Make Room For Alessandro Nivola

Extremely happy-making news today with the word that one of our favorite actors Alessandro Nivola has just joined the cast of Pedro Almodovar's new movie The Room Next Door! He joins the previously announced trio of Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, and John Turturro -- funny enough when I last posted about this movie about a week ago, I mentioned that it was already a Gloria Bell reunion thanks to the presence of Moore & Turturro; Nivola wasn't in Gloria Bell but he did give what I consider his greatest performance in a different Sebastián Lelio film, 2017's Disobediance. So Almodóvar's English-language debut feature film is turning into a total Lelio-fest (if only Tilda had worked with him) which I am totally down for. Anyway no word on what role Nivola is playing here, but I think we can rest assured that Pedro will know what to do with him. 

Pic of the (Yester) Day

Yesterday on Twitter Pedro Almodóvar's brother and producer Agustín shared this image of Pedro with the stars of his next movie, his first English-language feature film, The Room Next Door! And as if I even need to name them those stars are Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton! And yes every one of these sentences deserve an exclamation point! Every! One! of! These! Words! Deserve! An! Exclamation! Point! Anyway here is how IMDb describes the movie: "Martha's strained relationship with her mother fractures completely when a misunderstanding drives them apart. Their mutual friend Ingrid sees both sides of the rift."  TIlda is playing Martha, and Juli is the next door neighbor Ingrid. No word on who's playing Tilda's mother yet -- and after re-watching The Eternal Daughter a couple of weeks ago...

... excuse me for only being able to picture Tilda as being capable of playing TIlda's mother. I don't see Pedro going that route, though -- If I understand him (and I think I do) any excuse Pedro would have to work with an older legendary actress that he's never had the opportunity to work with before is the kind of thing one foresees him seizing. Who would you cast as Tilda's mother? 

Oh and one more thing I do want to mention on this subject -- there is one more person listed in the cast of this movie on IMDb and that person is John Turturro! I was weirdly never huge on Turturro (even despite my deep deep love for Barton Fink) until recently, thanks to the one-two punch of his performances in Sebastián Lelio's marvelous Gloria Bell (opposite Julianne Moore!) and on the show Severance. His romance with Christopher Walken of all people is one of my favorite things on T.V. these days. Who the hell had John Turturro becoming one of our great romantic actors on their bingo card? What a time to be alive.

Gaze Unto the Heavens, Andrew Garfield

I have to admit that the first headline I saw earlier today about this story I didn't pay attention to -- Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones set to bring to life the romance between legendary astronomer Carl Sagan and his collaborator Ann Druyan? Sure okay, could be good. Not the sort of thing I'm gonna do a post on, but I'll probably watch that. But then I saw a second headline that said who was directing the movie -- Sebastián Lelio! The man who gave us not one but two Gloria movies, who gave us Disobedience and A Fantastic Woman! All of them masterpieces. I was a little less enamored with his most recent movie The Wonder with Florence Pugh, but it's still perfectly solid. Anyway the second Lelio's name pops up on anything, a postin' we will go.

The movie will appropriately enough be called Voyagers and it will be set in 1977 when Sagan and Druyan worked together on creating "the golden record," which you can read about here if you're unfamiliar. Garfield is always great casting for a dreamer with his head in the skies. I guess Lelio will film this after he does his Bride movie (as in "of Frankenstein") with Scarlett Johannson? Anyway Druyan, who is producing the movie, shared this quote which I found really moving:

"Imagine falling madly, truly in love with one of the greatest humans who ever lived, while creating a complex message about what it is to be alive, a golden record affixed to the first interstellar spacecraft launched by our species, bound to sail the Milky Way galaxy long after Earth ceases to exist. It takes a movie to bring that mythic experience, that cosmic love story to vivid life. After years of searching, I feel that we have found exactly the right colleagues and artists to capture the magic of it.”

What a Wonder Full World

I keep thinking I've seen most of the 2022 movies I've been most excited about already, and then I'm reminded that no, wait, there are actually several more coming still! I might be ahead thanks to press screenings and film-fests but this is shaping up to be quite the year, y'all. Anyway one such film that I'd forgotten we've still got coming is The Wonder, the new movie from Disobedience and A Fantastic Woman and Gloria (times two) director Sebastian Lelio, which stars Florence Pugh. See my previous posts here -- I am a life-long committed Lelio-head at this point so I'm all over this like biscuits on gravy. Or gravy on biscuits? Christ I'm hungry. Speaking of in The Wonder Pugh plays an 19th Century nurse who goes to a small Irish village to find out what's happening with a young girl who's supposedly not eaten anything in four months -- it's based on a well-received book by Emma Donoghue. Anyway out of the two movies Miss Flo's got coming out this fall this is the one I truly give a shit about. And now there's a trailer: 

Netflix says they're releasing this in theaters on November 2nd

and then it's hitting streaming on November 16th, so stay tuned!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from: 

Gloria Bell (2018) 

Gloria: You're doing the right thing. It's gonna be fine.

