Female Film Critics 24/375
With Relic, director/screenwriter Natalie Erika James has crafted a taut horror flick that incorporates aging and dementia into its storyline. The clever use of music and lighting in the film, particularly those long shots of the dimly lit hallways in that creaky old house, really ramp up the fear factor and provides several well-earned jump scares
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At first, Relic plays like any number of supernatural thrillers but writer/director Natalie Erika James and co-writer Christian White incorporate genre tropes in smart ways that play into their larger theme. The idea to physically manifest the concept of dementia as a supernatural entity is nothing short of brilliant.
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Children will love the color, the movement, and the story, but grown-ups will bring more to Mary Poppins Returns. They will bring memories of Mary Poppins, the 1964 film with Dick van Dyck and Julie Andrews, or even the 2013 film, Saving Mr. Banks, the story of making Mary Poppins with Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks.
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If you’re looking for a jolly holiday gift that’s “practically perfect,” take everyone – kids and grandparents included – to see this enchanting, utterly delightful Disney sequel. It’s set in 1930s London, long after Mary Poppins original 1964 visit. Grown-up Michael Banks is now a widower, and his labor-activist sister Jane has come to help him with his three little children.
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The Bookshop reveals the character of a community. Some films aspire primarily to be a charming and cautionary story of political machinations that devastate kind characters striving to make constructive contributions to their community. That’s the case with The Bookshop, in which Florence Green, a widow of sixteen years, decides to transform her old stone house into the first bookstore for the fictitious town of Hardborough, East Anglia.
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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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A woman’s modest but passionate dream of running a book store goes up against small-town politics in Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop. With stunning performances by Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Bill Nighy and yong Honor Kneafsey, this intimate English-to-the-core drama reveals darkness at the heart of a storybook village.
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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Emily Mortimer stars in Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop, opening August 24. The indie drama is the latest triumph in Mortimer’s extraordinary career as a feminist actress-producer-screenwriter who hasn’t let the daunting challenges of dealing with the male-dominated movie business harden her heart.
Enigmatic and experimental as always, Sally Potter presents in The Party a tightly interwoven tapestry covering snappy interactions of seven quirky yet stereotypical Brits at a celebratory supper party. Shot in black and white, often in close up, the film reveals every nuance and wrinkle in superb performances by a stellar cast. Continue reading…