Doc Corner: 'Women He's Undressed' Reveals Hollywood Couture

Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand.

Gillian Armstrong is nearly as prolific as a documentarian as she is a dramatic filmmaker. While the likes of her “Seven Years On” series (an Australian 7 Up), her Bob Dylan concert doc Hard to Handle, or the true crime murder mystery of an interior design queen in Unfolding Florence aren’t as well-known as her collaborations with Judy Davis, Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson, and Winona Ryder, they are eclectic and passionate works nonetheless. As she said in her interview with Jose last year at Toronto, “there’s a different art to making documentaries” and unlike many other directors who split their time between mediums, her documentaries do feel distinctly unique from her other work and yet equally essential.

Her latest non-fiction work is Women He’s Undressed, a peek behind the velvet curtain at Orry-Kelly, a costume designer from Hollywood’s golden age. Armstrong posits that he is a virtual unknown – a claim a deliciously acidic Ann Roth, one of the doc’s more entertaining talking heads, doesn’t have a bar of – including in his home country of Australia. What we do know is that he was gay, secretly dated Cary Grant, Bette Davis was fiercely loyal to him, and that he had a hand in some the greatest films of all time from Casablanca to 42nd Street, An American in Paris to The Letter and many more. You don’t win three Academy Awards without being a little bit special!

[Jane Fonda, Marilyn Monroe's breasts and more...]

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Feeling really "sorted out" about Absolutely Fabulous

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Do you remember that bit in the AbFab series when Edina is turning 40 and her ex husband’s new wife Bo (the hilarious Mo Gaffney), already in her 40s, is feeling really zen about the aging process…

I mean, golly, I wish I could tell her it’s no big deal. I had a ball on my 40th birthday. I felt really strong, really sorted-out about it. I realized what a lucky, wonderful person I was. And whether in your 30s or your 40s, you’re still the same gorgeous person. Enjoy life!

…only to hyperventilate at the mention of her own impending 50s? I kept thinking about that bit during the new AbFab movie...

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Review: Star Trek Beyond

It’s Eric, an admitted non-Trekker, with some reflections on Star Trek Beyond.  

Is there a better rebooter in the industry than J.J. Abrams?  His last directing effort, a little film called Star Wars: The Force Awakens, expertly combined the franchises’ original charm and simplicity with a new sparkle that made it the best in the series since 1983.  And when Abrams kicked off Star Trek in 2009 for a new generation, he seemed similarly to balance many of the qualities dear to Trekkers’ hearts while introducing a new audience (of which I was one) to the series.   

Abrams also directed the next installment, Into Darkness, but here on Beyond serves as producer only while the director reigns go to Justin Lin.  Lin is an expert action director and has delivered some killer set pieces in volumes three through six of the Fast and the Furious franchise...

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TV MVP: Riz Ahmed in "The Night Of"

Chris Feil on HBO's latest buzzy drama...

HBO has gotten back into the crime genre with the launch of new limited series The Night Of. Adapted from the BBC's Criminal Justice, the series has more than a few shades of Serial thrown in as it examines the gruesome murder at its center. While the new series has already established a patient fascination with glacial detail, what has kept it from becoming a flat procedural is the fascinating performance by Riz Ahmed as murder suspect Naz.

Just as he served up a humane human foil to Jake Gyllenhaal's psychopath in Nightcrawler, Ahmed brings a necessary soulfulness to this otherwise cold world in The Night Of. In the lead up to and fallout from the crime, Naz makes an endless string of bad decisions that the actor effortlessly makes believable. He is a wounded deer in the headlights, alternating masked sexual nerves, outsiderness, and blind panic. If the script makes Naz out to be a naive dope, then it's to Ahmed's credit that he finds the honesty about why he would willfully put himself in an obviously toxic situation.

With an insurmountable amount of evidence against him and a convenient blackout during the murder, it's the raw believability of the actor that drives our doubt about Naz's guilt...

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Teensy Reviews: 6 Films We Didn't Review Properly

These reviews could fit in a tweet. Presented to assuage Nathaniel's guilt from not having properly reviewed them when they arrived, though he sometimes dropped hints of his feelings in other contexts.

IN THEATERS

Swiss Army Man (Daniels)
Story: A suicidal man (Paul Dano) finds companionship and a new zest for life when he meets a corpse (Daniel Radcliffe)
Review: Wobbly start, Self sabotaging end. But, Oh!, those imaginative mental heights in the middle. 
Grade: Middle Hour: A- / The Rest: C+

Genius (Michael Grandage)
Story: An account of the long working relationship between famed editor Max Perkins (Colin Firth) and one of his literary finds Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law). Let us not mention the women (Nicole Kidman, The Lovely Laura Linney) lest we rage again at the terrible gender politics
Review: The work of an editor is shape & rhythm, so why is a film about a great one lumpy and lead-footed? Over and under-acted at once. 
Grade: D- 
Extra: Amir's festival review

The Shallows (Jaume Collet-Serra)
Story: A grieving med school dropout is attacked by a shark and stranded in the ocean alone. Can she survive? Review: Mechanical, but that's meant as a compliment. It plays. Slight with just enough bite (sorry). Bonus points for Steven Seagull.
Grade: B 

ON DVD & BLURAY

The Bronze (Bryan Buckley)
Story: Two former Olympic champions (Melissa Rauch & Sebastian Stan) fight over a promising new female gymnast
Review: Rude and daring. But its suffocatingly narrow comic tone mars the promising conceit, good jokes, and a lunatic sex scene. 
Grade: C+ 

How to Be Single (Christian Ditter)
Story: Four single girls (Dakota Johnson, Leslie Mann, Rebel Wilson, Alison Brie) try to find themselves... and maybe a boyfriend... in Manhattan.
Review: Unexpectedly involving performances. Fun. And yet, as uneven and generic as first dates. One entire storyline needs to go.
Grade: B- 

10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg)
Story: A woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up chained up by a man (John Goodman) in an underground shelter. Should she fear the man or the apocalypse he swears is raging outside the bunker? 
Review: Discomforting. What it lacks in scope, it makes up for in propulsive plotting: from frying pan to fire to inferno.
Grade: B