Arnold: Thank you for saying that. You just may

not see how difficult this is for me.

Gloria: How can I not see you? I'm looking straight at you.

A very happy birthday to one of our favorite working directors, the Chilean wonder Sebastián Lelio, who's turning 48 years young today. It's been four full years since his last movie (the one above, a remake of his breakout 2013 film) so we're more than ready for what he's got coming up, and thankfully they seem to be piling up -- he's already finished filming The Wonder with Florence Pugh, which I told you about last May; it's an adaptation of a book about a journalist who travels to rural Ireland to check out the story of a young girl who's had some sort of medical miracle where she's survived without eating for months. The rest of the cast is to die for -- not just Ciarán Hinds and Tom Burke but when I wrote about this movie last year I wasn't yet familiar with actress Niamh Algar, but having now seen the horror flick Censor her presence is very exciting. 

PS I shared the first image of Pugh in the film right here. But wait! The Wonder is not everything! Lelio has a project lined up for after that one -- it's called Bride and it will star Scarlett Johannson and I am pretty sure I haven't mentioned that one yet even though it was announced way back in October. Apple and A24 are producing it and here's how the so-called "science-fiction drama" is described:

"“Bride” follows a woman created to be an ideal wife — the singular obsession of a brilliant entrepreneur. When she rejects her creator, she’s forced to flee her confined existence, confronting a world that sees her as a monster. While on the run, she finds her true identity, her surprising power and the strength to remake herself as her own creation."

I am sure it will be special given Lelio's involvement but this does sound a lot in its way like two previous ScarJo movies, namely Under the Skin and Lucy, doesn't it? You could also sort of say Ghost in the Shell too. She sure likes movies that have her being chased around for being different until she embraces her difference, right? Seems like a thing. Now I am picturing her in Ex Machina. Surprised she didn't steal that one from Alicia Vikander. Anyway in summation go watch a Sebastián Lelio movie tonight in the man's honor! I recommend any of them, but I am feeling like it could be a Disobedience kinda night. 

Pic of the Day

(via, click to embiggen) That there is our first look at Florence Pugh, young legend, in her next movie The Wonder -- to be honest I'd kind of hoped we'd put a moratorium on titles with "wonder" in them after the Great Wondering of 2017 debacle, but I'll allow it since I don't want to disturb this particular boat, this boat being a movie starring Pugh and directed by the great Sebastián Lelio of the films Gloria, A Fantastic Woman, Disobedience, and Gloria's 2018 remake Gloria Bell. I told you about this movie when it was first announced -- and funny enough I complained about the title then too; I am so original -- it's based on a book about a nurse and a journalist in 1859 rural Ireland who are both summoned to a small town because a purported miracle of some sort occurred. It's described (the book is, anyway) as a "psychological thriller" so that'll be kind of new territory for Lelio, as will also be the whole period setting. Exciting! The movie is being filmed right now so no word on release or anything; I would imagine next year. The only other cast member announced is an Irish actress named Niamh Finlay who is pretty green, only a couple of projects on her IMDb so far.

The Wonder of Florence Pugh

Florence Pugh has a face and a talent that I don't foresee myself getting tired of looking at any time soon, so I greet the news that she's hooking up -- work-wise, I mean -- with one of my favorite directors with much and I do mean much fanfare. Whoop whoop! (That's much fanfare. I even italicized!) Anyway Deadline reported this like a week ago but I'm a turd, just now getting around to it -- she's going to star in Sebastián Lelio's new movie! You should definitely know Lelio's name by now but if you need a refresher he's the genius fella behind Gloria, A Fantastic Woman, Disobedience, and Gloria's 2018 remake Gloria Bell with Julianne Moore. There ain't a stinker among that bunch -- indeed most of them were in my very favorite films of their years. 

