Review: Indignation

Manuel here with a review of Indignation, now in theaters.

Indignation is the type of film that, even if you didn’t know was adapted from a novel (by Philip Roth), you’d describe as “literary.” Part of this has to do with its dialogue which is both highly literate and thematically robust. And the other part comes from the strategically and efficaciously deployed voice overs that all but announce themselves as being cut whole cloth from a novel with a highly sophisticated narrator whose attempts at self-knowledge would be comical if they weren’t so earnestly intense.

The very first pages of Roth’s novel introduces us to Jewish student, Marcus (a wonderful Logan Lerman) as he’s rankled by his father’s sudden mistrust of him ahead of his heading to college. His father is clearly afraid for his boy—he’s seen too many of his relatives head to Korea never to come back. His pestering (and in the film, Danny Burstein gets at Marcus’s father worry as tinged by his own anticipated grief) leads him to constantly keep tabs on him, asking him where he’s been, how he can be trusted, and more pointedly: how does he know Marcus won’t go to places where he’ll get killed...

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Marion Cotillard and Brad Pitt Got Us Thinking

Released exclusively through People Magazine

by Murtada 

There are a couple of ways to look at this first released picture from the Marion Cotillard - Brad Pitt November release, Allied. Your mileage might depend on your feelings about the actors. So if you like them, you might be saying glamourous movie stars! Pretty period costumes! Why isn’t it November yet?. If not, your reaction might be that the picture is a bit posed. Maybe a bit too studied. Even cheesy...

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Ira Sachs and Cary Fukunaga Team Up To Bring '80s East Village AIDS Drama to TV

by Daniel Crooke

When mulling over Ira Sachs’ last handful of films – the intimately sketched, ephemeral epics of the heart, body, and soul, Keep The Lights On and Love is Strange, as well as his upcoming Little Men – a jokey poke from David Wain’s They Came Together immediately pops to mind: New York, a common setting between Sachs’ three aforementioned stories, “it’s almost like another character in the movie!”

After chronicling the city through a queer lens from the 1990s until now, Sachs will join forces with Cary Fukunaga to wind the clock back another decade to bring Christodora to the small screen – a interlocking character drama set in a 1980s East Village apartment building, built around devastation and communal connection in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Props to Sachs, for his New York stories always incorporate the city into the narrative in a way that isn’t only about iconographic lip service; his characters and their dilemmas could only exist within these urban surroundings, which creates deep internal and external senses of environmental exploration, whether through hard drugs, real estate, or gentrification.

Based on the novel of the same name, which was just released earlier this week, Christodora will be directed by Sachs and produced by Fukunaga via his production company, Parliament of Owls. [Side note: this company name in and of itself sounds like a creative collaboration between a lofty, Lincoln-mode Spielberg and Zack Snyder’s Ga-Hoole.] We don’t yet have a release date but fingers crossed that the limited series hits our televisions, tablets, very tiny screens, etcetera by 2017.

Have you picked up a copy of Christodora yet? What should we expect from Sachs’ first foray into television series?

New to DVD: April and the Extraordinary World

by Tim Brayton

As even the quickest look at a box office report shows, 2016 has been a great year for the popularity of animated films. But outside of the heavyweight American studio tentpoles, there have been genuine treasures that have still managed to slip through the cracks. Thus it's my pleasure to introduce to you the crackling Franco-Canadian-Belgian sci-fi fantasy April and the Extraordinary World, new to DVD this week, thanks to the endlessly wonderful folks at distributor GKIDS.

The film takes place in an alternate world where Emperor Napoleon III of France died in a lab explosion in 1870, just before our history had him falling from grace in the eyes of the French legislature; here, his son ascends as Napoleon IV and ushers in a bold new era of European diplomacy that manages to prevent both of the 20th Century's World Wars, but also results in an era of scientific stultification, meaning that by 1931, when the film proper begins, the world is still in an age of steam.

Here we meet young April, whose parents are working on a serum to prolong life...

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Frances McDormand: from Blood Simple (1984) to Olive Kitteridge (2014)

1984 is our year of the month for August. Here's Matthew Eng to talk about a treasured actor that made her on camera debut back then...

For the better half of her nearly four-decade film career, Meryl Streep has managed to compel generations of moviegoers to accept a self-styled character actress as not only an acting heroine for the ages but also a bona fide movie star with mass-market appeal and unimpeachable box office credentials. Like no other actress since Bette Davis, Streep has perfected a once-unfeasible practice of playing the sort of idiosyncratic women she has always drifted towards, but within the safe confines of midrange, studio-supported moviemaking that seems to satisfy audience expectations as well as her own.

Sometimes Streep’s projects—and, it must be said, Streep herself—can disappoint. For every quietly graceful gem (like her underrated Hope Springs performance) or skillfully uninhibited turn (as in the best passages of It’s Complicated), there are another two or three within Streep’s latter-day canon that could stand some sharper finesse or at least more dexterous directorial guidance. Whenever I’m let down to by Streep, I can’t help but wonder what one of her less-viable peers might do with the opportunities that are scarce for any actress born before the Kennedy administration and which Streep barely has to put up a fight for.

The Beginning: Blood Simple (1984); The Most Recent Triumph: Olive Kitteridge (2014)

For as long as I can remember, Frances McDormand has served as the purest and most intimidating embodiment of what a character actor should be. “That woman has no vanity,” my mom remarked with clear admiration after watching her in Lisa Cholodenko’s Olive Kitteridge, where McDormand delivers one of the decade’s most masterful star turns, a perfectly prickly meeting of actor and role that might have been a surefire Oscar winner had the project aimed for a bigger screen...

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