The always exquisitely curatedNashville Film Festival opens on Thursday, September 24 and runs through September 30 with a diverse menu of cinema. The Nashville Film Festival is the oldest running film festival in the South (this is the 57th!) and is an Academy Award qualifying festival. The program includes a mix of indies, docs and international cinema, including world and North American premieres.
The most high profile events at NashFilm will be:
Frampton: The festival opens with this profile of the iconic rock guitarist readying his final tour. Peter Frampton himself will appear personally.
A Talent for Murder: Anton Corbijn’s latest thriller, starring Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich and Olivia Cooke.
Tender Loving Care: On the fest’s final night, the latest from venerated auteur Mike Leigh.
The Incomer: This comedy starring Domhnall Gleeson was a hit at this year’s Sundance.
world premieres of Jackrabbit, Brother, Save Us and 23 other films.
Not high profile, but really intriguing – there’s even a program of Kurdish shorts.
Helen Mirren in A TALENT FOR MURDER. Courtesy of NashFilm.
The Nashville Film Festival embraces its home in Music City with a strong program of music films. This year, NashFilm will present Songs from the Circle, a Grand Old Opry concert in London, and the singer-songwriter profile Sara Bareilles: Good Grief.
My favorite element of most NashFilm fests is the discovery of new auteurs with their ballyhooed first films. This year’s slate includes these first films:
Compliance: Kyle Mangione-Smith wrote, directed, produced and edited his first narrative feature.
Crystal Cross: Director Richie James Follin costars and already has a few wins on the filmfest circuit.
Mallory’s Ghost: Arabella Oz also stars in her directorial debut, nominated for a jury prize at SXSW.
Seahorse: Canadian actress Aisha Evelyna’s fist feature as a director was in the narrative competition at SXSW.
Sparks: Fegrus Campbell’s offbeat first feature has already racked up one festival win.
All in all, this year’s NashFilm presents 150 films from 25+ countries. Peruse the program and get tickets. I’ll be publishing my festival recommendations on September 22. Here’s the fest trailer.
Photo caption: Robert De Niro, Adam Scott and Michelle Monagan in THE WHISPER MAN. Courtesy of Netflix.
The Whisper Man is even more disturbing than your average serial killer thriller because of three creepy villains with even creepier habits. Amanda (Michelle Monagan) is a police detective in a race against time to solve child abductions before they become child murders. Her suburban community in northern New Jersey experienced a spree of child killings a generation ago; these new crimes have exactly the same modus operandi, even though the original serial killer has been locked away for 25 years. She seeks the advice of Peter (Robert De Niro), the long-retired cop who caught the original killer, but he resists re-engaging. But then, Jake (Acston Luke Porto), the young son of Peter’s estranged son Tom (Adam Scott), is kidnapped, and Peter joins the manhunt.
The investigation takes Michelle and Peter behind bars to interview the original murderer Frank (Michael Keaton), who eagerly relishes the attention and who is just dripping with unhinged evil. Next, Michelle tracks down the wealthy weirdo Norman (Hamish Linklater), a fetishist proud of his transgressive collection. As they get closer to a solution, The Whisper Man becomes almost unbearably harrowing.
Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer adapted the screenplay from the Alex North novel. The writers have added some intriguing twists to a serial killer story – one about fingernails, another about collecting, and a third, horrific one involving cassette tapes.
As the good guys, often in conflict with each other, De Niro, Monagan and Scott all give strong performances. But it is the intense creepiness of villains played by Michael Keaton, Hamish Linklater and Owen Teague that makes The Whisper Man so unsettling.
Owen Teague in THE WHISPER MAN. Courtesy of Netflix.
I first noticed Owen Teague in the little indie family drama Montana Story, which I admired as one of the best movies of 2022. I wrote that Teague’s “quiet performance is exquisite. This is a melodrama, and the performance as Cal could easily have been overwrought. Instead, he perfectly captures this dutiful and seemingly passive man, with a hidden, festering guilt.” In The Whisper Man, Teague gets to go full-out maniac, and it makes the end of the movie even more gripping.
Don’t overlook the long-lost Iranian film Chess of the Wind, a masterpiece of family treachery. Recently rediscovered and restored, it’s now available to stream.
The Odyssey: epic filmmaking at its best. In theaters.
Romeria: when the dots don’t connect right away. Amazon, Fandango, AppleTV.
Over/Under. sweet and uncommonly authentic. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
I Want Your Sex: good, naughty fun. In theaters, but hard to find.