Now on to the movie they're making together. It's an adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel called The Wonder, a 19th century Irish thriller... well, I will let Deadline summarize it:

"The novel is set in Irish Midlands, 1859 and follows an English nurse, Lib Wright (Pugh), who is summoned to a tiny village to observe what some are claiming as a medical anomaly or a miracle – a girl said to have survived without food for months. Tourists have flocked to the cabin of eleven-year-old and a journalist has come down to cover the sensation. The Wonder is a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives, a psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil."

That's kinda vague, but I prefer it that way -- better to let the movie surprise me. Similarly I won't go read the book, but if any of you have please tell me if all of this sounds like a good idea! I kind of hope they change the title -- there are too many movies with too similar a title to The Wonder already. I don't want to be forced to think about that bad Terrence Malick movie with Ben Affleck, god forbid, during this.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Gloria Bell (2018)

Arnold: I don't think we should panic.

Everything goes in cycles, it's natural. Besides, every

generation thinks it's the end, the worst it's ever been.

Charlie: And one generation will be right.

Gloria: Well, when the world blows up,

I hope I go down dancing.

A happy 47 to the director Sebastián Lelio today! I've been championing Lelio ever since the first Gloria came out circa 2013-ish (which in the great vein of Hitchcock and Haneke Lelio remade his-own-damn-self several years later) but, as much as I have touted those films and Disobedience and A Fantastic Woman I am just now realizing I've never yet bothered to go back and watch the movies he made before this!

He made three full movies before Gloria -- The Year of the Tiger in 2011, Navidad in 2009, and The Sacred Family in 2005 -- as well as part of an anthology film called Fragmentos urbanos in 2002. Have any of you seen any of these? I really should get on this, seeing as how I've loved every thing I have seen of his.

I Am Link

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--- Romantic Plots - Photog Autumn de Wilde is making a new movie version of Emma, the Jane Austen tome, which well even besides the perfectly fun Gwyneth Paltrow version will never get a better movie than Clueless made from it; I don't know why they try. Anyway I only bring this up because they have cast Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead which is very fine work, but even better they have cast Callum Turner, perennially underrated hot piece, as well as the great Josh O'Connor from God's Own Country and Rupert "Scudder" Graves to boot! It's a good damn cast they have.

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--- Wicked Means - Colin Trevorrow gets a lot of shit for being a straight white dude who made a for-nothing indie and immediately graduated to blockbuster movies without proving himself, but we really should save some of that same shit for Jordan Vogt-Roberts, who went from The Kings of Summer straight to Kong: Skull Island, which is just as bad a movie as the Jurassic Worlds are, plus he also has the douchiest hipster beard. Anyway that aside I'm fairly interested in his maybe next movie, which might be an original monster movie set in Detroit and starring Michael B. Jordan. I'm always down for monster movies, my curse and a blessing.
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--- Bad Vibes Ahoy - Mark your calendars with a great big red slash and make sure you've got a bottle of Pepto Bismal waiting for you at home that week, The Babadook director Jennifer Kent's next film, the already wildly controversial The Nightingale, has been set for release on August 2nd. We recently posted a clip from the film right here, which stars The Fall's Aisling Franciosi and Sam Claflin in a dark turn that will supposedly wipe all our bad Finnick memories right away.
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--- The New Avenger - I constantly get the actor Macon Blair mixed up with his most frequent collaborator, director Jeremy Saulnier -- they made Blue Ruin and Green Room together -- and so when I read the news that Macon Blair is directing the Toxic Avenger reboot I thought the director of Green Room was directing the Toxic Avenger reboot and I was stopped in my tracks for a second. But all that is unfair to Blair, who did actually prove himself a director worth paying attention when he made a movie starring the goddess Melanie Lynskey. He knows what's up! Bring on the Toxie, then.
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--- Cruel Bummer - I forgot to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Cruel Intentions earlier this month but you know what, I've commemorated the only moment in that movie that really matters so many times over the years that my work here is done. Still if you missed it EW did an oral history of the film speaking to all the folks involved and they got this choice bit of quote from Ryan Phillippe, owner of said "only moment in that movie that really matters," himself:

"I felt okay with [showing] my butt. Everybody has a butt, it’s really not that graphic. [Laughs] So many guys on Twitter are like, 'That’s the moment I knew I was gay.'"

