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Murtada here. With her duties as Alice over, Mia Wasikowska is turning to smaller indies. Announced this week is Piercing, a psychological thriller from director Nicolas Pesce (The Eyes of My Mother). Wasikowska plays a prostitute who tassles with a family man client intent on murder. That part is played by Girls and James White star, Christopher Abbott. This film is so indie it flew under the radar while it was in production. The announcement mentions that it is already completed. Also complete is her other indie Damsel in which she reunites with her Maps to the Stars co-star Robert Pattinson. Directed by David Zellner (Kumiko the Treasure Hunter), little is known about the plot except that it’s a period western.
When Wasikowska appeared on the cover of the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue 4 years ago, alongside Rooney Mara, Jennifer Lawrence and Jessica Chastain, we thought she’d be the one to nab the most Oscar nominations from the quartet. Yet here we are and she has yet to get her first. It’s funny how these things work. We are glad to see her working with up and coming promising directors and in what sounds on paper to be challenging work.
To these eyes, her best performance remains Jane Eyre (2011). We return time and time again to this clip. Watch Jane’s spirit shine as she asserts her strength and her right to love. Mia mesmerizes.
It's Oscar month, so for which performance do you think Wasikowska should've been nominated?
Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on Madly.
Anthology films are always, by definition, a mixed bag. This omnibus collection, which features short films by Gael García Bernal, Sebastián Silva, and Natasha Khan among others, is concerned with “Love.” Each short tackles this loaded emotion in decidedly different ways, tackling impending marriages, stale relationships, burgeoning romances, and everything in between.
Mia Wasikowska, for example, in a particularly interesting segment titled “Afterbirth” focuses on the love between a recent mother and her baby. Those of us who know she’s worked with David Cronenberg and Park Chan-wook will recognize the influences that run through this eerie, off-kilter attempt at depicting the disorienting world of new motherhood. Spoiler alert, it won’t pair well with Garry Marshall’s Mothers Day. Part of the strength of the film lies in Kathryn Beck’s performance; she’s all wide-eyed and beautiful so that it’s only when Wasikowska’s camera lingers on her blank, almost indifferent expression that we begin to intuit that something’s a bit amiss.
Kathryn Beck in Wasikowska's "Afterbirth"
Among the rest, I have to admit I wasn’t wowed by Silva’s work. I’m starting to feel I’ll just never “get” what he’s doing even as he offers the most overtly LGBT entry in the collection. As a fan of 2/3 of Nasty Baby, I somehow kept expecting the other shoe to drop in his young black gay kid in a rough neighborhood sojourn (and it does, don't you worry about that). As for Gael’s fragmented take on a couple's storied history, I found myself noting that it'd be the type of needlessly puzzling film you’d condescendingly describe as “arty." The other one worth mentioning? Sion Sono’s sex club/incestual family comedy which is definitely unlike anything you’ve seen before and perhaps even more bizarre than it sounds.
Visually Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak is a big sumptuous meal. So visually full at all times that it masquerades a thin plot and uninteresting lead character and almosts gets away with fooling us into thinking it a great film. The compelling visuals keep it enticing throughout: Huge frilly sleeves on the dresses; red smoke flaring up from creeks on the floor; a creepy black skeleton hand moving ominously. It never stops.
Manuel here trying to not to make a big deal out of that “Grace of Monaco will be premiering on Lifetime” news. The Emmy campaign begins now, yes, but gosh, there really is no wrath like a Weinstein scorned, is there? And so, rather than try and come up with a witty headline (maybe something like “DisGrace”?), I figured we’d look onward by checking out some casting news about some of our favorite up and coming (read: young) actresses. In other words, imagine we here at TFE brought all of these talented gals together, shot our very own Vanity Fair-style cover, and this is just a helpful guide as to where to see them next:
Mia Wasikowska She’s been tormented by Nicole Kidman in Stoker, she’s tormented Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars, and while I wish I could announce she’ll finish collecting all The Hours ladies with an upcoming Meryl Streep film (we know Meryl loved her in Jane Eyre) she’ll actually be tormented and persecuted by her Lawless co-star, Guy Pearce, in the upcoming Western thriller Brimstone.
Mia is building quite the filmography, no?
Brie Larson After her head-turning lead role inShort Term 12, Larson has been oddly not busy (let’s not speak of The Gambler). Thankfully, 2015 looks busy enough: we’ll be seeing her next in Trainwreck, while two other films (the claustrophobic sounding Roomand the India-setBasmati Blues) feel like fall films. She’s just signed on to Ben Wheatley’s Reservoir Dogs-style flick Free Fire, where she’ll co-star against a trio of hunks: Luke Evans, Armie Hammer and Cillian Murphy.
I really hope Larson has some Trainwreck scenes with Tilda (here pictured with Schumer)
Keke Palmer Akeelah and the Bee was clearly just a beginning. Since, Palmer has been making a name for herself, both on Broadway (where she was the first African-American Cinderella) and on TV (with recurring roles in 90210, Masters of Sex and starring roles in Lifetime’s A Trip to Bountiful and VH1’s CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story). Now she’s joined the merry band of Ryan Murphy players in Scream Queens:
Kristen Stewart Hot off being the first American actress to win a Cesar Award (for Clouds of Sils Maria which opens this weekend; go see it!) and chastising the “big, big, big green monster of cash” that fuels the current celebrity news industry, Stewart has been lined up to star with Brendan Gleeson in a Scottish historical film titled The Great Getaway.
Stewart really is amazing in this two-hander with Binoche.
Gabourey Sidibe I can’t be the only one happy to see Gabourey’s post-Precious career continue to flourish. After parts in TheBig C, American Horror Story and Empire, it seems she’s found a footing in television and that’s where we’ll see her next in Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner’s Hulu comedy Difficult People.
Sidibe has a recurring role as the manager of the coffee shop where Eicher's character works
Don't you find it refreshing that none of these actress casting notices mention tentpoles, blockbusters or otherwise multiple-film franchise contracts? Which one of these projects are you most excited about?
This past week saw the release of not one but two true life films set in the art world. Rather than traditional artist biopics, both films focus instead on the life of a particular painting's subject matter or the history of the painting itself. Woman in Gold (which opened in the top ten despite its limited theater count) stars Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann, a Holocaust survivor. She fought for over a decade in court with the Austrian government to become the rightful owner of Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. The painting was of her aunt and it was stolen from her family by the Nazis during WWII. The long-delayed Effie Gray revolves around the unhappy wife (Dakota Fanning) of art critic John Ruskin (Greg Wise) in Victorian England. Apparently their marriage was never consummated and Effie became involved with the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais (Tom Sturridge) and was the subject of some of his paintings.
Biopics about artists (Frida, Pollock, Mr. Turner,Lust for Life, the original Moulin Rouge, and many more over the decades) have found favor with the Academy. It will be interesting to see if these new films begin a trend for movies about the backstories of famous paintings, rather than the artist who painted them.
Friday, February 10, 2017 at 10:48AM 
