Review: Shirley

by Chris Feil

Josephine Decker’s Shirley opens with the false optimism of young love with a couple in the mold of American idealism. Over the film’s volleying and spry 107 minutes, Decker curdles it with subversion by focusing on their dismantler: the genius writer Shirley Jackson, played by Elisabeth Moss.

The couple at the center, Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred (Logan Lerman), arrive in a college town already imbalanced, favoring the advancement of his studies over her own. Fred is under the leadership of writer and professor Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), the husband of Jackson, with Rose and Fred taking up residence in their booze-drenched home. The young couple disrupts their existence with tranquility and squareness, but Rose’s curiosity and oppression halts a patch of writer’s block for Shirley. The film crescendos with the status quo of the campus upper crust, Rose’s intoxication with Shirley, and the wringing of Shirley’s next masterpiece.

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Review: The Invisible Man

by Chris Feil

What was once meant for the microwaved territory of the would-be Dark Universe has found new, timely, and sometimes ingenious life as a one-off. Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man morphs its source material with a shift in perspective, making its mad scientist a complete phantom figure to the audience.

However, he is a monster all too intimately familiar to the protagonist, Elisabeth Moss’s fraught survivor Cecilia. The film aims to place itself alongside the greats of our current age of horror by placing us thrillingly in her escape from abuse, and in turn offers something fresher to its namesake than previously imagined. If not always a complete success in its genre elements, on a conceptual basis, The Invisible Man is valuable and invigorating as a portrait of the fallout from enduring domestic abuse.

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Best Performances by Actors in Limited Roles

Andrew Scott gives incredible cynical cameo in "1917"

And now a semi-tangential train of thought. Over the 20 years of doing the Film Bitch Awards we've noticed that our cameo categories have gone from being a fun place to shine the spotlight on unknown actors who we're curious about to an annual war between not-quite household names or "it" girls and guys who are appearing in everything. The problem for lesser known actors trying to catch a break these days is that we're long past the years when mid-level stars, or even major stars, had egos about the size of their roles. More and more stars will happily become day-players as if everyone wants to be working 24/7 and has never heard of the concept of over-exposure...

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My Ride or Die - Elisabeth Moss

by Ginny O'Keefe

Awards season is well upon us which means lists of our favorite performances and films. For many years I’ve had a “Ride or Die” performer who I would root for throughout all of awards season hoping they would get a longshot nomination. Last year my ride or die was Toni Collette for Hereditary, a performance that was criminally unrecognized -- the snubbing of said performance will leave me bitter for years to come. Several years before my Ride or Die was Benicio Del Toro’s haunting and hurting performance for Sicario. So as you can tell, my Ride or Die basically sums up performances that have no chance of winning or even being nominated for any major awards. Nevertheless they stay in my heart throughout the Globes, the SAGS, the Independent Spirit Awards and of course the Oscars.

A few weeks ago I attended a screening of Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica with a Q&A afterward with Elisabeth Moss and I realized less than eight minutes into Moss’ Becky Something launching herself into the scene like an unstable ball of light, that Moss was my Ride or Die this season...

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Year in Review: Jason's Fave "Horror Actressing"

by Jason Adams 

It's been easy to say this for several years running now but it's been a pretty darn good year for Horror Movies. There are filmmakers out there taking risks and big swings with the genre, from art-house oddities (Midsommar) right on up to the mainstream ones (Us). And once you really dig deep -- the Horror Genre has almost always been one where the most interesting stuff has been a dirty secret whispered between likeminded folk -- the beautiful freaks really come out to play.

For the past five weeks in our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series I've covered five of my favorite female performances in the genre in 2019, so first let's recap those before we get to the other five -- click their names to read those earlier posts.

Sofia Boutella in Climax

Rebecca Ferguson in Doctor Sleep

Fatma Mohamed in In Fabric

Lupita Nyong'o in Us

Florence Pugh in Midsommar

And now let's round out our top ten...

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