Female Film Critics 24/375
Consider the desperation, courage, and naiveté prompting two young American friends, Hanna and Liv, to accept a job bartending at the completely misnamed Royal Hotel, located in a remote Australian Outback mining town. As backpacking tourists in Sydney without any viable options, they certainly need the money. However, Hanna and Liv fail utterly to anticipate the clientele, to their dismay.
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Tthe audacious, bizarre, inconceivable dramedy will prove to be a favorite to quirky indie fans. There’s care and consideration in every aspect of the production, from the awards-heavy cast, to the careful color stories in the production design, to the embarrassment of riches offered up in the score and music. Writer/director Rebecca Miller gives her characters real issues, often to the point of mental illness, and they are issues that build interactions and relationships that offer less clearcut hero/villain scenarios, thereby making them worlds more interesting. She collaborated with her cast in developing their roles, and it shows in the commitment the performers give to their performances. The result is a sort of screwball comedy meets magical realism, with a lot of heart thrown in.
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Writer and filmmaker Rebecca Miller’s first film since the too-little-seen Maggie’s Plan starring Greta Gerwig, Julianne Moore and Ethan Hawke in 2015, She Came to Me is a charming fairy tale about finding romance in a magical New York. In her films and works of literature, Miller has always delivered a strong personal voice and characters, particularly women, that are individual, flawed and fully human.
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I’m in an uncertain place with She Came to Me, the slightly strange twist on romantic fiction by writer/director Rebecca Miller. There is an ostensible story and its themes—those are as clear as the hors d’oeuvres tray at a party. Yet there is an infusion of subtext that causes me to question the recipe. Perhaps that incongruity is leaving me wondering what to say. You could call me Schrödinger’s Critic—a state of neither/nor I find myself pondering more and more.
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Filmmaker Alexander Payne’s latest offering is not particularly original in any of its elements and doesn’t attempt to break any new ground, but as it transpires, that’s not at all a bad thing. Well-acted, lovingly directed, and sharply written by David Hemingson, The Holdovers is a warm, nostalgic hug of a film that harks back to a specific and beloved era of filmmaking. Payne sets the film in the early ‘70s to allow for a showcase of his vintage favorites. From the soundtrack to the color palette, he immerses his film in everything of the era and it truly works in the film’s favor.
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An exploration of memory, separation, and connections fractured but not broken, Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias puts Hiam Abbas (adored actress and the filmmaker’s mother) under the microscope, comparing some of her life’s choices with those of her mother and grandmother and the changing landscape around their homeland. Shown at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the film is a deeply personal, layered journey that demonstrates how we can try to uncover the past but never truly know it.
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Dame Kristin Scott Thomas makes her feature directorial debut with North Star, a family tale about love and loss with a great cast. A lesser cast and better writing would have improved matters, but never mind. The plot revolves around the reunion of three sisters who are gathering at the family home for their mother’s third marriage. Mom (Scott Thomas) has been twice married and twice widowed, a detail from Scott Thomas’ own life. As a child, the filmmaker lost her father and her stepfather — both armed forces pilots — within six years.
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Cinematic love letters to the art and magic of movies are common enough and more often than not, are told from the perspective of a young boy, eager to experience all the technicolor adventures on the big screen have to offer. With The Movie Teller (La Contadora de Películas), Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig has not only gifted to audiences a moving, captivating ode to both movies and the power they have to create and bind communities, but one told–for a change–from the perspective of an imaginative young girl with a talent for storytelling herself.
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Bosnian-Dutch filmmaker Ena Sendijarević’s her sophomore film is set on a remote Indonesian island during the waning days of the colonial era. Sweet Dreams is the story of two women who are left to their own devices after the death of Jan, patriarch owner of a sugar plantation. Sendijarević grew up in the Netherlands, a country with a long and atrocious imperialist past. “I never learned anything about it when I was [in] school. She wanted to know more about it and got the idea to do something with it on film.
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Kim Thuy came to Canada as one of the million “boat people” fleeing Vietnam in the late 1970s after Communist victory in the war. Thuy wrote of her experiences in Ru, a 2009 bestselling memoir that was eventually translated into 30 languages and won her a slew of awards all over the world. One person who championed the book was TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey, who represented the book at the 2015 edition of Canada Reads, an annual battle-of-the books event broadcast nationally by the country’s public broadcaster, the CBC. It seems fitting that the superb film version of Ru had its world premiere at TIFF 2023.
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