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--- Music Woman - When I reviewed Gloria Bell the other week I talked a lot about its soundtrack, which is a vital piece of what makes it work so well (as it is with all of Lelio's films) -- when I wrote all that I was hoping that one of our pal Chris Feil's "Soundtracking" pieces at The Film Experience would be forthcoming and I didn't have to wait long, click here to read Chris's typically gorgeous take.
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--- Wolff's Pack - While I tend to focus on his Hereditary co-star Toni Collette more we should all be paying attention to what Alex Wolff is up to as well, seeing as how he was also top-tier in that movie -- well here's what's what: he's just lined up a thriller called The Line which has him starring opposite John Malkovich, Scott "Scoot!" McNairy, Jessica Barden (we lovvve Jessica Barden) and the adorkable Lewis Pullman. It is about "the wild excitement of being young and the dangers of living without fear of consequences," so they say.
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--- And Finally it looks like Blumhouse is rebooting The Craft! Well "reboot" is a premature word to use - they might be giving us a sequel of sorts, set in the same world as the 1996 film, we don't know yet. (That link does have some plot details and uses the word "reboot" but... well we'll see.) Anyway even more important is that Blumhouse has actually hired a female director to direct the thing -- who knew there were female directors, right Jason Blum? Zoe Lister-Jones, mainly known as a TV actress (she was on Whitney and New Girl) is writing the thing and directing it. All I know is Fairuza better show or else...
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Even If Nobody Else Sings Along

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The "Bell" in the title Gloria Bell might seem like an executive decision made to simply differentiate this remake from its original, director Sebastian Lelio's much marveled at and loved 2014 film Gloria. That Gloria already had a Gloria problem after all, since I remember at the time wondering if it was a re-do of John Cassavetes' 1980 Gena Rowlands film... a film that had already been remade, to little marvel, with Sharon Stone. So many Glorias!

But upon watching the film the "Bell" of Lelio's Gloria Bell strikes me as more than just a choice to calm down our IMDb searches. The "Bell" says from the top down this movie is about a different person -- a different, fantastic woman -- and that seems to be the ethos that Lelio and his star Julianne Moore took in re-crafting this movie from its Chilean origins and from original actress Paulina García's beloved interpretation of the character. Gloria Bell is not Gloria.

That is to say that Julianne Moore's Gloria Bell feels like a person I hadn't met yet, and the one hundred minutes I spent getting to know this person feel as revelatory and unique, as investigative and curious, as it did getting to know García's person. In place of a bastardized retelling then what we get is one hundred minutes watching Julianne Moore click her own emotional beats into place -- when a plot hinges so totally on character, like both of these films do, then the action scenes, the car chases and the sky-dives, the ground-quaking apocalypses, they manifest themselves in a head tilt; a semi-smile. What Julianne Moore does with Gloria and Gloria's arc, in the hands of an wisely open interpretation like this, becomes its entire own beast. 

So in describing the story of Gloria Bell everything might sound similar -- a middle-aged woman who loves to dance meets a middle-aged man who keeps on being a disappointment until she finally realizes that hey, she's the title of her own song dammit -- but Lelio and Moore manage to build new music from played notes. They know that there are more instruments to play, different crescendos to approach, and if that every single body shakes and shimmies to its own kind of music, its own special song. Gloria Bell shimmies and it glows, gorgeously one of a kind.

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Disobedience (2017)

Rav Krushka: In the beginning, Hashem made three types of creatures, the angels, the beasts, and the human beings. The angels, He made from His pure word. The angels have no will to do evil. They cannot deviate for one moment from His purpose. The beasts have only their instincts to guide them. They, too, follow the commands of their maker. The Torah states that Hashem spent almost six whole days of creation fashioning these creatures. Then, just before sunset, He took a small quantity of earth and from it He fashioned man and woman. An afterthought? Or His crowning achievement? So, what is this thing? Man? Woman? It is a being with the power to disobey. Alone among all the creatures we have free will. We hang suspended between the clarity of the angels and the desires of the beasts. Hashem gave us choice, which is both a privilege and a burden. We must then choose the tangled life we live.

These are the opening lines of Sebastián Lelio's great film Disobedience, which we called our 5th favorite movie of 2018 -- if you're keeping track (and who wouldn't be) that marks three films in a row from Lelio that've placed in my Top 10s of their respective years, what with A Fantastic Woman making #9 in 2017 and Gloria making #8 in 2014. Needless to say Lelio has immediately become one of my most beloved auteurs, so the realization that it's his 45th birthday today -- and on the day he has a brand new movie hitting movie theaters, no less! -- means we must mark the occasion. 

