Even though this is a work of fiction (termed “an act of female imagination”), the starting point for Women Talking was a recent real-life event in Bolivia. Between 2005 and 2009, more than 100 girls and women in a remote Mennonite colony discovered they had been raped in their sleep. A group of men from…
Don’t mess with the classics, they say. But when something has been through as many iterations as Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who knows what the definitive “not to be messed with” version is anyway? Even in the film canon, versions of this story go back as far as the early 20th Century. You’ve got Orson Welles’ traditionalist…
Are you into French culture? How about classic American writing of the 1950s and ’60s? Haute cuisine? Student politics? Post-modern art? Balloon-assisted crime? Chess? If you said yes to any of those, chances are you’ll love Wes Anderson’s new film, The French Dispatch. Anderson is, let’s face it, a divisive filmmaker. In my experience, few…
In Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, Fern (Frances McDormand) is a loner. The highly capable 61-year-old has little to her name. She’s averse to traditional societal norms. Now she leads a frugal, nomadic life with memories of the past with her now-departed husband. Fern has always been a free spirit. But she settled in a nondescript house…
Irish playwright turned filmmaker Martin McDonagh has a great track record. His films including the black comedies In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths. And now he gives us what is close to his best film yet, with the evocatively titled Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. This acerbic and blackly funny drama tackles revenge, justice, family and the secrets…