The Last Viking: hidden loot amidst the deluded. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
Maddie’s Secret: a bracingly inventive comic melodrama. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
ON TV
Ricardo Montalban in BORDER INCIDENT
On September 7, Turner Classic Movies presents a Ricardo Montalban double bill from 25 years before Ricardo hawked the Chrysler Cordoba by purring ‘rich Corinthian leather“. In Border Incident (1949), he plays a Mexican cop teamed with an American cop (George Murphy) chasing an illegal human smuggling ring.; Border Incident is memorable chiefly for the Murphy character’s harrowing demise, guaranteed to make you fidget in your seat. In Mystery Street (1950), Ricardo plays a Massachusetts State detective who teams with a Harvard Medical School researcher (Bruce Bennett) to solve a murder case with forensic science; it’s the granddaddy of all the CSI-type forensic procedurals.
Bruce Bennett and Ricardo Montalban in MYSTERY STREET.
Photo caption: Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA: Courtesy of MUBI,
It’s been a massive week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of Jane Schoenbrun’s witty and bizarre Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the Anthony Bourdain coming-of-age biopic Tony, and the sweet and authentic female coming-of-age film Over/Under.
Don’t overlook the long-lost Iranian film Chess of the Wind, a masterpiece of family treachery. Recently rediscovered and restored, it’s now available to stream.
Shohreh Aghdashloo and Fakhri Khorvash in CHESS OF THE WIND. Courtesy of Janus Pictures.
REMEMBRANCES
We remember Dolly Parton acting in the movies 9 to 7 and Steel Magnolias, but she made a massive contribution to the movies behind the camera, with 62 composer credits and and an unfathomable 702 soundtrack credits.
In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Tim Curry charismatically exploded off the screen as Dr. Frank-N-Furter – A Scientist, the “sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania.” As Frank-N-Furter, Curry created a movie character as unforgettable as Michael Corleone, George Bailey, Rhett Butler, Hannibal Lector or Indiana Jones.
The Last Viking: hidden loot amidst the deluded. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
Maddie’s Secret: a bracingly inventive comic melodrama. In theaters, but hard to find.
ON TV
Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea in SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS
On August 30, Turner Classic Movies will be presenting a film recognized as the masterpiece of a great filmmaker, but one that has slipped from the current conversation – Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. Sturges was the first workaday Hollywood screenwriter to transition into a major writer-director, and between the ages of 42 and 46, he churned out The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, Sullivan’s Travels, Hail the Conquering Hero and The Great McGinty, an impressive body of work. Unfortunately, his turbulent personality led to conflict in his business affairs, which exacerbated his drinking. He burned out and was dead at age 60, but he left behind some of the very, very smartest and funniest movie comedies. Sullivan’s Travels is a fast-paced and cynical comedy about a pretentious movie director who goes on the road to be inspired by The Average Man – and gets more of an adventure than he expects. There has never been a better movie about Hollywood. Sullivan’s Travels is on It’s on my own 50 Greatest Movies of All Time list.
Photo caption: Antonio Banderas and Dominic Sesso in TONY: Courtesy of A24.
“I was a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
So begins Tony, the origin story of celebrity chef/traveler/raconteur Anthony Bourdain – with Bourdain’s self-description of himself at age 19. Tonyis more of a coming of age film than a biopic, focusing on this pivotal, transformative year in Bourdain’s life.
The young Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sesso), lazy, entitled and supremely confident, is betting everything on being awarded a college writing fellowship that he can use to bankroll a fun year in NYC. Having no Plan B, he is devastated when he doesn’t win the fellowship. Even worse, he has already told everyone he knows that he had already won the prize, and, unable to face the embarrassment, covers it up by running away. Impulsively, he heads to the tip of Cape Cod in pursuit of a a girl who is summering there. Arriving at the onset of Provincetown’s tourist season, he soon finds himself with no girl, no money, no place to stay and no ticket for the return ferry.
The taciturn chef-owner (Antonio Banderas) of a modest restaurant allows him to sleep in a hammock on his back porch and to eat at the restaurant in return for working as the dishwasher. Bourdain becomes the lowest-ranking member of the kitchen team, a colorful assembly of experienced cooks. He thinks that he is too good for this setting, but his colleagues are uniformly unimpressed with him.