So like I said those are the opening lines of the film, spoken by a man who will die a moment later and set the film's plot in motion -- he is Ronit (Rachel Weisz)'s father and Dovid (Alessandro Nivola)'s teacher, and both characters will come to reckon with the Rav's words over the course of the film. Dovid especially, since he was there to hear them, and feels that this lesson about "free will" holds the key to the tangled life he will live. The entirety of the film's laid out right there in its opening moments, and we'll close the circle by film's end when Dovid will stand in that same place, with his choice laid in front of him. 

Lelio often deals with these moments where clouds break and sunlight casts itself down on a single path, a perfect blazing moment of realization that burns off the fog. His characters wander, confused and lost, until they aren't -- my favorite means he uses is pop music, which always gets a moment to shine in his movies; the whole of Gloria and its remake with Julianne Moore are built as a lead-up to theirs (I'll say more about that when I review the latter later today) but I think Disobedience's is my favorite -- how does one even begin to think one can get away with using The Cure's "Love Song" as their movie-couple's primary love song? That is an act of insane hubris. It is obvious as a heart-shaped sledgehammer. 

And yet isn't love, or can't it be, that bolt of perfect light out of the blue? The most obvious thing -- the clearest vision. The right song at the right moment, when suddenly our lives don't feel in our hands anymore but out of our control, being guided by a force that's blunt and bigger than us -- Love and Truth and all the words that the poets capitalize. Lelio's films time and time again are about watching his characters join their Free Will hand in hand with Fate -- when the course of our lives slip into place, those two things side by side, running, dancing, bounding ahead together.

I Think They Got My Number

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Tonight I'm seeing a new movie by one of my favorite working directors that stars one of my favorite working actresses... so why am I so nervous? Well because it's that favorite director (Sebastián Lelio) remaking one of his one films (Gloria from 2014) with an actress (Julianne Moore) that I'm worried is maybe miscast, is why. The original Gloria, which I just called one of my favorite movies of 2014 earlier this week, starred the lovely but decidedly un-supermodel-adjacent Paulina García.

And García's convincing forgotten-woman-ness is integral to that movie's success. I am just worried that my Juli is too utterly devastatingly gorgeous for this role, is all! But the reviews have been good and Lelio has yet to make a false step if you ask me, so I hope, I hope, I hope that my fears remain unfounded. I guess you'll know how I feel tomorrow, probably! Here's the trailer:
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Love & Death

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After crowing about my big like for the film called To Dust for an entire year -- I saw and reviewed it at Tribeca last spring -- it's finally hitting theaters in New York and Los Angeles this Friday. (It expands out to Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, DC, Houston, San Francisco and Seattle next weekend.) Watch the trailer here if you don't remember what I'm talking about -- it's the one that stars Son of Saul actor Géza Röhrig as a grieving cantor who looks for answers about the afterlife from a very Election-ish Matthew Broderick as a community college science-teacher.

Anyway I'm using the enthusiastic release of that film, which was produced by Alessandro Nivola, to bridge us to this week's "Beauty vs Beast" over at The Film Experience, which is tackling the other movie about Orthodox Jews & Alessandro Nivola from last year's Tribeca, Sebasitan Lelio's great Disobedience. Click on over to have your vote matter in this crazy world!
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The Time For Disobedience has Finally Arrived

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The best movie of 2018 so far is out in theaters this weekend and it doesn't have a single solitary superhero in it - Sebastián Lelio, hot off of winning an Oscar for the fantastic A Fantastic Woman, returns right quick with the forbidden lesbian love story Disobedience, which I saw several weeks ago and've been dying to talk about since. 

And now I can since it debuts at Tribeca tonight! My review is over at The Film Experience, and I think I've made it clear already - it's a rave. I managed to sneak in a second viewing of the film and my love for it only strengthened - Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams are both doing some of their best work ever, but my best in show is Alessandro Nivola as a deeply decent man wrestling with his place in a new world; there is this close-up of him mid-film that absolutely shatters me. Stunning work.

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Quote of the Day

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"I’m not interested in showing body parts. I’m interested in your face and your longing, and your desire. The audience will imagine where the other woman’s fingers and face and tongue is outside the frame,” Weisz says their director told them. “It was our job like musicians — if there are coordinates or notes — to fill that with emotion, which I think we did. I hope we did.”

-- That's Rachel Weisz on what her Disobedience director Sebastián Lelio said about the film's steamy but relatively nudity-free sex scene (the scene got a lot of chatter when the film premiered in Toronto in the fall) - oh how I wonder if we'll get the same outrage aimed at the movie for this approach as what Call Me By Your Name got... ha, no I don't wonder that; of course we won't.

