Female Film Critics 24/375
A remake of Akira Kurosawa’s highly acclaimed To Live, Living is equally powerful, thanks to Bill Nighy’s quietly dignified performance and a beautiful script by Nobel Prize winner, Kazuo Ishiguro. Nighy plays Mr. Williams, a very average British civil servant in postwar London, whose first name we never even get to know because no one is close enough to him to refer to him personally.
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It’s hard to imagine a Johnny Depp film being ignored but that’s what happened after Minamata premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival back in 2020, when Covid shuttered most theaters. Depp plays renowned W.W.II photojournalist W. Eugene ‘Gene’ Smith, who, by 1971, had become a jaded recluse: broke, wasted, estranged from his children, and suffering from PTSD.
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Director Oliver Hermanus and writer Kazuo Ishiguro have that rare mix of hubris, knowledge of film history, and love of subject that have led to adapting the screenplay of writer/director Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 masterpiece Ikiru. Bill Nighy’s performance and the evocative cinematography that captures mid-century London make Living a film that will have its own staying power and great value in repeat viewing. Shame on any critic that points to Ikiru in denying the richness of Living. Note to Hermanus and Ishiguro: Kurosawa would be proud.
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A marriage on the brink. Arguments. A son. Long walks. Consults with lawyers. Papers signed. Depression with determination. Happiness. No, this is not another review of Marriage Story. This is a review of Hope Gap, which those phrases also describe. Do we need another film about a marriage’s ending We do if it’s Hope Gap
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Among the most popular and praised films from last year, Marriage Story dramatizes, often painfully, a young couple’s separation and alienation. As if adding a postscript, Hope Gap focuses even more intensely on the dissolution of a twenty-nine year marriage. However, instead of giving equal weight to wife Grace and husband Edward, the profile stacks the deck against Grace.
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Emma may satisfy Janeites — or they may hate it as veering too far from the Austen gospel. Anglophiles may get their dose of the olde motherland, and fans of haberdashery will get their fill of ruffles and bonnets. Just don’t look for depth or incision in this movie version of Emma.
Read moreZoe Kazan and a fine ensemble of actors play characters on the margins of life in Manhattan in Danish writer/director Lone Scherfig’s The Kindness of Strangers. The narrative has a stream of dark comedy as it follows the lives of a mixed bag of struggling strangers.
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The thin script and confusing narrative do little to enhance the film, although the film is a gorgeous display of animation and stunning colors, it’s impossible to follow the story as it appears to be one video game vignette after another.
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In this slow-moving British period piece, Emily Mortimer plays Florence Green, a widow who moves to a sleepy coastal town in England to open a bookshop in an old abandoned house. It’s the 1950s, though, and outsiders — especially those who would be considered liberal elites today — are simply not welcome.
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In 1950s Britain, a widow moves to a small English village, buys a old house in town that had stood empty for years, with the intention to open a bookshop. Sounds harmless enough, maybe even something the village would welcome. But Florence Green (Emily Mortimer) does not find it so. It isn’t so much the bookshop that is the problem, although one seemly friendly villager offers her the not-to-encouraging advice that people around there don’t read. Well, the villager admits, there is one reader, the reclusive Mr. Brundish (Bill Nighy) but he never leaves his decaying mansion. No, the real problem,as it turns out, is not lack of readers, but that Florence happened to pick as the spot for her bookshop the very old house that a powerful local aristocrat Violet Gamat (Patricia Clarkson) had her eye on, planning to turn the building that everyone in town calls “the old house” into an “arts center.”
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