Female Film Critics 24/375
When a 15 year old boy on the autism spectrum, acting in his first movie, outshines his heavy hitting Hollywood co-stars, you know he’s something special. If only his film, Ezra, was just as exceptional. William A. Fitzgerald is Ezra. The teen was a mild mannered New Jersey school boy who liked acting when, on a whim, he auditioned for the film and won the part. He makes the movie watchable, stealing every scene he is in, which fortunately is a lot.
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Making a dramatic feature based on a nonfiction book can be a tricky proposition, but Ava DuVernay does it adeptly with her thought-provoking, powerfully moving Origin. Inspired by journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the film combines the book’s arguments with Wilkerson’s experiences researching and writing it; the end result is a compelling look at trauma, grief, and the absolute tragedy of dehumanizing certain groups of people.
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Origin is an historical fiction drama based on the non-fiction book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by journalist Isabel Wilkerson. In Caste, Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning features writer and New York Times bestselling author, explains that America’s founding ideology and ideals of liberty and equality for all are really an enduring hierarchy that isn’t racial, but an unspoken caste system much like that which exists in India.
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This installment is based on the curious case of tormented Arne Cheyenne Johnson, whose solemn answer when accused of the 1981 slaying of his Brookfield landlord was that the Devil made him do it.
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Having lived in Connecticut for many years, I had the pleasure of spending time with ‘ghost-hunters’ Lorraine and Ed Warren and saw Annabelle in her glass case in their home/museum. Even though they’ve both died, the fictionalized tales of their paranormal investigations continue.
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Rupert Wyatt’s wannabe sci-fi feature is so jumbled and idiotic that I’m stunned it ever got released. His tale begins in the bleak, wasteland remains of Chicago in 2027, nine years after Earth was invaded by spiny, insectoid aliens who look like huge, angry porcupines, riding around in a spaceship that resembles a large, lumpy sweet potato or yam.
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After a brief appearance by “The Nun” in James Wan’s “The Conjuring 2” (2016), this is a franchise spinoff, a supernatural prequel, set decades before the evil spook began to haunt Connecticut’s ghost-hunter Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga). After a nun commits suicide at a cloistered abbey in Biertan, Romania, in 1952, Father Anthony Burke (Demian Bichir) is summoned to Rome. He’s dispatched by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church to investigate the sacred sanctuary, accompanied by a young novitiate, Sister Irene (Vera’s real-life sister Taissa Farmiga), who has occult visions.
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Although 88 year-old Christopher Plummer oozes charm as a manipulative con man with a twinkle in his eye, Shana Feste’s
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Vera Farmiga is guiding the successful BatesMotel series through its upcoming final season. Throughout her career, she’s focused on work, preferring to stay off magazine covers. but she deserves time in AWFJ’s spotlight for her wealth of accomplishments in films and on television. Read on>>
Renowned Connecticut demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga) return with another ‘documented’ case, this time set in
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