Female Film Critics 24/375
Bones and All uses cannibalism to argue for compassion. Of the many truly terrific fifteen films I saw at the Telluride Film Festival this past year, Bones and All is the only film I can not wholeheartedly recommend. For it presents, with some reserve, cannibals, those who in fact are the living eating the living. And director Luca Guadagnino introduces it without holding back in an early scene.
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The Girl From Plainville is inspired by the texting suicide case in which 17 year old Michelle Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for coercing her boyfriend Conrad Roy to kill himself. There was a documentary on the subject called I Love You, Now Die released in 2019, but this narrative brings something more, because it can be as subjective as it wants to be. Elle Fanning as Michelle Carter is so magnetic you can’t take your eyes off her, and Chloë Sevigny, who plays Conrad’s tortured and grieving mother Lynn Roy, is as heartbreaking as Fanning’s is chilling.
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For roughly the past decade, Italian high-fashion brand Miu Miu, a subsidiary of Prada, has been commissioning and releasing short films from some of the world’s most renowned women directors. As long as the films include Miu Miu fashions and accessories, the directors have been free to express their own creative impulses and personalities. Within the series, film fans will recognize signature flourishes along with great invention.
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Whoever you are, as an audience member Queen & Slim flows through you from the screen like music you’ve rarely heard played out loud. Visceral. Transcendent. Haunting…The film is all these things and more. To call this a ‘black Bonnie and Clyde’ is reductive and doesn’t do justice to the depth of the film.
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You gotta admire idiosyncratic filmmaker Jim Jarmusch assembling a star-studded cast – Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Selena Gomez, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover, Chloe Sevigny, Tom Waits – for a laidback zombie comedy with an environmental message.
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Lizzie resurrects an old axe murder mystery. The year is 1892. The murder: Mr. and Mrs. Borden. The suspect: Lizzie. If this movie were just the unspooling of a Victorian axe murder, it would still balance merit with demerits, but as it’s based on a real murder, Lizzie takes on an element of history beyond the psychological thriller. The story begins in medias res as Lizzie Borden, one of wealthy Alexander Borden’s two daughters, finds her father axed. She screams for Bridget, the servant, to call the police. Then they find Abby Borden, Lizzie and Emma’s icy step-mother, also axed.
Read moreWhen Jane Austen was very young, she scribbled the novella “Lady Susan,” an archly observant satire of 18th century epistolary novels in the form of letters from the hyper-articulate heroine. It’s perfectly suited for writer/director Whit Stillman (“Damsels in Distress,” “Last Days of Disco,” “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona”), who has demonstrated a fondness for the witty banter that harks back to the Restoration comedy of manners.
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