Review: Alison Maclean Returns with 'The Rehearsal'

By Glenn Dunks

Alison Maclean is not a prolific filmmaker. While her resume is littered with TV (Sex and the City, The Tudors), music videos (Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn”) and short films (the superb domestic horror Kitchen Sink, and a segment in Subway Tales), films are few and far between. Her third feature is The Rehearsal and if its release feels awfully quiet then you can probably thank the near 20-year gap between feature projects and her return to her native New Zealand with a thorny film about tricky subject matter and written with a sense of ambiguous mystery.

My knowledge of New Zealand cinema is by far not as thorough as Australian film, but Maclean’s Crush is perhaps my favourite from there that isn’t Heavenly Creatures or The Piano. It is a film rife for rediscovery, not least of all for the delicious performance by Marcia Gay Harden at its centre (it also competed for the 1992 Palme d’Or). I was less enamoured by Jesus’ Son, a film that I assume stuck too closely to the often chaotic and episodic short story structure of its source novel to find its own groove, although Maclean’s experiences in the vast expanses of New Zealand and Canada gives her a unique advantage in framing the emptiness of the American mid-west and finding idiosyncrasies for her characters.

The Rehearsal is a much different style of film. It’s smaller in scope in terms of its core narrative, less tied to and reliant on its location and a sprawling need for its characters to escape whatever it is that nevertheless confines them to their place in life.

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Annette Bening as Gloria Grahame

by Murtada

We just got the news that Annette Bening will be presiding over the Venice Film festival jury. Now we get two new photos of her as Gloria Grahame in the anticipated biopic Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. And that's not all. The film has a UK release date of November 17. A US distribution and release date news must be imminent. Unfortunately Bening presiding over the Venice jury not only rules the film out of that festival, but also out of Telluride which takes place at the same time, and the first and more important week of buzz building at TIFF. Unless they unspool the film without its star which seems unlikely. And we'd like her to get that festival buzz that is important for awards later on.

Till then enjoy the Bening and Jamie Bell as Grahame and Peter Turner, an actor she befriended late in her life while appearing in a production of The Glass Menagerie in London. The film is based on Turner’s memoir about the time Grahame spent recuperating at his family home in Liverpool when diagnosed with cancer. Directed by Paul McGuigan (Victor Frankenstein), it also stars Julie Walters and Kenneth Cranham as Turner’s parents.

Will Bening follow Blanchett and win an Oscar for playing an Oscar winner? 

Happy Birthday, Robin Weigert!

How will you celebrate the birth of one of our most underrated supporting actresses of the stage and screen today? Will you:

• hang out in a diorama and monologue about pain, as she did in Angels in America?
• drink and cuss up a storm, like her Emmy nominated Calamity Jane from Deadwood?
• break from procedure to help someone in need, like her Big Little Lies therapist?
• bump your head and get kinky, a la Concussion?
• have three distinct personas, like each different woman she played on Law and Order?

When did you fall in love with this scene stealer?

Thoughts I Had... The "Geostorm" Trailer

Chris here. It's been a long time since we got a good old fashioned disaster flick, right? Luckily Geostorm is here to fill the silly void this fall.

The film stars Gerard Butler (as if you had to ask) in a world where satellites help ward off the perils of global warming. When the system gets hacked (or something, science is hard), Butler and crew is sent into space to investigate while Jim Sturgess is our hero on the ground. From the looks of the first trailer, there is a whole lot going on, from explosions to tornado armies to an Andy Garcia president. Naturally, I have some thoughts:

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First Look: Sienna Miller in "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof"

Why is it that Sienna Miller has had quite a successful and diversified stage career, but can't seem to break from the suffering wife roles that have marked her film work? Miller always gives these roles more than they ask of her, so you would think she would be given a role with more narrative heavy lifting. This year, she got to flex a little more muscle in The Lost City of Z (out on DVD next week) within the trope, giving the film its haunting final note.

Miller's next stage role is a similar suffering wife, but of the iconic sort: she will be playing Maggie in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in London's West End beginning next week. Miller joins a growing list of actresses like Scarlett Johansson and Anika Noni Rose that have played the role in recent years - this play never seems to go away. Unbroken's Jack O'Connell plays her closeted husband Brick. Take a look at Miller in rehearsals and muse on her career in the comments.