What are Kristen Stewart's Five Good Films?

by Cláudio Alves

In the past decade, Kristen Stewart has come a long way. While her career started early and with great promise – while she was still a teenager – the actress' participation in Twilight movies soured the world's perception of her talent. It's unfair but, as of the writing of this piece, it seems to be over. With Pablo Larraín's Spencer, even the biggest Stewart skeptics have quieted, and she's on her way to a likely Oscar nomination if prognosticators are to be believed. All that and she also just got engaged to girlfriend Dylan Meyer, making this a time of great personal fulfillment as well as professional and artistic. Still, when looking back at her own filmography, it seems that the actress herself isn't as enamored with it as some fans might be…

In an interview about Spencer for The Sunday Times, Stewart said:

I've probably made five really good films out of 45 or 50 films. Ones that I go, 'Wow, that person made a top-to-bottom beautiful piece of work!

Reading this, I couldn't help but wonder what cinematic quintet she holds dear to her heart...

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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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FYC: Lily Gladstone, Supporting Actress

by John Guerin

I could not have predicted that in a movie starring Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, and Michelle Williams, a performance by relative newcomer Lily Gladstone would leave me the most affected. The best short film of 2016 is the third act of Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, in which Jamie (Gladstone), a solitary Montana rancher, falls for Beth, an out-of-town lawyer (Stewart), who is stuck teaching an educational law night class four-hours away from her home in Livingston. Stewart, unsurprisingly, adds another formidable performance to her collection of direct yet remote modern women, but the revelation here is Gladstone, who contributes a sensational breakthrough performance that deserves The Academy’s attention...

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Most Coveted Things from 2016 Films

Year in Review. Every afternoon, a new wrap-up. Today Murtada with a wish list...

What did you covet the most on the big or small screen this year? Was it a costume, a prop, or even a place or living thing? Here is my personal list in case you haven't yet completed your Christmas shopping.

Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard’s white linen costumes in Allied
Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard play a Canadian and a French spy respectively, who meet in Casablanca. They take an excursion to the desert outside the city right before completing their very dangerous assignment. They practise shooting with firearms, they bond, they fall in lust. All the while wearing gorgeous white linen on khakis. It must be the gorgeous desert. Or maybe the longing. Or could be just how breezy and stylish these linen costumes are.

Lunchboxes, records, and living things after the jump...

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Here's to the Ladies Who Lush

Year in Review. Each afternoon, a new wrap up list. Today Steven with our first wine soaked entry...

A lot of us were taken by surprise by the results of the election, and now we find ourselves living in a post “11/8” world. Since that day, how many of you have spent a quiet evening at home pondering the winding road ahead with a giant glass of red wine for company? I know I have. If you answered yes, you're not alone in this and you have fine actressy counterparts. Some of 2016’s best narrative moments have played out just this way. Our screens, large and small, have been filled with fierce femmes sipping some wine, reflecting on life, death, pain, joy…you know, existence.

Join us in tipping a glass to some of the best of those scenes (possible spoilers ahead)...

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