Female Film Critics 24/375
When production in Australia began on this new Hulu series, Nicole Kidman refused to meet the rest of the cast until she was in character as beatific Masha Dmitrichenko, the mysteriously serene leader of a holistic wellness center who uses questionable treatments and experimental practices on her clients.
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Eventually everyone gains expert status on loss. If you think you’re immune, you aren’t. This is something director Theodore Melfi banks on with his new film The Starling a dramedy in which parents Lilly and Jack Maynard are grappling with grief from losing their baby daughter Katie to SIDS. The Starling works the extended metaphor of Lilly’s inability to control a bird in her garden that repeatedly attacks her while protecting its nest as a reference reference the grieving parents’ inability to deal with their sadness. The film works and reworks that metaphor and others to such an exhaustive degree that it might as well be the audience members getting dive-bombed à la Tippy Hedren in The Birds.
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Oooh, you think, this is going to be a great movie. Just look at that cast! Melissa McCarthy! Chris O’Dowd! Daveed Diggs! Kevin Kline! Then you look at the movie, and you think, “Meh!” The Starling is a film with more promise than delivery but worth analyzing for what went wrong.
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The problem with Thunder Force is that it’s unnecessarily complex. Two fine actors — Melissa McCarthy and Olivia Spencer — expend breathless monologues to explain the plot design, and, still they do not succeed to make it plausible or even fantastic enough for awe. So, bottom line, the problem is Ben Falcone. Falcone, McCarthy’s husband, wrote and directed Thunder Force.
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Unfortunately, inept writer/director Ben Falcone forgets about essential character depth and development, telegraphing the lame slapstick gags, which lack any sense of pace and timing. Worse yet, he totally wastes the considerable talents of Olivia Spencer, whose underwritten Emily is simply steadfast, drifting along for the ride as a relationship sidekick.
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For all the laughs, Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone’s holiday movie,Superintelligence, preaches but blessedly falls a skosh shy of being sanctimonious. It’s a massive moral wrapped in founts of fun. Plus, Superintelligence does not take superintelligence to enjoy.
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The Kitchen, from director Andrea Berloff, is a crime thriller based on the DC Entertainment/Vertigo comic book miniseries of the same name. The movie stars Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss as the wives of Irish mobsters. The women decide to get tough and take over organized crime operations in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood when their husbands are sent to prison.
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Emmy Award winner and Oscar nominee Melissa McCarthy will receive the Distinguished Artisan Award at the Sixth Annual Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild Awards (MUAHS, IATSE Local 706) celebrating her prolific acting career and the plethora of characters she embraces. McCarthy is the first female artist to receive the award.
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There’s Oscar-buzz about Melissa McCarthy’s snarling performance as a cranky, slovenly, misanthropic Manhattan author who is unable to pay her rent or care for her ailing cat.
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Can You Ever Forgive Me? highlights Melissa McCarthy’s dramatic gifts. We who know Melissa McCarthy as a brilliantly talented comedic actress will expand our categorization with her dramatic performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me? McCarthy plays the real-life Lee Israel, in her fifties, living in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, eking out a living writing biographical histories. Tough times and her abrasive personality propel her into a downturn.
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