NYFF: Sonia Braga in "Aquarius"

Manuel here reporting from the New York Film Festival and reminding you that Sonia Braga is a goddess of cinema 

Aquarius is the name of a building in Recife where Doña Clara (a resplendent Sonia Braga) has made her life. The apartment she lives in, which is littered with books and old LPs (she was once a famed music journalist), once belonged to her aunt. Indeed, Kleber Mendonça Filho first introduces us to the Aquarius and to the apartment back when Clara was a young woman who’d recently battled breast cancer, a key detail her aunt brings up in the midst of a birthday celebration. In this lively opening sequence, the camera pauses on an old furniture piece before giving us a glimpse of even livelier days of the older woman celebrating her birthday surrounded by family. We see a memory flash before us of a heated sexual encounter, her lingering gaze having triggered an old but cherished memory...

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NYFF: "My Entire High School..." & "Yourself and Yours"

Here’s Manuel with two more dispatches from the New York Film Festival

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
And the winner of most literal title at this year’s fest goes to: My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea. For that is precisely what happens in Dash Shaw’s diverting and visually stunning film...

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Review: The Girl on the Train

by Murtada

The Girl on the Train presents actressexuals with a major dilemma. On one hand you have an actress you like front and center in a movie, being framed by an adoring director and cinematographer, giving her showcase scene after showcase scene. And the actress is giving it her all, rocking our world with deeply felt emotions. On the other hand  the movie around her is artless, even silly at times. What would an actressexual do in this situation? Be happy the actress is Emily Blunt, lean back and enjoy.

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NYFF: "Toni Erdmann" is Astonishing

Here's Jason reporting from the NYFF on a Cannes favorite and Oscar hopeful

It's not often you hear an audience of movie critics gasp out loud at something on-screen, but Toni Erdmann, the new comedy of forced familial closeness from German director Maren Ade, has a comic moment so perfectly timed that it got the civilized cinema-set of New York City to jump out of their seats like this was an Evil Dead movie in 3D. You know you've got 'em hooked when you can conjure up such a response - Hitchcock called it playing the audience like a piano. The fact that it comes via a comic-beat here, and not via a cat jumping onto a final girl's shoulder or a shower stabbing, makes it all the more astonishing.

And make no mistake - Toni Erdmann is astonishing...

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Review: Denial

by Eric Blume

It’s kind of surprising how good Denial isn’t.  The new film is about a Holocaust historian (Rachel Weisz) who has libel charges thrown against her by a racist Holocaust denier (Timothy Spall). The basic story is absorbing and filled with potentially interesting ideas but it's executed in the most perfunctory manner. It’s as if the actors, director, and crew showed up every morning and said, “okay we know the scene we need to shoot today -- maybe let’s try cameras here and turn on some of these lights we have sitting around. Let’s do this!”.  

Director Mick Jackson has previously won an Emmy for the lovely Temple Grandin for HBO, and previously made L.A. Story and Live from Baghdad; he's not without talent.  But Denial proves shapeless, not only in the shot construction, but all of the beats, and even in our feelings towards the main character.  We’re kept at a visual and emotional distance from Weisz’s Deborah Lipstadt. This is not unlike what happened with Jack O’Connell’s character and performance in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken: the protagonist is front and center but doesn't do anything --  things are done to them...

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