Social change has come to 1920s Littlehampton in the person of Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a foul-mouthed pub-roisterer of an Irish immigrant to this sleepy little English town. More specifically, her unconventional choices, including raising her daughter on her own and living with a man (Malachi Kirby) to whom she is not married, predictably raise… Read More »
BARBIE
At one point in BARBIE, Greta Gerwig’s pink-plastic jab at the patriarchy, America Ferrara, as Gloria, an ordinary woman, gives an impassioned précis on exactly what women face in the current social climate. It is a clarion call that should reverberate through the ages and one that will, like the film in which it appears,… Read More »
A NIGHTMARE WAKES
The most potent image in A NIGHTMARE WAKES, a film that is rife with them, is the juxtaposition of blood and ink as Mary Shelley (Alix Wilton Regan) struggles to produce her novel, Frankenstein or A New Prometheus, putatively the beginning of the science fiction genre (pace fans of Cyrano de Bergerac’s A Trip to… Read More »
THE LAST WORD — Mark Pellington Interview
Mark Pellington is firmly in touch with his feminine side. It was one of the first thing he talked about when I interviewed him on February 27, 2017. We went on riff on the psychology of the characters in THE LAST WORD, muse on making an entertaining film with substance, and the legacy of the… Read More »
THE HOURS
THE HOURS begins with a suicide, a famous one at that. Virginia Woolf with a fierce deliberateness puts a heavy stone in her pocket and walks into a river. We see her head duck silently into the water and then her body floating delicately away, pulled by the current with a gentle urgency. By the… Read More »