Female Film Critics 24/375
The extremely intense, seven-episode mini-series centers on the 1984 murders of a mother and child, killed within the closed wold of the Mormons. Director/co-writer, Duston Lance Black folds into the narrative concepts of polygamy, blood atonement, evil, misogyny, and racism. He also fiddled all the pieces of this puzzle into a well-seamed production.
Read more
Almost unrecognizable in spidery mascara, prosthetic cheeks and garish wigs, Jessica Chastain is irresistible as camp icon Tammy Faye Bakker who – with her husband, preacher Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield) – built a Christian empire, Including Heritage USA, a Jesus-themed amusement park.
Read more
Every teacher has had a student who tried to charm his way to an A by writing about how he couldn’t write the paper assigned. Tick, Tick…BOOM proves that sometimes it works. This is the Jonathan Larson musical he wrote — before the phenomenal Rent — about writing a musical. And, boy! does it work!
Read more
As Lin-Manuel Miranda’s screen adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s Off-Broadway musical-about-writing-a-musical begins, anxiety-riddled Jon (Andrew Garfield) prepares to celebrate his 30th birthday in his cramped fifth-floor walk-up in Lower Manhattan with his dancer girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp), singing “This is the Life!”
Read more
Even at the height of their influence, Jim and Tammy Bakker were difficult to take seriously. The notorious TV evangelists got famous selling that specific American Christianity that is equal parts mammon, myth and messianic misdirection. The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a new film based on an eponymous documentary, attempts to capture this particular moment and these people. Directed by Michael Showalter and starring Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield, it is short on script and long on latex.
Read more
Jessica Chastain might be hoping that the sheer amount of makeup on her face will be good enough at awards time to garner her some nominations. In becoming The Eyes of Tammy Faye‘s Tammy Faye Bakker, there is so much coverage on the actor’s visage (really, so much that it is practically spackle) – which makes her resemble a John Wayne Gacy clown painting and which she blames for possibly forever altering her skin – that it is practically a character unto itself and certainly more animated than anything else in this needless dramatic regurgitation of the 2000 documentary of the same name. Whether all that paint will be good enough for an Oscar nod in a movie that misfires remains to be seen.
Read more