Another Look at 'Clemency'

by Murtada Elfadl

Hodge and Chukwu at ND/NF

Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency opened the New Directors/New Films fest in New York last night. I got the chance to see it again and any reservations I had about it went away. This is a new version that is tighter than the one I saw at Sundance. While the changes are miniscule, they really pull the film together and focus its story. At Sundance I praised the central performance of Alfre Woodard as a prison warden managing a prison that includes a death row. However I thought the film meandered and was repetitive.

Not anymore!

Now it centers Woodard’s dealing with the processing of one death row inmate (Aldis Hodge) and the forces both against him and defending him. The focus is still on the toll all this takes on the psyche of Woodard’s Bernadine; so she is still front and center and owns the film. What is around her now flows easier and the film’s message about capital punishment remains potent. Chukwu won Sundance grand jury prize making history as the first black woman to do so. Clemency announces her as an exciting new director.

Oscar Chances: Obviously Woodard is its biggest and perhaps only chance at Oscar. The performance is there and so are the critical plaudits, however she needs a patient release plan to allow the film to reach its audience (The Wife playbook if you will). Other than that I see this as a film that Gothams/Indie Spirits will fall in love with - with possible nominations for film, director and supporting actor (Aldis Hodge).

Great Scots!

by Jason Adams

It is always good news when the Coen Bros announce a new thing, even if the new thing turns out to be kinda hit-n-miss like I found their last new thing (that'd be The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which I reviewed out of NYFF last fall right here) to be. The hits are worth the misses. ("Pan shot!") But today's good news is more than good -- it's downright invigorating.

The Bros are taking on the Bard -- they're making their Macbeth, and it's going to star Denzel Washington (who previously played Don Pedro in Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, pictured) and Frances McDormand (who is Frances f'ing McDormand) as the Lord and his Lady. O, Vaulting Ambition!

And you're a better person than I if you're not already casting this thing in your head with a bunch of Coen regulars -- as soon as I landed on Tilda Swinton playing all three of the witches I might've passed right out. Who are you play-casting?

Is There Still Sex in the City? You Tell Us!

By Spencer Coile 

Just when you thought the Kim Cattrall v. Sarah Jessica Parker feud would result in a discontinuing of the Sex and the City cinematic universe, Paramount Television and Anonymous Content swooped in to acquire the rights to Candace Bushnell’s Is There Still Sex in the City? A follow-up to her previous 1996 book, Bushnell – who will write the pilot and serve as executive producer – asks a new age question: how sexual can women in their 50’s and 60’s be? She adds:

I’m thrilled to be reflecting the rich complexity of their reality on the page and now on the screen.

Is There Still Sex in the City is set to premiere on August 6, 2019. And because we won’t be seeing the return of Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda, I couldn’t help but wonder: will this reincarnation into the Sex and the City-verse be as successful as its predecessor?  

Showbiz History: Faye's win, Winona's debut, Gaga's birth, and Angelina's first nuptials

7 random things to celebrate on this day in showbiz history...

And the winner is... Faye Dunaway in Network

1920 Silent superstars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford marry. Their marriage last only 16 years but their only child together is still going strong: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! We kid sort of. They were the two most famous of the 36 founding members of the Academy, originally the brainchild of producer Louis B Mayer though the Oscars were not initially the main idea of the group...

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Soundtracking: Gloria Bell

by Chris Feil

For everywoman Gloria Bell, you are what you listen to. In this retelling, as it was with his Chilean original starring Paulina García, Sebastián Lelio places his eponymous hero in a headspace where music is all around. This time it is Julianne Moore who frequents dance clubs with bisexual lighting and sings in her car as if no one is watching. But the film succeeds through the audience’s musical voyeurism of watching such vulnerable moments, all of them stitched together into the broader canvas that is her life.

Lelio curates a batch of upbeat standards of adult contemporary radio, many of them overly familiar but here they provide specific texture...

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