Young Bourdain, holding on to the writing fellowship as a false cover story, still tells everyone that he is a writer. Of course, he hasn’t written anything – not even a draft or an outline – or even concocted an original idea. He is, however, an earnest and often successful bullshitter – and he’s about to learn how far that will take him. He’s not a sociopathic liar, on the road to being a con man; he lies out of desperation, terrified that somebody will learn that at age 19, he hasn’t magically already become who he aspires to be. What he needs is a harsh reality check – and that’s what he gets from the restaurant kitchen – where pampering is not tolerated.
Of course, there is humor in watching a young punk getting his comeuppances, and much of Tony is very funny. Dominic Sesso (The Holdovers) is able to keep the audience rooting for the young Anthony Bourdain even while he is behaving badly. Banderas is solid as his boss and purveyor of tough love. Leo Woodall (Tuner, Nuremburg, The White Lotus) is excellent as kitchen crewmate Sal, a blue collar hedonist who has much more game than the teen Tony.
Note: Bourdain’s real life best friend, fellow celebrity chef Eric Ripert, appears in a cameo as the chair of the admissions committee for the Culinary Institute of America.
I remembered reading about Bourdain’s Provincetown experience in his own colorful memoir Kitchen Confidential, which launched his post-restaurateur career as a travel and food writer and television personality. The Bourdain biodoc Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain was one of the best films of 2021, and also covers this period as it traces his entire life.
The director Matt Johnson and co-writers Todd Bartel and Lou Howe made wonderful choices in adapting the source material; instead of making a movie about Bourdain discovering a love of cooking, they focus on the character-building payoff of his Provincetown experience. Johnson also gets the tone just right, with just the right amount of humor, as he did in the corporate docudramedy BlackBerry in 2023.
Tony’s trailer (below) depicts a talented, immature narcissist who keeps self-sabotaging until he falls under the guidance of a crusty mentor. Because that’s the plot of 1969’s fictional Downhill Racer, with Robert Redford and Gene Hackman, I was going to skip Tony. But then I read Jeannette Catsoulis’ glowing review in the NYT, and I’m glad that The Wife and I got to see it. It’s a good watch.
Photo caption: Anastasia Veronica Lee and Emajean Bullock in OVER/UNDER. Courtesy of Bulldog Film Distribution.
In the sweet and uncommonly authentic coming of age film Over/Under, a deep friendship between two girls evolves over four years.
Their Southern California families vacation each year in a New England beach community, and nine-year-old Violet (Emajean Bullock) and Stella (Anastasia Veronica Lee) have become the fastest of friends. Over/Under reminds us of the innocent intensity of childhood friendship when kids feel compelled to spend every minute fully engaged with a best friend.
As the years pass, the beach setting remains idyllic, but their bodies and interests evolve. Disappointments, jealousies, betrayals and the appeal of boys threaten the friendships. Can their profound bond survive?
In her debut, director and co-writer Sophia Silver has made a film without a single false moment. Female viewers will recognize every moment of heartfelt exuberance or anguish.
Over/Under was nominated for a Grand Special Prize at the Deauville Film Festival (a French film fest devoted to American film).
This is a film that will resonate strongly with women and girls. Over/Under is now available to stream.
Photo caption: Gillian Anderson in TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA: Courtesy of MUBI,
In Jane Schoenbrun’s witty and pleasingly bizarre Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the promising young filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder) has been tapped to make yet another sequel to a slasher movie franchise. The once popular Camp Miasma movie franchise has slipped into oblivion, and the movie studio that owns the intellectual property wants to re-monetize it. The origin story of the slasher character was transphobic, so the studio intends to use Kris, who is polyamorous, to queer-wash the newest Camp Miasma movie.
The Camp Miasma movies are devoid of any cinematic aspiration, but the cynical studio execs just want to cash in with more schlock. What the suits don’t know is that Kris herself is a huge fan of the franchise, and that Kris, who over-intellectualizes everything, has envisioned elevating the next chapter into something artsy and meaningful. And she’s obsessed with casting Billy, the actress who played the Final Girl in the original 1980s Camp Miasma.
Billy (Gillian Anderson) retired early from acting and now lives a reclusive life in the abandoned summer camp that was fictionalized as Camp Miasma in the movies. Billy is more than a little weird, and she both fascinates and unsettles Kris. I strongly recommend Schoenbrun’s own video narration of a scene in the NYT; there’s absolutely no gore in this clip.
