WEEK IN WOMEN: Lisa Cholodenko’s HIGH ART gets Criterion Collection Blu-ray – Brandy McDonnell reports

Lisa Cholodenko’s acclaimed 1998 debut feature High Art is getting a Blu-ray release this month via The Criterion Collection.

The queer romantic drama follows Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), a once-prominent photographer who has retreated into a life of heroin abuse with her faded-actress lover (Patricia Clarkson). When Lucy is rediscovered by Syd (Radha Mitchell), an up-and-coming editor at a photography magazine, professional ambition and personal attraction become dangerously entwined.

Cholodenko was still a student in Columbia University’s master of fine arts film program when she wrote High Art, which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival, earned her a Gotham Film Award nomination for breakthrough director and received multiple Independent Spirit Award nominations, including a best actress win for Sheedy. The film also screened in the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in France.

The Los Angeles native followed High Art with 2002’s Laurel Canyon, a drama about music, sex and generational divides starring Frances McDormand, Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale. Her sophomore feature, which premiered at Cannes in the Directors’ Fortnight, follows an uptight young man (Bale) and his fiancée (Beckinsale), who move into the home of his libertine record producer mother (McDormand) in the titular affluent L.A. neighborhood, which is famed as a 1960s and ’70s musical hub. Continue reading on THE WEEK IN WOMEN