Female Film Critics 24/375
Depression doesn’t play favorites. Neither does anxiety. A loving family, a creative career, and financial stability are no defense against the darkness that creeps into one’s mind, as the drama A Mouthful of Air demonstrates through one mother’s anguish. Making her feature directing debut, Amy Koppelman adapted her fictional 2003 novel of the same name, based on her own experience with clinical depression.
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A smartly spooky movie in which the true monsters are all too real, husband-and-wife team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s adaptation of Elizabeth Brundage’s All Things Cease to Appear, is driven by a haunting whose nature is tantalizingly unclear.
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Like the haunted house in upstate New York at the core of its story, Things Heard & Seen has good bones. Unfortunately, its plodding pace, shallow characterizations, and on-the-nose dialogue keep this Netflix thriller from being a satisfying showpiece.
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Marion Davies, movie star and long-time love of the wealthy media powerhouse William Randolph Hearst, is a featured character played by Amanda Seyfried in Mank, the story of Herman Mankiewicz as he wrote the original screenplay for Citizen Kane. Davies is better remembered as the inspiration for the untalented Susan Alexander character Kane tried to make into an opera star in Citizen Kane than for her own appealing appearances in film. Film historian Lara Gabrielle, author of a forthcoming book about Davies, discusses the real-life actress.
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Articles, books, and films have interrogated the creation of director/co-writer Orson Welles’ iconic 1941 Citizen Kane. Director David Fincher’s Netflix film Mank won’t settle any arguments given its clichéd treatment of Hollywood luminaries, with name dropping replacing complex development. Here’s the essence of this take on the troubled attribution of Kane’s screenplay.
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Are you curious about how Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane got made? The movie industry loves its own past, so director David Fincher (The Social Network) wants to set the record straight, working from a witty, character-study backstory by his late father, Jack Fincher.
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The title says it all: you should have left this direct-to-DVD disappointment in the Red Box! When wealthy retired banker suspects his marriage to his much-younger movie actress/wife is in trouble, he rents a huge, brick country house in Wales for them and their six year-old daughter for a brief vacation,
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In its first three seasons, Veronica Mars was widely regarded as a sparkling feminist television series. Well, its fourth season, airing on Hulu, would seem to unmask the show as creator Rob Thomas’ 21st century version of the kind of backlash entertainment that appears right on cue whenever women make new strides toward independence, personhood, and realization of their talents and goals. Like running for president and “me too”? Suddenly, Veronica has emerged as a sinister warning to any girl who would be her own person while female. And in a very big way.
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Where would we be without Shirley MacLaine? Since her first appearance in cinema (Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry), La MacLaine has played a wild card in the best sense of the term, injecting tartness, intelligence and slyness into performances that elevate even well-trod narrative tropes. Now, at age 82, she brings her heightened verve to The Last Word. Read on…
Disney Animation’s Zootopia set records at box office, but the film’s success is about so much more than impressive numbers.
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