Wednesday, March 7, 2018 at 12:29PM by Nathaniel R
Remember Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day? It opened 10 years ago on this very day starring newly crowned (again) Best Actress Frances McDormand and Amy Adams. All I remember about it actually is Shirley Henderson's high pitched voice and Amy Adams flouncing around before breaking my heart by singing a duet with the scrumptious Lee Pace...
Friday, February 23, 2018 at 10:30PM By Salim Garami
What's good?
Timothy Spall's character Maurice Purley in Mike Leigh's 1996 Palme d'Or winner Secrets & Lies is a photographer and every scene we see him at work involves his usually-successful, sometimes-not-as-much attempts to amiably convince his clients to take a big smile before he takes the photo. Sometimes it's a direct appeal and sometimes it's just by making an off-hand joke that catches them. Usually it's preceeded by a very slight window of sadness implying a long and exhaustive story on the subject's part. It feels like a very reflexive move on Mike Leigh's part: Secrets & Lies, like most of Leigh's works, is a humanist tale of some very messy and sometimes sad parts of a large story but Leigh imbues it with a sense of delicate compassion, sometimes injecting a sense of humor about the situations, but always wanting the best for its characters.
Thursday, February 22, 2018 at 4:00PM by Eric Blume
Mike Leigh nabbed his second Best Director nomination and his third Original Screenplay nomination with his 2004 film Vera Drake (he has yet to win any Oscars despite seven nominations across those two categories). Imelda Staunton scored an Actress nod as well for this tale of the vibrant eponymous character who “helps girls out” as part of her many job and family responsibilities. Her actions carry a brutal cost, and the film still carries incredible power.
Fourteen years later, Vera Drake has aged beautifully, perhaps in part because Leigh has structured and staged it in a classical framework...
Monday, February 19, 2018 at 6:23PM With Mike Leigh turning 75 tomorrow, we'll be looking at a few of his films. Here's Chris Feil
Of Mike Leigh’s many great films, Happy-Go-Lucky is perhaps the one the has grown most in its potency. Though his films reward multiple viewings, here is one that has grown all the more meaningful as the world around us has become increasingly fraught with depressing news; the benefit of positivity is at once essential and ignored. The film is both a character study of its relentlessly gleeful protagonist Poppy, played to perfection by Sally Hawkins, and about how the world works against her optimistic state of being.
The pull to submit to anger and gloom weighs heavy on our times, and an outlook like Poppy’s can seem so very far away indeed.
Ten years on now, Happy-Go-Lucky feels prescient to the dire state of the world, as if we are becoming more like those annoyed by her cheeriness. Some of us who once saw ourselves in Poppy might have even succumbed to the numbing anger of the every day in the intervening years...
Wednesday, November 22, 2017 at 7:00PM by Eric Blume
Today marks the 50th birthday of one of our very best actors, three-time Oscar nominee Mark Ruffalo. Ruffalo burst onto the scene in 2000 with a remarkable lead performance in Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me. His complex, layered work had critics fairly sprouting comparisons to Brando, and his gorgeous duet with Laura Linney still feels like the standard-bearer for on-screen sibling chemistry. It’s astonishing to think Ruffalo missed out on an Oscar nomination that year, considering his performance is unquestionably better than several of the eventual nominees -- was it category confusion or lack of name-recognition? Oscar has remained historically slow to coronate good looking young actors, and that recognition remained on hold for him for over another decade...
