Female Film Critics 24/375
In a drama stuffed with detail, Rachel Carey weaves the fact-based story of Chicago’s Jane collective, everyday women who, in the years before Roe v. Wade made abortion in the United States legal, risk their own freedom so that other women can end their pregnancies without resorting to back alleys, knitting needles, bicycle spokes, or rat poison.
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Director Mary Harron, who previously found the humanity in would-be assassin Valeria Solanas with I Shot Andy Warhol and Bret Easton Ellis’ twisted master of the universe in American Psycho tries to the same with Charles Manson acolytes and murderers Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkle, and Susan Atkins with her latest, Charlie Says. It is a mixed bag, but intriguing enough to make it a worthy addition to Harron’s oeuvre despite some glaring weaknesses.
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A grandmother takes on the powers that be in The Seer and the Unseen, Sara Dosa’s sophomore feature that made its debut at the SFFILM Festival. The documentary’s depiction of efforts to stop development across one of Iceland’s magnificent lava fields is enchanting—and not just because Iceland’s legendary elves are the titular “unseen.”
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Welcome to the worst episode of West Wing, ever, as directed by Jason Reitman trying to channel Robert Altman. Never has Altman’s signature overlapping dialogue and large, panoramic casts been so ill-used than in this pallid distillation of what went wrong with Colorado Senator Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign.
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Lacking the tension it might have had had the story been presented as a thriller, Red Joan instead wallows in melodrama. What could have been the crackling story of a spy so good she got away with it for decades dissipates into weak soap opera.
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Roma unreels like memory, blending quotidian scenes of family life with dramatic historical moments (an earthquake, student unrest), and leavening bits of absurdity. Exquisite sound design and director Alfonso Cuaron’s own shimmering black-and-white cinematography add to the pleasure of this warm, evocative drama,’s own shimmering black-and-white cinematography add to the pleasure of this warm, evocative drama,
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Louis Garrel spins a compact , buoyant romantic farce in which he stars as Abel, sweet, passive, and buffeted by the whims of others. Rejected first by Marianne (Laetitia Casta, Garrel’s wife) in favor of his friend Paul, the pair reunites years later, with some unexpected adjustments.
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Jake Gyllenhaal and Ed Oxenbould deliver fine performances, but Wildlife is the Carey Mulligan show. Her old friend Paul Dano has given her a present, which she graciously gifts him back with one of the towering performances of her career.
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Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Elizabeth Debicki are the women of the title, drawn together after their criminal husbands are killed in a shootout with Chicago police. Left with their spouses’ debts to some very bad men, the women have no choice but to pick up with their old men let off.
Read moreOne of the happy surprises of Toronto International Film Festival 2017, Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston and the Women, may share
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