Review: "Nightmare Alley" only in theaters

by Matt St Clair

Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s anticipated follow-up to The Shape of Water, is quite a risk for the Oscar-winning auteur. Del Toro ditches the phantasmic monsters he’s known for in favor of human monstrosity, the beasts within all of us that drive our carnal needs. As with the original 1947 noir, Nightmare Alley is an exemplary exercise on the folly of man and what happens when the line between man and beast becomes blurred. 

The main anti-hero who toes that line is Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a carny with a knack for manipulating people. His subjects include fellow carny and eventual love interest/accomplice Molly Cahill (Rooney Mara), Paul Krumbein (David Strathairn) and his fortune teller wife Zeena (Toni Collette), and a wealthy fearsome widower Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins). Cooper's piercing eyes and bewildering smile make him a perfect casting fit for the manipulative con man. He is a man of few words which is just as well; the words when they come are lies and deceit. It is in Cooper’s expressive face where we see Stan’s constant fear of his troubled past resurfacing...

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Review: Netflix's all star comedy "Don't Look Up"

Netflix's latest release, "Don't Look Up" sees a cast of A-listers staring down the apocalypse.by Christopher James

Satire is a precise tool, not a blunt object.

Adam McKay has led a polarizing, yet successful career trying to tackle tough topics with a sardonic edge. In The Big Short, he broke apart the 2008 financial crisis with some degree of success through raucous and audacious storytelling techniques. Vice, which received many Oscar nominations, took the “more is more” cinematic devices to dine out on anger towards the right. While I found it smug, it makes sense why some nodded their heads and found some shred of insight in a film confirming their own biases. That begs the question: what do we do with our anger towards people and movements that we believe are leading to the destruction of our world? 

Don’t Look Up is a disaster movie that bills itself on being a prescient allegory for our inability to deal with climate control (aka the big comet heading to destroy us). McKay presumes the world, and all of us who inhabit it, are doomed and good riddance because everyone sucks. It’s a nihilistic movie with many ill formed targets...

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Cate is camp and crazy-good in "The Man Who Cried"

by Nathaniel R

I'm pleased to share that I have returned for a second appearance on Murtada's fun podcast "Sundays with Cate" in which he's surveying Cate Blanchett's whole career (not chronologically) with various guests. This week's topic is the strange Sally Potter misfire The Man Who Cried (2001), a pre World War II drama about dancing Russians, singing Jews, and operatic Italians in Paris. I requested this one because I remembered being absolutely bewitched by one closeup in particular when the film was in theaters. But the film had become so entirely forgotten (even by me) that I could barely remember anything of the context. The film stars Johnny Depp and Cristina Ricci (both having just co-starred in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow) placing it forever in a very specific place in Hollywood time. Give us a listen! 

Gay Best Friend: Abby Gerhard in Carol (2015)

In this series by Christopher James we investigate the 'Gay Best Friend' trope in movies.

 

In honor of "Carol Day" (December 21st, the day Therese went to Carol’s house), the choice for Gay Best Friend was obvious! No Holiday Movie Watchlist is complete without a viewing of Carol, Todd Haynes’ romance masterpiece. A single sultry glance from Cate Blanchett’s Carol could keep you warm all winter long. As much as we’re transfixed by her and her love for Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), this article isn’t about them. In a sea full of lesbians in this film, there’s only one that's on our hearts and minds for this column.

Abby Gerhard (Sarah Paulson) is perhaps the greatest and most fully realized examples of a gay best friend... 

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Red Carpet Lineup: 30 Looks from Venice 2020

The 77th Venice Film Festival wrapped today with the Golden Lion going to Chloe Zhao's Nomadland (which we'd predicted as far back as our annual April Foolish Predictions to be in the forthcoming Best Picture and Best Director lineups (we'll update all those charts this week). Venice wasn't the star-studded affair it usually is due to the shortage of travel and the ongoing troubles of the pandemic but they shouldered on. Cate Blanchett was in town for the whole festival as the President of the Jury and she made the all too rare decision to be sustainably fashionable by wearing only red carpet looks she'd worn before at other glitzy events. But her superpower, well one of them at any rate, is to make any year's fashions look utterly timeless.

29 other looks after the jump from the small batch of stars who went to Venice...

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