Stage Door: Isabelle Huppert is "The Mother"

Since we're in the thick of theater season with the Drama Desk, Drama League, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony Awards coming up, that means an extra stage review here and there! Here's Eric Blume...

One of TFE’s favorite actresses, Isabelle Huppert, currently stars off-Broadway in writer Florian Zeller’s new play, The Mother.  As you might guess, she kills it in Zeller’s non-linear play. The Mother is challenging and archly theatrical, with scenes being acted and re-enacted, timelines being blurred, and reality and fantasy being blended in gloriously unclear ways to achieve both a distancing and an immediacy.  This is intelligent and precise writing, not an easy ride for theatergoers, and demanding in its shifts both temporal and stylistic.

But Huppert is deep in character as always, sinking into the skin of the matriarch in the four-person family play...

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Review: The Aftermath

Please welcome guest contributor J.B.

When I saw The Aftermath, the latest from Testament of Youth director James Kent, starring Kiera Knightley, Jason Clarke and Alexander Skarsgård, last weekend, I was seated next to an older man with a notepad who I assumed was a journalist. I chatted briefly with him before the film started, and when the lights went up and the credits began to roll, I asked him what he thought. His response: “I interviewed her [Knightley] when she did Atonement with James McAvoy. She was so good in that.”

That's a pretty fair takeaway from The Aftermath, which casts Knightley as Rachel, a bereaved military wife recently arrived in Hamburg in 1946 to join her estranged husband, Lewis (Jason Clarke), an officer in the British Army tasked with overseeing the rebuilding of the war-torn city and ferreting out any remaining Nazi-sympathizers...

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Review: The Beach Bum

by Murtada Elfadl

If your favorite Matthew Mcconaughey mood is of the naked bongo drumming variety, then Harmony Korine has made just the movie for you. In The Beach Bum Mcconaughey is Moondog, a rebellious rogue living outside society in Florida doing exactly what he wants, whenever he wants it, and all the while high as a kite. He’s nice, benevolent, kind, mostly peaceful, accepting of all and of their foibles. He believes in true love and practices it (straight of course but not adverse to a bit of cross dressing). Even when he finds out his wife (Isla Fisher) is also sleeping with other people, it takes him literally only a minute to go from surprise to complete acceptance.

The plot -if we can call it that - is to follow Moondog along his travels in Key West and Miami...

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Review: Lords of Chaos

By guest contributor Samantha Craggs

Rory Culkin headlines the music bio "Lords of Chaos"

There's a scene in Lords of Chaos, now available on VOD, that sums up the film in a nutshell. Euronymous (Rory Culkin), the lead guitarist of the black metal band Mayhem, walks into the bedroom of his depressed lead singer, Pelle, who goes by the name Dead. The camera pans over the mostly barren bedroom and shows us a dead cat swinging from the ceiling, apparently with a hook through its face. Euronymous tells us in an arch voiceover that Dead hates cats, just in case we didn't get it the first time. Dead is lying on the bed, and Euronymous wants to rouse him. "Dead," he says, looking out the window, "Cat." Dead sits up, excited, and the two go out into the woods with a shotgun to stalk and kill.

You get the feeling this scene is supposed to be comic relief...

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Review: Hotel Mumbai

by Jason Adams

What scares us -- the communal us -- shifts through time. The 70s gave us Vietnam allegories like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, while in the 80s Slasher Movies were all the rage as divorce numbers went up and women asserted their rights. Then there was so-called Torture Porn, which was all the rage while Bush & Cheney were throwing their waterboarding parties. So what now? It's hard not to see Grief as the theme of our current moment -- the great horror films of our age, films like The Babadook and Hereditary, are profound ruminations on a world that's already slipped through our fingers -- a madness so close its breath is hot on your throat, and a knowledge that its our own failures, our own shortcomings, that brought this all down upon us.

Hotel Mumbai is technically not a horror movie (look to Jordan Peele's Us, which Chris just reviewed, for this weekend's official entry in that genre) but it sure operates like one...

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