Venice: The Mara Sisters in "Bucking Fastard"

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

BUCKING FASTARD © Gateway to Orkney LLC

Back in the 1980s, Werner Herzog met the Chaplin twin sisters for a project, but he is the first to warn against connecting his return to fiction filmmaking after a string of documentary projects too closely to that real story. In his new film Bucking Fastard, Jean and Joan are not twins but sisters who "speak, move, dress, dream and even slip their tongues, as the title proves, in the very same way." The movie is about their quest for true love, one that is neither particularly well planned nor particularly successful, as if the point were simply to find a way not to feel alone. Joan and Jean feel that way - alone together - even though they are always together, even though their understanding of each other is absolute...

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: 'Three Identical Strangers'

by Glenn Dunks

“Truth is stranger than fiction”, nudge, wink, geddit? It’s fairly common that that old chestnut of a phrase makes its way into writings about documentaries as more and more filmakers uncover strange but true stories that then make their way into cinemas and onto streaming services. Crazy! Amazing! Insane! Shook! Whatever. Sometimes it's justified (Hi Tickled!) and then there’s Three Identical Strangers. A film that would almost certainly be a farce if invented in the mind of a screenwriter. There’s no way such a story could play as straight drama. It’s just too nutty. It is crazy and amazing and insane and I was shook.

Three Identical Strangers starts the way somebody telling this story might. Have you heard of the one of three brothers, identical triplets, who were separated at birth? That's where we begin...

Click to read more ...

Drag Race: "The Evil Twin Ball"

by Nathaniel R  

Asia and her evil twin North Korea

Oopsie. When Drag Race took a week off we took two weeks off of watching it. It's almost time for the new episode and we forgot to watch it last Thursday (!) so herewith very very quick notes on the 11th episode of the season in which the Queens were tasked with exposing their inner saboteur...

Click to read more ...

Three can't-miss movies directed by women on the festival circuit

our continuing adventures at TIFF with a little NYFF thrown in.

This year I made a conscious effort to see films directed by women at the Toronto International Film Festival. Nearly half of the films I screened had women behind the camera! Even though a few of them were unsatisfying, a handful were gems so praise be to TIFF that there were so many to choose from. Other festivals haven't been as inclusive. We've already discussed the tragic romance of Mary Shelley, the visually stunning The Breadwinner, the what-were-they-thinking Kings, the confounding but admirably crafted Zama, the dramatic misfire of Euphoria, and Hungary's strange and totally involving Oscar submission On Body and Soul.

I saved the three best for last. If you get a chance to see Western (playing at NYFF September 30th and October 1st), the Austrian costume drama Mademoiselle Paradis, or a hard to describe miracle from Indonesia called The Seen and the Unseen please take it. Unfortunately none currently have US release dates (though Western does apparently have some sort of stateside distribution planned for 2018). We'll take them alphabetically after the jump...

Click to read more ...

BB-8 is Basically Round WALL•E

Chris here. One of the most exciting elements of The Force Awakens is the fresh heroes we have to idolize. But Rey, Finn, and Poe aren't the only new blood worth obsessing over: we also have fan favorite BB-8.

So much of The Force Awakens relies on our collective nostalgia for the originals, but BB-8 seems to be his own charming creation. If you're thinking of C-3PO and R2-D2 as sources for our new friend, they're not the droids you are looking for. Delivering more humanity than his droid predecessors and drawing the most laughs, his extroverted connection to the other characters embodies the optimistic spirit of hope that is the staple of the franchise.

And yet something still felt too familiar. Who did BB-8 keep reminding me of?? And then, it clicked...

A playful breakdown after the jump...

Click to read more ...