Tribeca 2017: The Drama Queens of "Blame"

Nathaniel R catching up with Tribeca Film Festival

photo by Jacqueline Harriet for Constellation Magazine

These women pictured above, left to right, are Quinn Shephard and Nadia Alexander. You should probably learn their names. They're the leading ladies of Tribeca hit Blame. Nadia Alexander picked up the festival jury's Best Actress prize. Not that Quinn Shephard is a slouch in that department. Or any department. Get this -- Shephard wrote, directed, produced, stars in, and edited Blame. Whew. More impressively, she did all of those things well! Will the cinema's leading 20something DIYer Xavier Dolan feel threatened or be all 'plz, she didn't have the energy to do the costume design, too? Slacker!'

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Feeling Positively "Wonderstruck"

By Spencer Coile 

After the sting of Carol's snub for Best Picture just two years ago, Todd Haynes is coming back, hopefully better than ever. His new film, Wonderstruck, will be premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in a few short weeks, but will also be released through the partnering of Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions. Slotted for a limited release of October 20 with an eventual expasion in November, the studios are giving Haynes' latest effort the awards season push many fans believes he deserves.

As I am sure many of you know by this point, Wonderstruck (based off the book by Brian Selznick) reunites Haynes with Julianne Moore (at long last!) after their collaborations on Safe (1995) and Far From Heaven (2002). It tells two parallel stories-- one taking place in 1927 and the other in 1977. Moore will be joined by Michelle Williams, Amy Hargreaves, Oakes Fegley (the lead of last year's Pete's Dragon), and newcomer Millicent Simmonds. 

The last time Amazon and Roadside partnered up, they produced Manchester by the Sea, which led to the biggest box office either company had seen and two Oscars for the film. Clearly, signs are positive for Wonderstruck. While we wait for the film's premiere at Cannes, let's cross our fingers and hope that sins of Carol's merciless snub will not be committed again. 

Today's Four: Send Keira your ♥︎...

Each day The Film Experience offers up a few mood-boosting at-home assignments for you. Try these at home and report back. 

Four Showbiz Anniversaries to Inspire You Today (May 4th)

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Michael Haneke's "Happy End" Gives An Unhappy First Glance

With just about two weeks to go before its seaside premiere at the 70^th annual Cannes Film Festival, the first image for Michael Haneke’s Happy End – his latest cold dose of cruel reality – has landed as hard as the realization that one day we will all die, and most likely alone. Of course, Haneke returns to Cannes this year a reigning champ, double-fisting Palmes d’Or after his last films to grace the Competition – The White Ribbon and Amour – emerged victorious. The question on many minds going into this year’s festival is whether he’ll win the top prize for a third time and break the all-time record he holds alongside fellow international auteurs Alf Sjöberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Bille August, Emir Kusturica, Shohei Imamura, the Dardennes brothers, and last year’s surprise winner Ken Loach.

Happy End reunites Haneke with two performers who have arguably given career-best performances under his clinician’s gaze: Isabelle Huppert, The Piano Teacher herself, and Amour’s Jean-Louis Trintignant; familiar faces Toby Jones and Mathieu Kassovitz round out the cast alongside fellow first-timers Franz Rogowski and Fantine Harduin. While little is known of the plot’s particulars, we do know that Happy End focuses on a French bourgeois family living comfortably in the port town of Calais as the European refugee crisis washes ashore in their midst, considerably less comfortably. The image above shows our main cast dining al fresco around a white-on-white-on-white table in the fashionably casual spring wear you’d expect from the seaside privileged, a breeze surely blowing somewhere in the air. Meanwhile, you can tell by their gazes of curious dispassion that you’re unmistakably inside a Michael Haneke film. Of all of his frown-triggering films to debut at Cannes in the main Competition – Funny Games (’97), Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Caché, The White Ribbon, and Amour – which sends your soul spiraling the deepest and darkest, and why?

Tribeca 2017: The Endless

And here's Jason Adams finally report from Tribeca Film Festival though Nathaniel has a few more to go...

If you loves puns as much as I love puns you'll understand when I find myself in a bit of a mental pickle when a film I don't particularly enjoy comes along and it's called The Endless. On the one hand it's just far too easy, riffing on how "endless" you found the experience of sitting through the film to be. On the other... it's the base level humor of puns that we're talking about here. This ain't precisely elliptical rocket science stuff. You can go low when they go low.

But even worse for this pun-lover is it's not particularly true either, that The Endless feels endless, and so we're stuck somewhere in between. Kind of like the characters in The Endless find themselves! Whoa. If that blew your mind then have I got a movie for you...

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