Interview: Alice Winocour on Disorder, PTSD, and Joining the Academy

by Nathaniel R

Alice Winocour, writer/director of "Disorder"The absence of strong female representation behind the camera has been a constant sore subject this past year in the world of cinema. But there are shining exceptions to the rule. Though Alice Winocour began making shorts a dozen years ago and released her first feature in 2013, the 40 year old French director really broke through with the one-two punch of Mustang (which she co-wrote) and Disorder (which she co-wrote and directed) last summer at Cannes. Mustang went on to an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film (and much love - including right here). After serving on the Cannes International Critics Week jury this summer (one year after her own breakthrough double) she's making the rounds promoting Disorder which has finally hit US screens after its festival run.

I had the pleasure of seeing both films nearly back to back at AFI last November and I was stunned that the same person was involved with both. She admits that "it was funny to switch from one film to the other" during their festival runs. They really couldn't be more different, one a memoirish feminist drama and the other a tightly wound home invasion thriller. I had the pleasure of sitting down with her in Manhattan this month to talk about her big year.

NATHANIEL: Since you've written a few features was Disorder a conscious choice to show your directorial chops? Thrillers are not generally thought of as writer's pictures. 

ALICE WINOCOUR: Writing is an unconscious process. You don't think about it like that. You just fall in love with the subject or character and then you start to tell the story...

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The Furniture: The Lobster's Phony Flowers

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber... 

In a 2014 interview, production designer Jacqueline Abrahams described her job as “creating an environment that is credible but sometimes incredible...always aiming to be authentic in spite of being made up.” As this was two years ago, she may not have had her work on The Lobster in mind. Yet the sentiment couldn’t be a more perfect fit for the weird universe of Yorgos Lanthimos.

The dystopia of The Lobster, after all, is not particularly flashy. It’s a world just like our own, only a little grayer. If every frame held immediate physical evidence of a dramatically different future, the carefully calibrated mood would collapse. Instead, the dystopia emerges subtly, through little gestures of performance and design.

Abrahams, a BAFTA-winner for her work on BBC’s Wallander, is an integral part of this achievement. Her presence is felt from the first shot, in which she makes her acting debut as the woman who shoots a donkey on the side of the road. Her design contributions are even more memorable.

The hotel for singles is a triumph of carefully planned ennui. If you look closely, you can pick up the tone from the very first scene within this last resort...

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Review: Meryl Streep as "Florence Foster Jenkins"

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

It takes a gifted singer to sing this horribly. Every other note is wrong. No phrasing goes unmangled by shortness of breath. No lovely moment meant to soar cannot be shattered by a flat ear-piercing decibel. The central conceit of Stephen Frears new comedy Florence Foster Jenkins is that Florence, a considerably wealthy patron of the arts played by Meryl Streep, lives for music but is ghastly at it. The inside joke, given the casting, is that we all know La Streep can sing with the best of them. She followed the "is there nothing she can't do?" revelation of Ironweed's tragic showstopper "He's Me Pal" (1987, Oscar-Nominated) with transcendent country crooner feeling in Postcards From the Edge (1990, Oscar-Nominated), and just kept on singing whenever a movie gave her the opportunity all the way up through last year's Ricki and the Flash which was practically a concert film there were so many scenes of Streep at the mic, rocking out.

Florence Foster Jenkins doesn't rock out. Florence is not that kind of girl and Florence, also, is not the kind of movie...

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'Moonlight' Rising

by Chris Feil

We've been excited at The Film Experience for Barry Jenkins's Moonlight, the follow-up to his 2008 tiny but magnificent debut Medicine for Melancholy (which is available on Netflix - you're welcome).You're going to want to catch up to that film if you haven't because if the buzz is to be believed on Moonlight, the writer/director has something special coming our way.

This week the film was announced as part of the lineups of both New York Film Festival and Toronto Film Festival. In Toronto, it will compete in the Platform section meant to launch auteurs to the next stage of their career. If the just released trailer is any indication, Moonlight has the goods to do just that - take a look at this stunner:

Consider our breath offically taken. Not only does the trailer make good on the buzz we've been hearing for Naomie Harris's performance, but the images are full throttle gut-punchers running the spectrum from sexy to devastating. If the film itself is as visually arresting and emotionally investing as these short two minutes, then we are in for something special indeed. A24 also has Mike Mills's 20th Century Women coming this Oscar season, but their success with Room last year shows what they can do with a modest emotional powerhouse like this.

Moonlight opens on October 21. Which moment from the trailer took your breath away?

Review: Ira Sach's "Little Men"

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Feeling fatigued by summer movie season's emphasis on loud and flashy but ultimately empty spectacles? You're in luck. Little Men, now playing in limited release, is the perfect antidote: quiet but insightful, memorable and substantive. It's not a spectacle by any means but you should still see it inside the movie theater because it's the kind of careful storytelling that benefits from being fully inside of it. Getting lost in a story is much easier to accomplish in the pages of a great novel or the dark of a movie theater than if you wait around to Netflix and chill. The movie comes to us from one of our best LGBT directors, Ira Sachs. The New York based writer/director made his feature debut 20 years ago with The Delta (1996) but recently he's been on quite a roll.

Little Men is not an adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott sequel to Little Women, but it does feel like a rich unexpected sequel to a more contemporary future classic. Ira Sach's last film was the moving gay seniors drama Love is Strange starring John Lithgow and Alfred Molina whose marriage at the beginning of the film sets off a surprising chain of events which leaves them homeless and at the mercy of friends and relatives. That beautiful movie ended, rather intuitively, with a wordless and narratively inconsequential scene in which we followed their young nephew on his skateboard down the streets of the city at magic hour. The image was rapturous and watery... or rather just rapturous; I was watching it through cascading tears was all. [More...]

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