NYFF: The sad, strange, incomplete "French Exit"

by Nathaniel R

Frances Price, the soon to be impoverished widow at the center of French Exit alarms everyone around her and puts them on edge. She will just not cooperate. Neither will Michelle Pfeiffer, the actress playing her, for that matter. Rather than dance around it, let's just state the conundrum up front. When you're watching your favourite actor star in a potential comeback role based on a book you've grown deeply fond of and have already visualized as a movie in your head, the conflicts between expectations and reality and dreams can be impossible to mediate. And disconcerting, too. You've got to watch the movie for the movie but also work through your own external actress-related issues while doing so.

I obsess over Michelle Pfeiffer, okay?! There's no avoiding it and little point not foregrounding it in this review. Complete strangers know this about me...

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Kelly Reichardt and the "Roads to Nowhere"

by Cláudio Alves

With First Cow, Kelly Reichardt reaches an apotheosis in her career. Watching the director's filmography, one wouldn't suppose she was building up towards a monument, a grand summation of an auteur's cinematic idioms and preoccupations. Yet, here we are. While Reichardt has a very characteristic style and collection of favorite themes, one of the main elements of her oeuvre is a conspicuous lack of grandiosity. She's one of the great voices in contemporary American cinema, but her works seldom underline their mastery or call back to the films that came before, their predecessors in the Reichardt canon. 

Because of that, it feels like a good time to meditate on Kelly Reichardt's cinema, to revisit her features' wonder and, perchance, reevaluate what each one was trying to say. It's also an opportune moment to examine how those films were made, the methodologies of the artist. The way something is created imbues it with particular qualities, both aesthetic and ideological, thematic, and even spiritual. Helping us through this odyssey of discovery on the films of Kelly Reichardt, we now have Seventh Row's latest e-book, Roads to Nowhere: Kelly Reichardt's broken American dreams, as a handy guide… 

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Shelley Winters @ 100: Pete's Dragon (1977)

Concluding our Shelley Winter's Centennial party, here's new contributor Baby Clyde...

My film obsession started around the age of 12 when I somehow acquired my first "Encyclopedia of Movie Stars". It changed my life. I spent literally hours pouring over it, utterly entranced by the legends of the Golden Age of Hollywood. I remember it introduced me to the likes of Luise Rainier and John Garfield who I had never heard of before, but mostly I remember being totally confused by the entry on Shelley Winters.

Who was the glamourous woman who had been a sex bomb and serious actress before going on to win two Oscars and how was she in any way related to the harridan who had been the stuff of my childhood nightmares? Whilst I understood that actors played different roles, I don’t think I’d quite grasped at that point just how different they could be and how the same woman could go from this...

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Shelley Winters @ 100: The Middle of Her Century

We're celebrating the centennial of Shelley Winters. Here's Glenn...

That Shelley Winters has an autobiography isn’t surprising. But that book also had a sequel, Shelley II: The Middle of My Century. Hollywood loves a sequel, after all. And what a title! These 474 pages have been sitting on my shelf for a few years now since I picked it up in a secondhand book shop and unfortunately, like many books on my shelf, I have never finished it. No slight on Shelley, of course. I’m just slack.

For Shelley’s centennial, I thought it would be fun to pick quotes from random passages based on completely arbitrary rules...

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Charlink

• Boy Culture "A Star is Bored" a new novel from Carrie Fisher's former assistant
• Vanity Fair interesting piece on the new "primacy of the face" due to scial media - we're all disembodied talking heads now
• My New Plaid Pants it's Charlize Theron's birthday today. What are your favourite of her films?
• The Guardian Diego Luna talks about his new show Pan Y Circo
• IndieWire investigates what moviegoing is like in China now 
• The Guardian Dirty Dancing is getting an official sequel 33 years later and Jennifer Grey is returning 
• After Ellen, a lesbian site which is of course named after Ellen DeGeneres discusses the allegations against the famous comedian and her management team about the toxic work environment on her show
• Cartoon Brew Disney posts a quarterly loss for the first time in ages. Maybe this is behind the Mulan decision - quick money?
• ...TFE The Mulan streaming release news icymi
• Coming Soon trailer for Judas and the Black Messiah, a new Black Panther reelated biopic starring Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield
• Broadway World Club Cumming, the nightclub owned by Alan Cumming, is going to start offering virtual variety shows -- it's such a fun club here in NYC. Stay tuned for the guest list

Exit Video
Lily Wachowski talks about recent discussions of the trans allegory nature of The Matrix...