Horror Actressing: Sofia Boutella in "Climax"

by Jason Adams

Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 freak-out flick Possession, starring Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, has spent the past couple of decades being rediscovered as a major work of art -- Adjani won Best Actress at Cannes and the Cesars that year but the film was nearly chopped in half for its U.S. release (from 126 minutes down to 81) making an already cryptic and eccentric story totally incomprehensible. In short it bombed, and critics here in the US sneered. Still one has the feeling that the film's become a foundational text nowadays, and this year's Gaspar Noé movie Climax, with its gloriously unhinged central performance from Sofia Boutella, feels like Adjani's LSD-soaked descendant.

A professional dancer before becoming an actress it's only natural that Boutella would nail the physical requirements necessary to play Selva, the lead figure in Climax's troupe of overripe boogie-woogers who get more than they bargained for from the homemade sangria served at their snow-bound after-party...

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Frozen II enjoys a mammoth opening weekend.

Did you see Frozen II this weekend? Everyone else did. It grossed a whopping $127 million. The big 'Let it Go' successor is "Into the Unknown" but clearly audiences are still very much into the "known" every weekend at the box office -- sequels continue to pack movie houses. Meanwhile Parasite and JoJo Rabbit and Pain and Glory, three success stories of platform releasing, all started to wane this weekend. They're now losing screens and momentum after two months of growth. Precursor awards and top ten lists and year end hoopla basically begins after Thanksgiving so if they're lucky they'll get a strong second wind. We'll see. 

Sadly the superb Mr Rogers picture, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, opened somewhat quietly with only $13.5 million in wide release (which seems low for Tom Hanks). GO SEE IT, IT'S AMAZING. 

Weekend Box Office [Estimates] Nov 22nd-24th 🔺 = New or Expanding / ★ = Recommended
W I D E	PLATFORM / SPECIALTY TITLES
1 🔺  FROZEN II $127 *new* REVIEW	1 JOJO RABBIT $1.5 on 797 screens (cum. $16) ★
2 FORD V FERRARI $16 (cum. $57.9)  REVIEW, PODCAST ★	2 PARASITE $1.2 on 433 screens (cum. $16.4) PODCAST, CLASS, BONG ★
3 🔺  A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD  $13.5 *new* ★	3 🔺  HONEY BOY $269k on 44 screens (cum. $939K)  REVIEW, PODCAST ★
4 🔺 21 BRIDGES  $9.3 *new*	4 🔺  WAVES $168k on 21 screens (cum. $335k) REVIEW, 2ND OPINION ★
5 MIDWAY $4.7 (cum. $43.1)	5 PAIN AND GLORY $135k on 217 screens (cum. $3.3) REVIEW, PODCAST ★

Tweetweek: 1917, Movie Real Estate, and 'The Bad Place'

by Nathaniel R

So we were at the first screening of 1917 yesterday at the DGA theater in NYC and as you may have noticed if you were online, the Oscar pundits and online film press collectively went berzerk for it, immediately declaring it was going to win everything, it was best this and that... even of the decade! 'Nobody's ever done this before' (uhhhhh. people have been doing continuous take movies since at least Hitchcock's Rope in the 1940s and probably before that and one of 'em just won Best Picture five years ago!)  For the record we enjoyed it and it is quite technically impressive... but deep breaths people. "Consider" your opinions before tweeting them out before the credits of the thing you just watched have even stopped rolling!

Much is made in 1917 about the futility of medals and yet my dumb ass still wants one for noticing each and every invisible cut in this “one-take” movie

— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) November 24, 2019

I'm not going to share the generically breathless super-hypey tweets (they all sound pretty much the same) but more 1917 reactions are after the jump, plus The Bad Place, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Dick Tracy, Cats, and Best Real Estate Envy movies. So read on for more curated tweets...

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Kathy Bates going lead for Richard Jewell!

Shortly after updating the Best Supporting Actress chart and placing Kathy Bates in the mix for Richard Jewell, one of our SAG Nominating Committee friends sent us this image.  SURPRISE. Kathy Bates is campaigning as a lead at SAG.

Longtime awards obsessives will already know this but for newbies to the intricacies of awards season you should know that SAG voters do not have a choice where they place actors. They can only vote on them in the categories for which they've officially been submitted by the studios (same with Emmy voters). Occassionally SAG and Oscar campaign tactics are different, studios changed their mind, or errors are made by administrative types so people nominated in lead at SAG occassionally go on to win supporting acting Oscars (Benicio del Toro in Traffic / Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind) or go from being a supporting nominee at SAG to a leading player with Oscar (Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider / Kate Winslet in The Reader).

How will this all shake out?

"Three Colors: Red" at 25

by Lynn Lee

Transfixed.  Transported.  Exhilarated.  These are words I don’t use lightly when I’m talking about movies, but they all apply to my reaction the first time I saw the final installment of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy.  And in large measure they still do.  Even if the initial wonder has given way to a comforting familiarity, few films capture the universal human yearning for connection and kinship (or fraternité, the unifying theme of Red) as vibrantly yet delicately as this one.

I first saw Red some years after its initial release, at a special screening at the university I was attending.  I went in knowing very little about the film except that the friend I went with had seen it before and spoke of it in glowing terms.  He noted that in an ideal world I’d have seen the preceding chapters, Blue and White, but thought I’d enjoy Red even without having done so.

He was right. 

In fact, I occasionally wonder if Blue and White – both of which I admire rather than love – suffered by comparison when I saw them later.  Perhaps I’d have a different take if I’d watched the trilogy in the intended order.  But I don’t think it would have altered my strong personal affinity for Red, which quickly became one of my all-time favorite films...

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