Review: Mary Queen of Scots

by Murtada Elfadl

The story is familiar. We’ve seen it many times on both film and TV. The queens are familiar. We’ve seen them being embodied by many actresses we love and admire. Now it’s time for Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie to play Mary and Elizabeth I in Mary, Queen of Scots. Familiarity can breed contempt. We’ve seen this before so why do we need another version? But familiarity can also help us absorb a story when we know the beats of its narrative. We can take in the performances, the costumes, the setting and not worry about following the plot. Director Josie Rourke and screenwriter Beau Willimon understand that they need to freshen up the material, give it a new spin. And so they try.

Their story concentrates squarely on Mary and starts with her return to Scotland from exile in France, threatening Elizabeth’s reign because of her strong claim to the crown with Elizabeth being unwed and childless...

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Review: Write When You Get Work

by Murtada Elfadl

For a film that starts with Finn Wittrock taking his shirt off, Write When You Get Work disappoints. He plays a New York City drifter working odd jobs and living off petty crime schemes. His ex (Rachel Keller) has left that life behind after the break-up and is now trying to make it working at a prestigious school in the wealthy Upper East Side. Of course their worlds collide as he tries another get-rich scheme that involves one of the parents of the kids in her school (Emily Mortimer)...

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Doc Corner: Movie Stars - Fonda, Kael and Dukakis

by Glenn Dunks

DOC NYC is still going in New York, running until this Thursday the 15th. We’re looking at just a very small selection of films screening at the festival including these today based around three iconic names in American cinema: film critic Pauline Kael, and Oscar-winning actors Jane Fonda and Olympia Dukakis.

WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL
I noted on social media as I sat down to watch my screener of Rob Garver’s biography that there were certainly worse ways to spend one’s Sunday evening than surrounded by the words of the late, great Pauline Kael and an abundance of film clips. Sometimes a film can give you exactly what you ask for and that’s exactly what I received from What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael about the much loved (and loathed) film critic...

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The 166 Documentaries Competing for Oscar's Love

Yesterday AMPAS released the list of the documentaries that are eligible for this year's Oscar. The list is always crazy long (even longer than the other top 'specialty' prize -foreign language film). Members of the doc branch have 166 films to sift through from which they will draw a final 15 and then vote from those 15 for the 5 nominees. We wish the Foreign Film committee would do the same since it strikes us as odd that they only get 9 finalists. But we digress.

Because Glenn Dunks does such fine work for us here in his series Doc Corner, we've already written up 24 of these contenders. If the title is linked below it goes to our review. The complete list of eligible documentaries follows after the jump...

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Doc Corner: Memories of the past in four new films at DOC NYC

By Glenn Dunks

DOC NYC starts today in New York where something like 100 films will screen. Of the 300+ screenings and events, there are 135 features and 43 world premieres including the just announced screening of the once-thought-lost Aretha Franklin concert doc Amazing Grace. We will be looking at a just a small slice of the selections based loosely around themes. Part one is focused on memories of the past returning to the surface and involves four films which are about grieving families, the NYC art scene of the 1960s, an underappreciated photographer, and the rise of the Nickelodeon network.

EVELYN
Despite his familiarity with war zones in the Oscar-nominated Virunga from the frontlines of Congo’s bloody poaching crisis and Oscar-winning short The White Helmets from the Syrian civil war, director Orlando von Einsiedel has apparently been less well-equipped to deal with the wars of his own family’s anguish. His latest film, recently nominated for the BIFA Best Documentary prize, is an examination of his own family following the suicide of his brother many years ago. Sending himself out into the Scottish highlands alongside various family members and childhood friends for a series of memorial treks, he hopes the wintry walks will allow his family a chance to talk and confront their pain head-on like they have never done before...

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