Carey Mulligan Shines in 'Wildlife'

by Murtada Elfadl

Carey Mulligan always impresses. She gave the best performance I’ve seen on stage in Skylight in 2015. Earlier this year I was again astounded by her stage presence in the one woman show, Girls and Boys. It was an emotionally devastating theater experience, thanks to her command of the stage and of the language inflections. But despite being biased for her, I wasn’t ready for how blazing she comes out in Paul Dano’s Wildlife.

This is her shining moment. It’s her Blanche Dubois moment.

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NYFF: Five Favorite Performances at the Festival

As the New York Film Festival winds down, here's Murtada Elfadl with some of his favorite performances from the movies he's screened.

Sakura Ando in Shoplifters
Shoplifters, Japan's Oscar submission, is about familial bonds that unite with love and real connection rather than blood. Ando plays Nobuyo, the matriarchal figure in this family of outsiders. Her character is the wisest, always knows more than the other characters in any situation. She’s in charge emotionally and that needs an actor who's restrained yet immediate and easy with feelings. She always has the emotional truth in the scene whether her character is having a tender moment with a lover, or facing up to ignorant authority.

Ando shines everytime she’s on screen, yet there’s one moment that is forever marked in my memory...

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NYFF: Pawel Pawlikowski's Cold War

Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival

Like Phantom Thread last year Pawel Pawlikowski's magnificently romantic and visually bewitching new film Cold War deals in the secret languages and strange understandings between true lovers - that no matter how hard it is on your soul and constitution that person sitting across the table is the one made for you and vice versa, and you might be the end of each other but you'll be each other's beginnings too...

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NYFF: Happy as Lazzaro

Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival

The surprises that flow out of Alice Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro start like a trickle - an idiosyncratic sound in the forest, a mysterious red light burning in the night sky - and flash to a flood by  the mid-point, washing away what we thought we knew of its retro-future strangenesses. The earth cracks like a shell, piece by piece, and reveals another odd shell underneath.

Lazarro tells the story of an isolated band of sharecroppers in rural Italy, whose Sisyphean work in the tobacco fields only seems to plow them further into debt day after day...

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NYFF: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival

Anthology films always have a bit of an under-cooked quality - you like a chunk of meat here, a chunk of potato there, but the stew's uneven, the broth skinned over from sitting. Even the very best ones can feel haphazard - you can and should certainly argue that Pulp Fiction is an anthology film, albeit one that's po-mo'd up in glorious fashion, but some days you're just not in the mood for Honey Bunny, ya dig?  The Coens' six-part The Ballad of Buster Scruggs maintains that streak - highs, lows, and everything in between, slapped between two fraying book covers...

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