YNMS: A Fantastic Woman

by Ilich Mejía

Since screening at Berlinale earlier this year, and now at TIFF and Telluride, A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantástica in Spanish) has been generating very positive talk. It is Sebastián Lelio's follow up to 2013's wonderful and under-appreciated Gloria. The film stars trans actress Daniela Vega as a waitress mourning her lover in what looks like will be another queer classic from this year. 

Let that stunner of a trailer sink in after the jump and let's discuss the Yes No and Maybe So of it all... 

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TIFF: Haneke & Huppert Return with "Happy End"

by Chris Feil

Michael Haneke is back to satirizing the upper class for Happy End, a bitter comedy on conscious distraction and privilege in the digital age. The film opens with ominous Snapchat footage and is peppered with live time Facebook chat and email screenshots that feel strangely right at home in the auteur’s aesthetic. But this isn’t Haneke’s treatise against internet platforms - in his eye, these are just other ways to reveal our disaffected, sometimes wicked selves...

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Dee Rees on 'Mudbound'

by Murtada

Mudbound is having a moment this week. On the eve of its TIFF premiere, the trailer drops and Dee Rees, Carey Mulligan and Mary J Blige get the cover at Variety. Rees talks about how difficult it was to find a distributor at Sundance in the year after The Birth of a Nation debacle:

I feel like we were in the shadow of other films. This film is certainly on the level of — if not better than — that. To burden our film with that was unfair. That’s the hard thing about Hollywood; you realize it’s not fair. It’s not a meritocracy. It’s like, Come on.

More from Rees plus the movie's trailer after the jump..

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TIFF: Foreign Oscar Hopefuls from Hungary & Belgium

by Nathaniel R

On day one of TIFF two official Oscar foreign film submissions, one emphatically weird but kind of irresistible and the other mainstream but lush and erotically charged.

what's that panda doing in her bed?

On Body and Soul (Hungary)
Written and directed by Ildikó Enyedi 

Ildikó Enyedi first came to niche fame in 1989 winning the Camera d'Or at Cannes for My Twentieth Century the story of identical twins separated as children who both board the Orient Express as much different adults unaware of the other. The film had a succesful arthouse run in the US and was submitted but not nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. 28 years later Enyedi is winning prizes again for another film that concerns doubling...

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Ryan Murphy Is "Cuckoo" for Netflix

Chris here. In what is surely one of the most side-eye worthy prequel adaptations to come along in an era full of them, Ryan Murphy is creating an original story for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest villain Nurse Ratched. The series will be Murphy's first for Netflix (surprising it's taken this long, right?) and run for 18 episodes over two seasons. The title? You guessed it: Ratched.

On the plus side, the series will be another collaboration between Murphy and main muse Sarah Paulson. If the project seems wholy unasked for or in ill-fitted hands, we can rest assured that Paulson can deliver nothing less than a worthy portrayal of a legendary character. Maybe Nurse Ratched won't turn out to have been so evil after all - at least before Murphy got his hands on her. And if long running series are as daunting for you as they sometimes are for me, the promise of only an 18 episode run is glorious indeed. The series begins filming next year with Murphy set to direct the pilot.

Can Murphy and Paulson do justice to Louise Fletcher's Oscar winning performance?