Nor should we, of course - you guys know where I stand on this argument. But it's an interesting comparison. There are, of course, aspects of gender coming into play here - "female" sex being thought of as being about desire, an erotica of the mind, while "male" sex is supposedly about the body, the parts. God forbid we blur those lines...

Anyway stay tuned for my review of Disobedience, 

which is screening at Tribeca, coming soon.

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Gloria (2013)

Rodolfo: If I were a peach, you would be a tree.

And if you were a tree, I would be its sap,

flowing through your branches like blood.

And if I were blood, I would live in your heart...

A very happy 44th birthday to Chilean director Sebastián Lelio, who just won an Oscar this past weekend for his magnificent film A Fantastic Woman - and even better than that dumb ol' Oscar is the news that his movie placed 9th on our list of our favorite movies of the year that we posted earlier this week!

As far as art-house foreign films are concerned Gloria was a great big and deserving international hit for Lelio in 2013 (I wrote a small capsule review of it right here - I am sad I didn't call it "Gloria-ous!"); it got him noticed by the right people, anyway. He's in the process of remaking the movie with Julianne Moore in the lead right now - part of does worry that a woman as gorgeous and glamorous as Moore might have trouble convincing us of middle-aged dowdiness? Paulina García in the original is obviously a beautiful woman but not in the same way as Moore, whose bone structure regularly cuts the screen to ribbons. Then again I suppose Moore did well enough in The Hours playing a frumpy hausfrau - I should never doubt Juli's abilities.

Before that remake of Gloria comes out though we've got Lelio's real first English-language debut to contend with, and right quick too - his movie Disobediance starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams as hot lesbian lovers closeted in an Orthodox Jewish community is out at the end of April, and it was just announced yesterday to be screening as part of the Tribeca Film Festival just before that. 

And yes that is Alessandro Nivola all bearded and suited up playing McAdams' hubby. We posted the trailer alongside our review of A Fantastic Woman, see (and read) that here. We are very very much looking forward to this movie - the reviews in Toronto were good if not quite as ecstatic as the ones that've greeted Lelio's previous two movies but I'm pretty primed all the same. Several pictures got released yesterday; you can hit the jump for them all...

Woman On Fire

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Sometimes I just stand looking at myself in the mirror, trying to figure out what other people see. Everyone else's eyes are seeing me from the side, you see - nobody's seeing me from where I stand. I tilt my head - I am tall so people must be seeing me from below, right? My features seem fine from one angle, grotesque from another - you stand staring at yourself for too long and you become an abstraction; an assemblage of disconnected pieces, multiple noses and chins, a Picasso cluster. 

Marina (Daniela Vega) spends a lot of time in A Fantastic Woman looking at herself, and you get the same sense that it's not because she's vain, but because she can't see what other people see and she would very much like to. It doesn't add up to her. The film starts with an opening sequence that reminds me of Pixar's Up - a love story, from start to finish, in miniature. Marina is seen, loved, appreciated, and it is beautiful. And then it all falls apart and the film becomes about the aftermath - when that comfort, that certainty, is yanked away, how do we find ourselves again?

Everyone else refuses to see what we have already seen, experienced, and so we feel Marina's pent-up rage for her, even as she's too stunned and heartbroken to channel it outward herself. Director Sebastián Lelio once again (after his marvelous Gloria, which he's currently in the process of remaking with Julianne Moore!) shows a mastery of dropping overwhelmed and anxious women into pulsating public spaces and forcing us to navigate alongside them - we're never not right there with Marina, even when she's making a string of bad decisions.

Clearly a lot of that credit goes to Vega, whose face is a pleasure to scrutinize. In keeping with the shock Marina is in for most of the film Vega underplays everything, keeping herself mask-like in even the most brutal of circumstances, but it's in defiance, an act of war - she isn't going to give it to us, she's going to make us come up and ask for it. Politely. Or else. And then, oh then, the music she makes...

A Fantastic Woman is finally hitting theaters this weekend - it's up for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars next month too, and it would be a perfectly wonderful winner. See it. There's a delicate strain of surrealism worked through the film that graces us with some of the most transfixing moments I saw on-screen anywhere in 2017.
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In related news that there is the trailer for Disobedience, which is Sebastián Lelio's next movie - it's out on April 27th - and stars Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams as forbidden lovers reunited after a death in her family brings Weisz back to their shared conservative Jewish community. I have heard very good things about the movie - Leilo really does seem to be a tremendous new talent! Oh and also that's not even mentioning how there's a generously bearded Alessandro Nivola sexing up the Tzitzit therein...