The life of Tony-winning playwright Terrence McNally (Master Class, Ragtime): 60 years of groundbreaking plays and musicals, the struggle for LGBT rights, addiction and recovery, finding ... See full summary »
Director:
Jeff Kaufman
Stars:
F. Murray Abraham,
Lynn Ahrens,
Jon Robin Baitz
Kate Stone is career-focused, and enjoys her life that way. Her brash attitude keeps relationships at arm's length, making her an outcast in her own right.
Director:
Laura Steinel
Stars:
Kate McKinnon,
Taylor Schilling,
Brian Tyree Henry
A documentary that follows Mc Linn Da Quebrada, a black trans woman, performer and activist living in impoverished São Paulo. Her electrifying performances (with plenty of nudity) brazenly take on Brazil's hetero-normative machismo.
Gillian is an aspiring playwright married to Oliver, a small-time DJ for all occasions. Their marriage has hit the Seven Year Itch, and this neurotic pair want to scratch that itch until it bleeds.
Summer is a 17-year old carefree black girl, whose world is turned upside down when her mother, a popular meteorologist named Jade Jennings, abruptly converts to Islam and becomes a ... See full summary »
Leo is 22 and sells his body on the street for a bit of cash. The men come and go, and he stays right here - longing for love. He doesn't know what the future will bring. He hits the road. His heart is pounding.
Director:
Camille Vidal-Naquet
Stars:
Félix Maritaud,
Eric Bernard,
Nicolas Dibla
Su is a dreamer who believes that the love of her life will one day find herself. Aras is the one who can not prevent the inconvenience of trying to hide everybody. He has many problems due... See full summary »
Caesar is a would-be rock star. But for now, he works at a pencil eraser factory. Soon he falls in love with the owner's daughter. In order to get her, he bets with the old man that he can ... See full summary »
Director:
Anthony Michael Hall
Stars:
Anthony Michael Hall,
Bobbie Phillips,
Leslie Danon
After watching this irreverent yet sincere tribute to poet Emily Dickinson, I had the urge to revisit Julie Harris in "The Belle of Amherst". Call me Old School, but I vastly prefer serious filmmaking to the facetiousness of this feature-length SNL sketch approach.
Certainly SNL alumna Molly Shannon as Emily and Susan Ziegler as her sister-in-law, who share the love that dare not say its name in this version of the Dickinsons story give amusing and often moving performances, but the film has no consistent style or tone, and the male characters are predictably straw men mocked for the self-centered Male Superiority attitudes. Even the movie's unreliable narrator, Mabel (Emily's posthumous editor), well-played by Amy Seimetz, is written with such a heavy hand by filmmaker Madeleine Olnek as to lose substance.
Set in 3 different time frames: 1860 for the main story, 1840 for the young Emily and Susan played by disconcertingly lovely actresses Dana Melanie and Sasha Frolova, and Mabel's current era after Emily's death, wherein she pontificates to packed audiences inflating her role in championing Dickinson's career, the movie unfolds in disconnected scenes, many of which might easily have been dropped for sheer dullness, and a couple of which (surreal in nature) clash with the matter-of-fact overall style. Unlike the usual exaggerated beauty of period movies, typified by everything from Merchant-Ivory classics to Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon", Olnek presents the show as if in a low-budget amateur dress-up production representing 2019.
Use of poetry on screen in subtitles as it is recited (and sometimes by itself) recalls Jim Jarmusch's recent use of same in "Paterson", a techinque I found artificial and forced, just as it seems here too.
3 of 5 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful to you?
| Report this
After watching this irreverent yet sincere tribute to poet Emily Dickinson, I had the urge to revisit Julie Harris in "The Belle of Amherst". Call me Old School, but I vastly prefer serious filmmaking to the facetiousness of this feature-length SNL sketch approach.
Certainly SNL alumna Molly Shannon as Emily and Susan Ziegler as her sister-in-law, who share the love that dare not say its name in this version of the Dickinsons story give amusing and often moving performances, but the film has no consistent style or tone, and the male characters are predictably straw men mocked for the self-centered Male Superiority attitudes. Even the movie's unreliable narrator, Mabel (Emily's posthumous editor), well-played by Amy Seimetz, is written with such a heavy hand by filmmaker Madeleine Olnek as to lose substance.
Set in 3 different time frames: 1860 for the main story, 1840 for the young Emily and Susan played by disconcertingly lovely actresses Dana Melanie and Sasha Frolova, and Mabel's current era after Emily's death, wherein she pontificates to packed audiences inflating her role in championing Dickinson's career, the movie unfolds in disconnected scenes, many of which might easily have been dropped for sheer dullness, and a couple of which (surreal in nature) clash with the matter-of-fact overall style. Unlike the usual exaggerated beauty of period movies, typified by everything from Merchant-Ivory classics to Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon", Olnek presents the show as if in a low-budget amateur dress-up production representing 2019.
Use of poetry on screen in subtitles as it is recited (and sometimes by itself) recalls Jim Jarmusch's recent use of same in "Paterson", a techinque I found artificial and forced, just as it seems here too.