Middleburg: "Marriage Story" wins yet more fans and "Waves" gets a Spotlight

by Nathaniel R

The Middleburg Film Festival is halfway over and we've yet to report! We were off to a troubed start with a very late flight (8 hours in the airport for a 45 minute flight. ARGH!). Given the gusty NYC weather, we missed the Virginia premiere of Marriage Story, the opening night film. We'd already seen it at TIFF and loved and are pleased to report that the movie was met with great enthusiasm yet again. A Los Angeles friend came directly towards us at the Q&A  (which we arrived just in time to see ending) apologizing for her wet face. Never apologize for crying at beautiful movies...

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TIFF: "Waves" Crashes

by Chris Feil

Writer/Director Trey Edward Shults’ approaches his subjects with raw emotionality, with his first two features Krisha and It Comes At Night using visual acrobatics to reveal the tenser truths festering inside extreme family dynamics. His third feature Waves attempts this dynamic again while pushing the sensory experience extreme territories. Shults somersaults and twirls with florid visual vibrancy here, as aggressive a display of a director demanding we consider them with greater reverence as we have seen since Xavier Dolan. But despite its fevered sensory world and punishing human stakes, Waves struggles to align the two for the truly immersive experience of its ambitions.

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Reader Writes: Kris takes a trip to Telluride

We've been tinkering with the idea of a weekly or bi-weekly column where we hear some film talk from readers beyond just the comments section. So let's kick that off. Here's Kris Mascarenas to talk Telluride which just wrapped... - Editor

Long time reader, first time writer here reporting on Telluride Film Festival which wrapped up on Monday.   It was my second time at the festival, the first being in 2015 when Carol, Room, and Spotlight all premiered.  For the uninitiated, Telluride is located in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. There is one road in and out of town and the moment you arrive, you can feel how truly special this town is.  It is a low-key festival with no paparazzi, and if you are lucky you can run into actors and directors while waiting in line for your morning coffee. 

I was on hand opening night for Judy but first there was a tribute to Renee Zellweger, and clips of her movie played (Chicago, Cold Mountain, Nurse Betty, and inexplicably... Miss Potter) before she was awarded the Silver Medallion...

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Beauty vs Beast: Woods, Men

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" -- I usually try to choose older movies for this series because it's more likely y'all have seen them and have an opinion. That is unless we're talking about great big cultural juggernauts - those are usually safe. It Comes at Night isn't an old movie, and it wasn't so much a cultural juggernaut either, but here we are anyway. The film had a stellar ad campaign (thanks to A24, the king of stellar ad campaigns these days) so it did get some chatter at the time of its release, but it ultimately only made just under 20 million bucks. This is no Avatar.

And yet here on the eve of its release on blu-ray tomorrow I still want to highlight the movie, and I have faith that a good portion of the TFE audience, who already knew Trey Edward Shults' amazing Krisha, was the audience that sought the movie out. For good (I loved it) or for ill (I know a lot of people felt cheated by the ad campaign which baited and switched a supernatural horror film for a tense chamber piece). And you'll maybe have an opinion on who was in the right - Joel Edgerton's homeowner Paul or Christopher Abbott's encroacher Will.

PREVIOUSLY For no reason in particular we hit up Halle Berry's Catwoman for last week's contest but it was her nemesis, the skin-care supervillain played by Sharon Stone, who slinked away with the 65% win - said Eder Arcas:

"... the WINNER here gotta be SHARON STONE, the woman delivers camp like no one else , she`s elegant and graceful cool, because, well, she's Sharon Stone. You always get the feeling she's just about ready to snap a full on crazy - but that kinda IS what is interesting about Sharon Stone. Sort of a female Jack Nicholson, but hotter in heels and a skirt."

Review: "It Comes at Night"

by Chris Feil

After last year’s Krisha, Trey Edward Shults returns to the horror of family dynamics with post-apocalyptic nightmare It Comes At Night. This time he’s equipped with higher production value and more familiar faces than that astute micro-budgeted debut, though Night is just as personal. His resulting sophomore feature is part Greek tragedy, part vague social polemic, and one of the most terrifying films in several years.

Set in a remote, wooded mini-mansion, a family has made their home a fortress from some unspecified apocalypse. The elderly father of Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) has fallen “sick”, leaving her husband Paul (Joel Edgerton) and son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) to dispatch of him for their own safety. The desperate invasion of another family (led by Christopher Abbott and Riley Keough) tests both the reclusive family’s empathy and rigorously protected lifestyle. Meanwhile, Travis is having increasingly vivid visions of the encroaching malignant threat that test his (and our) sense of reality.

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