Review: Denial

by Eric Blume

It’s kind of surprising how good Denial isn’t.  The new film is about a Holocaust historian (Rachel Weisz) who has libel charges thrown against her by a racist Holocaust denier (Timothy Spall). The basic story is absorbing and filled with potentially interesting ideas but it's executed in the most perfunctory manner. It’s as if the actors, director, and crew showed up every morning and said, “okay we know the scene we need to shoot today -- maybe let’s try cameras here and turn on some of these lights we have sitting around. Let’s do this!”.  

Director Mick Jackson has previously won an Emmy for the lovely Temple Grandin for HBO, and previously made L.A. Story and Live from Baghdad; he's not without talent.  But Denial proves shapeless, not only in the shot construction, but all of the beats, and even in our feelings towards the main character.  We’re kept at a visual and emotional distance from Weisz’s Deborah Lipstadt. This is not unlike what happened with Jack O’Connell’s character and performance in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken: the protagonist is front and center but doesn't do anything --  things are done to them...

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Michelle Williams' Oscar Moment might be in Manchester

by Murtada

Williams this week at NYFF

There was a time - say early 2012 - when Michelle Williams could do no wrong with Oscar. Basking in her third overall nomination for My Week with Marilyn (2011), the second in as many years as she was nominated the year before for Blue Valentine (2010), she had the heat, she had the momentum. She also had the critical and cinephile love with acclaimed performances behind her in Take this Waltz (2011), Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and Wendy and Lucy (2008).

The win was definitely coming and soon. How times change.

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NYFF: Uncle Howard & Brillo Box (3 ¢ off)

Here's Jason reporting from NYFF on two docs that deal with a younger generation being affected and influenced by the art dealings of their elders.

It seems like every other gay person that I meet has a gay aunt or uncle who informed their childhood in some way - I never did; the closest I got was a friend of my mother's who was whispered about as a weird bachelor type, but he was out of her life before I was born. But you remember such things, small weird whispers as they are, when they're your singular life-line to a big world actually existing out there where you can figure your own stuff out. 

I don't know or care if director Aaron Brookner is gay himself but you get the same sensation from watching Uncle Howard, his new documentary on his uncle, a film-maker who died at the age of 34 from AIDS - the thirst to eat up all he can about this fabulous person who lived a fabulous life in the margins of his own, and what that was like for him... 

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Isabelle Huppert Lands AFI Fest Tribute

by Daniel Crooke

Isabelle Huppert is having a pretty great year. Which is saying something, because it's hard to imagine her having a bad one. Between her raves for Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come and Paul Verhoeven’s instantly infamous Elle, a sexual assault thriller that’s accrued steady word of mouth since its Cannes debut earlier this year, Huppert continues to sit pretty upon her throne of breathtaking unconventionalism. But while her oeuvre of compelling, challenging performances has garnered her a red-hot reputation across the globe as one of the best and bravest actresses of her generation, her domain of awards acclaim has rested largely in her home country of France. She holds the record for the most César nominations by an actress and yet Oscar has never paid her mind. With the news that AFI Fest plans to fête Huppert with a Tribute and matching Gala screening of Elle this November, perhaps she’ll push her way into the hearts and minds of Angeleno Academy voters in attendance before ballots go out.

If Huppert’s awards record of European cries and American crickets sounds familiar in this Oscar race, you’d be forgiven: we’ve already had a similar discussion a couple times this decade about under recognized actresses from the other side of the Atlantic. Last year, AFI Fest hosted a similar Tribute for Charlotte Rampling with a screening of 45 Years and then a scant few months later, Rampling was back in LA for the Oscars as a first-time Best Actress nominee. Emmanuelle Riva – iconic in Hiroshima, Mon Amour but mostly unknown to mainstream American audiences – found herself in the thick of the Best Actress race for Amour and became the oldest nominee in history for the prize. For my money, she should’ve been the oldest winner too. Couple this with the statistic that a European actress from a foreign language title has landed a Best Actress nomination three of the past five Oscar ceremonies (the third being Marion Cotillard for the Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night) and a precedent emerges that may give hope for Huppert landing that first Oscar nomination this year.

Although, as has been oft discussed in the infancy of this season, this is an usually competitive year in Best Actress. Do you think Huppert will make the cut, or it simply too tight a year for a performance in such a provocative film to squeeze in?

Break me off a link of that

Vulture Amy Landecker is Julia Roberts' voice double. This is amazing. Especially if you love the movie Duplicity
Geek Tyrant yummy yummy fandom pies
Coming Soon backwards told and trippy actually is commercial Strange Dr new the

Variety Robert De Niro's The Comedian will be getting an Oscar qualifying run. I guess Cinelou really wants to make these Oscar Qualifying runs their thing (see also Cake). Sigh. 
Women & Hollywood Emma Thompson and Stanley Tucci will star in the adaptation of Ian McEwan's bestseller "The Children Act" to be directed by Richard Eyre (Notes on a Scandal) -- ooh, sign us up. 
Awards Daily Oscar hopeful Loving about the famous right to marry case from the 1960s has released interracial and same sex emojis
Tracking Board Wolverine 3 gets a title, Logan, and a spirit of the beehive poster moment 
The Guardian another report on Hollywood whitewashing of Asian stories and characters. I love Billy Magnussen but am sad that he's now involved in this too. Apparently the Bruce Lee biopic Birth of the Dragon has been saddled with a white character as lead, sidelining Bruce Lee in his own story What the actual fuck?
Variety Ian McKellen is getting the documentary treatment in McKellen: Playing the Part  

Today's Video
Kristin Chenoweth sings the Game of Thrones theme song

Finally...
Winter is Coming looks at the top paid actors per TV episode via Variety. These are so weird to look at. The numbers rarely align with what you think of as pop cultural worth. Though if you're on a phenomenal success like Game of Thrones the two sometimes line up. One assumes the numbers have a lot to do with how long a show's been running and whether actors have been able to renegotiate. And also network pays more than streaming which pays more than cable, etcetera. For instance... how weird is it that Taraji P Henson as the key figure on one of TV's biggest smashes (Empire) makes the same figure per episode as Michelle Monaghan a less famous star on a show people don't talk about (The Path).