she at the top?

Sasha Stone: I’m getting that winner vibe from Viola Davis this year. I know that Glenn Close is way overdue and this would be the perfect year to award her but I have a feeling Davis will win in whatever category she’s put in, supporting or lead. Partly it’s because the film is so successful but mainly because her character is so admirable.

Susan Wloszczyna: If she were in the supporting category — not that I think that where she necessarily should be, but she could be — I believe Davis would have a much better chance of winning at least at this stage of the game. But if Michelle Williams pulls off a miraculous incarnation of MM, she might get the edge for actress. Not only does she have two previous nominations, but if she is fabulous, she might outdo Cate Blanchett’s winning turn as Kate Hepburn.

SS: Susan, I’m not sure Michelle Williams is quite ready for a win. She’s going to have to top Glenn Close, who is running on overdue status, Meryl Streep AND Viola Davis…I can’t imagine a scenario, unless she gained 30 pounds and murdered people, where she could pull this off. Not feeling it quite yet for her.

Blanchett won in supporting, which is an easier feat to pull off for a role that’s exactly like another actress – in fact, Blanchett won as a win for that movie too. There was Aviator heat building that year. I am not sure the Marilyn movie is going to be a strong Best Picture contender. So I guess I have trouble seeing where the incentive to vote for her would be, over all of those other strong performances. I can’t see it happening. We’ll have to wait and see.

SW: Sometimes they go with the overdue. Sometimes they invest in the future. And sometimes the actual role counts as much if not more than the career status of the nominee. As much as I love Mamma Mia! I am not sure about Phyllida Lloyd’s skill as a movie maker — therefore to me Iron Lady is a question mark.

And as much as I think Close does deserve an Oscar, after seeing Alfred Nobbs, I am not so sure this role will do it for her. For one, Janet McTeer pretty much steals the show. For another, her performance did not move me as much as I would have expected. It’s not like how I felt after seeing Bullock in The Blind Side. Meanwhile, someone like Williams could be akin to Portman or Cotillard in terms of their preference. The influx of young actors who vote could also cause more shifts in the conventional wisdom side of things. Basically, I think it is too early to hand it all to one actress candidate.

Oh and my choice of overdue status this year is Vanessa Redgrave, who is astonishing in Coriolanus — but in supporting. Her Julia statue is pretty dusty too.

SS: Susan, you make great points. But remember, we’re still talking about a performance no one has seen in Williams. It’s sort of like talking about War Horse winning Best Picture – yes, if the stars align perfectly it will happen but it’s unknowable. It’s impossible, then, to really read the Best Actress race accurately without having seen everything. But I’ve not yet seen Michelle Williams turn in the kind of performance she’d need to beat Davis, Close, Streep, etc. I think she was wonderful in Blue Valentine but she wasn’t playing someone whose voice we all know so well, whose face we have studied for decades, someone whose relationship with the camera was second to none – and that’s Marilyn, and those are big, big shoes to fill. I’ve seen many actresses try to nail Marilyn over the years and somehow I am still skeptical that this one girl can do it that well. Don’t get me wrong, I think she’s really good. But playing Marilyn is like playing JFK – almost impossible.

Cate Blanchett is a different actress from Michelle Williams. Blanchett can completely disappear into a persona, as she did with Hepburn and with Bob Dylan. That has not yet been what Williams has done – and it’s really hard to do. You have to be a mimic and a good actress at the same time.

I agree that McTeer pretty much steals Albert Nobbs and that Close’s performance wouldn’t win on its own. But then I think of Paul Newman in The Color of Money and that quiets my doubt. I still think Viola Davis has it in the bag but my next in line, at this stage of the game, without having seen Williams, is still Close.

TA: Well, Sasha and Susan, I’m hearing early buzz on Marilyn the movie is that it’s light, lighter than expected. That said, it’s still in the New York Film Festival. And the reaction to Nobbs at Toronto was, in general, respectful rather than passionate. And Susan raises a red flag regarding Director Phyllida Lloyd — can she pull off a movie about Margaret Thatcher that is as complicated as that world leader, or equal to Streep? Again, early buzz is that The Iron Lady is not The Golden Statuette material above and beyond the central performance.

Of course, only seeing the films will tell, but does the success of the movie overall (not just box office, but emotionally) have an impact on who wins? That’s an open question to those joining our virtual roundtable.