YNMS: Leave No Trace

Chris here. Now that the summer movie season has arrived (and earlier than ever) we're on the hunt for counterprogramming wherever we can find it. Enter film festival darling Leave No Trace, a drama about a father and daughter (Ben Foster and newcomer Thomasin McKenzie) struggling to reacclimate to society after living off the grid.

The film is director Debra Granik's narrative follow-up to the Oscar nominated Winter's Bone, which you will recall helped place none other than Jennifer Lawrence on the map. Trace debuted at Sundance and has been hitting regional festivals nonstop ever since, and will get another large platform when it plays Cannes' Directors Fortnight sidebar. That should build a whole bunch of word of mouth before the film arrives on June 29.

From the looks of the trailer, we're promised a film much less grim than how the film comes across on paper. Take a look and we'll break down the Yes No Maybe So...

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Tribeca: Mary Kay Place leads "Diane"

Tribeca has ended but we have a few more movies to talk about. Here's by Jason Adams with a movie to keep your eye out for...

Why is it so hard to describe why Kent Jones' Diane works so well? Twice just after seeing it I stumbled trying to do so. Just laying down the plot is insufficienct. It's about an older woman in a small town whose son is a drug addict and whose cousin is sick with cancer. But that makes it sound like something Lifetime coughed up. So you've gotta start with Diane herself. Veteran character actress Mary Kay Place plays her, and already you can feel it. The no-nonsense lived-in vibe of it. The wood grain. Just keep going from there...

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Wasp and the Wasp and the Wasp

This blog will not be acknowledging the existence of any more Ant Man and the Wasp trailers that ignore Michelle Pfeiffer. Supposedly there's a split second  of her in the new trailer but that split second features a character in potential 'old Wasp' costume covered from head (helmet) to toe and that's no way to look at the world's most beautiful movie star. 

We've also fixed the new Ant Man and the Wasp poster to better reflect our needs...

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Avengers: Infinity War Part One

This article was originally published in Nathaniel's intermittent column at Towleroad

NOTE: THE FOLLOWING THOUGHTS ARE FREE OF SPOILERS (THE MOVIE HAVING JUST OPENED) EXCEPT FOR THE MOVIE’S OPENING BATTLE AND A VAGUE SPOILER ABOUT THE GENERAL NATURE / IMPERMANENCE OF SUPERHERO DEATHS WITHIN THIS GENRE. IF YOU'D LIKE WE CAN DISCUSS IN MORE SPOILERY DETAIL A WEEK OR TWO FROM NOW. LET US KNOW.

If gloves make a big fashion comeback, blame Thanos. The alien destroyer has been haunting the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes (aka The Avengers) from the sidelines (aka the post credits sequences) for a full decade of moviegoing. He's been on the hunt for the six “Infinity Stones,” (aka the Tesseract, The Aether, etc...) to decorate and power his universe-controlling glove (aka the “Infinity Gauntlet”). Sorry for all those ‘also known as’ asides but there are so many names to keep track of!

Consider, though it’s much less difficult if you don’t, that most of the six Infinity Stones have gone by at least two different names within the last decade’s worth of Marvel movies. We'll cite just one example since it’s crucial to the story.

The most familiar gem from the previous movies is “The Mind Stone”.  When last we checked in with our heroes it was sitting all lovely and golden on the broadly handsome expanse of The Vision’s Paul-Bettany shaped forehead… but it didn’t start there...

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Doc Corner: Women Astronauts and Rachel Dolezal on Netflix

By Glenn Dunks

“That’s one small leap for a woman, another giant step for mankind” is how Mercury 13 opens. Ignore that it is probably the teensiest bit too twee of a means to open a movie – and also doesn’t make much sense in so far as what they’re referencing – and consider for a moment what could have been. David Sington and Heather Walsh’s film isn’t one of speculative fiction, but rather the untold story of the women who partook in a NASA program.

In many ways, Mercury 13 feels like a blueprint for a feature narrative drama film. Watching the doc and one can almost see it playing out with actors like Emma Stone in the roles of these determined women who took to the skies and played an important part in the war efforts before being recruited for a secret mission to test whether women were fit for space travel.

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