Posterized: Brie Larson

By Nathaniel R

Last week the directors of Captain Marvel were announced, moving that imaginary Marvel Studios picture, starring Brie Larson, closer to reality. 2019 is still a long way off though we have plenty of Brie to tide us over until then. She's in movie theaters currently as part of Ben Wheatley's crime comedy ensemble picture Free Fire  (reviewed). It's one of two features this spring whichhas featured Brie Larson as the token female amongst a group of adult men fighting for their lives (the other being Kong Skull Island). Which is, if you consider her particular skills as an actress, kind of a waste; to date she's consistently done her most transcendent work opposite other women or child actors.

Though it feels as if Brie Larson only recently exploded into fame having won the Best Actress Oscar for Room (2015), in reality she has been paying her dues for ages, winning her first TV gig at just 9 years of age (a comedy skit on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno) and her first movie gig by 10 (something called Special Delivery in which she played "Little Angel"). She's done a little of everything including an attempted pop career - which goes down really well in a meta sort of way via the satiric prism of her role in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and her role-playing  within "United States of Tara" -- 'Princess Valhalla Hawkwind,' anyone?.

So let's look back on her movie history via POSTERIZED (returning for another season!). We've thrown in all her movies that we could find posters to (a couple others don't seem to have been released) and her three largest TV roles. How many of these 27 Brie Larson projects have you seen?

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Tilda Swinton talks of the nightmares of pigs

by Murtada

Why release a boring old trailer to sell Okja when you can get Tilda Swinton in character as a chilling corporate honcho talking abouts pigs? She’s falsely cheery Lucy Mirando of the Mirando corporation… and she’s trying to sell us something. Organic baking goods, happy pup treats or great tasting tenderloins? Let's find out.

We are definitely sold on Swinton and the movie, even if we want to run away as far as possible from Lucy Mirando. Okja is about a young girl and her best friend, the title character who is a kind big monster pursued by the Mirando Corporation for research, or likely something more sinister. Directed by Bong Joon-ho, its sprawling cast includes, in addition to Swinton,  Ahn Seo-hyun, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Steven Yeun, Giancarlo Esposito, Shirley Henderson and Lily Collins. Okja is playing in the main competition at Cannes and will be streaming on Netflix, and perhaps play a few out of the way theaters, on June 28. Are you ready to meet Okja?

Tribeca 2017: Sex Games and Ticking Clocks in "The Exception"

Here's Jason Adams reporting from the Tribeca Film Festival yet again!

Let me just be clear about his right up front: I like thinking about Black Book. Paul Verhoeven's sexy 2008 Holocaust thriller with Carice Van Houten is one of my favorite movies and I've seen it at least a dozen times by now. And so it turns out that enthusiasm is open to re-interpretations, because a full half of The Exception plays like an off-Broadway re-staging of that earlier movie, and I still liked it plenty. No, director David Leveaux doesn't have nearly the handle on making moral hay of human contradictions so deftly as Verhoeven does, but who does? Leveaux makes a go of it, at least...

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David Fincher Enlists For "World War Z 2"

Chris here. Looks like the sequel to 2013 surprise megahit (and famously troubled production) World War Z is finally a go - and just landed some major directorial heft. After many rumors of star Brad Pitt's wooing the director were shrugged off, David Fincher is signing on to the film. 

Already some Fincher fans and stuffy types are turning up their noses at the news, but it is a potentially inspired choice...

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Familiar Faces: The Jonathan Demme Players

by Nathaniel R

Dearest reader, as you've probably heard by now the director Jonathan Demme has passed away at 73. He died due to esophageal cancer. I had run into him at a screening of La La Land  this past September and I took the opportunity to tell him how much Rachel Getting Married  meant to me (he joked about being first with interracial weddings for Rosemarie deWitt onscreen). Then we talked Swing Shift for a little bit as we had just discussed it on this very site. I was so saddened by this yesterday that I couldn't do much but tweet my farewells. The words wouldn't come out for a lengthy piece but then, surprise, I remembered I'd written the following piece that was never published (oops) to coincide with the release of Ricki and the Flash (2015). I filled in a few of the blank spots and adjusted some verbs to reflect the past tense but this surprisingly doubles as what I probably wanted to say about Jonathan Demme yesterday and couldn't. It's about his favorite actors but looking back, it's a fitting tribute because what American director was more curious about literally any kind of person he might find with his camera?

Jonathan Demme was one of America's most interesting and surprising directors. Though he's now best remembered for the modern classic The Silence of the Lambs (1991) it was actually something of an oddity in his filmography being the only horror film and, in some ways, the most classically controlled. In other ways though it's a traditional Demme picture. It features actors doing unexpected or suddenly signature electric work, weird musician cameos (what the hell is one of the members of 80s synth pop band Book of Love doing in there?), and diverse casting where most films would go with the default heavily male white cast. In fact, Silence might be his most white/male movie but that's part of its plot...

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