As the two rewatch the original movie, Schoenbrun spins Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma into a loving homage to and parody of the slasher movie genre. They send up all the slasher movie tropes – a bunch of teens doing things their parents wouldn’t like, impending virgin deflowering, the nocturnal emergence of a slasher villain and the plot importance of the Final Girl. Here, the slasher villain is Little Death, who wears an HVAC vent on their head and wields a bayonet-like spear.The body horror is intentionally so unrealistic (Old Faithful-scale geysers of blood instead of mere spurts) that it’s not as cringe-worthy as are most teen splatter movies.
Kris proudly proclaims herself to be polyamorous as if she’s earning some woke-ism points. But polyamorous threesomes may be equitably more reciprocal in theory than in practice. Kris’ girlfriend and the girlfriend’s boyfriend seem to be getting more of their needs met than does Kris. Basically, Kris is masking that she is a puddle of sexual unfulfillment. Will her stirrings be awakened?
In another comic thread, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma sharply mocks the cynical business side of Hollywood, including perhaps the most disastrous movie pitch ever,
Hannah Einbinder in TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA: Courtesy of MUBI,
Hannah Einbinder carries the movie, reaping all the humor in Kris’ pretensions and her sexual unease, along with her Final Girl vulnerability. Einbinder, a standup comic and daughter of SNL original cast member Laraine Newman, won an Emmy for the TV series Hacks.
Gillian Anderson goes full creepster and nails Billy’s teetering between assured self-control and psychosis.
Amanda Fix plays the young Billy acting in the first Camp Miasma film, and her performance is unexpectedly haunting. Dylan Baker strikes the perfect tone as a studio exec. Prolific character actors Patrick Fischler and Kevin MacDonald are very fun as slasher movie tropes – the ominous townsman and the local sheriff; wait through the final credits for their final gag.
In 2024, I wrote that Schoenbrun’s evocative psychodrama I Saw the TV Glow was the “emergence of a great filmmaker”, and that was a good call by me. In Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, they have successfully braided together a romantic comedy, a sexual awakening film, a horror movie and a slasher parody. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is very smart and riotously funny.
Photo caption: Greta Lee and Willem Dafoe in LATE FAME. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
This week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of Willem Dafoe’s tour de force in Late Fame and the long lost Iranian film Chess of the Wind, a masterpiece of family treachery.
Next week: Jane Schoenbrun follows their astonishingly original I Saw the TV Glow with Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, the Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony and the sweet and authentic female coming of age film Over/Under.
REMEMBRANCE
Mark Rydell directed The Cowboys, Cinderella Liberty, The Rose and his triple-Oscar winner, On Golden Pond.
CURRENT MOVIES
Late Fame: will he stay comfortable in his own skin? In theaters.
The Odyssey: epic filmmaking at its best. In theaters.
Romeria: when the dots don’t connect right away. In art house theaters, but hard to find.
The Last Viking: hidden loot amidst the deluded. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
Maddie’s Secret: a bracingly inventive comic melodrama. In theaters, but hard to find.
ON TV
Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine in BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT
On August 24, Turner Classic Movies brings us Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, with its ending of unsurpassed irony. Seeking to discredit capital punishment, a cocksure novelist (Dana Andrews) gets himself charged with and CONVICTED of a murder, planning to then reveal proof that he couldn’t have done it. But then the evidence of his innocence suddenly disappears! Crackerjack (and deeply noir) surprise ending. Another film noir from The great German auteur Fritz Lang directed the cinematic masterpieces Metropolis and M before fleeing the Nazis; Beyond a Reasonable Doubt was the last in his remarkable string of Hollywood film noir:The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, House by the River, Clash by Night, The Blue Gardenia, The Big Heat, Human Desire and While the City Sleeps.
Photo caption: Akbar Zan Janpour, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Fakhri Khorvash and Shahram Golchin in CHESS OF THE WIND. Courtesy of Janus Pictures.
The Iranian thriller Chess of the Wind is a newly rediscovered lost film, a masterpiece of craven family intrigue, with a singular look and feel.
Chess of the Wind was screened at the Tehran Film Festival in 1976 and immediately banned for objectionable content. Things got worse with the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and the negative ad all prints were supposed to have been destroyed. Decades passed, and,i n 2014, the director’s son was browsing in a Tehran junk shop and miraculously happened upon film cans that contained the negative Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna worked to restore the film, which was released in 4K in 2020.
Chess of the Wind is all about a wealthy family’s mansion, where almost all the action takes place. The family matriarch having just died, leaving her willful, forty-something daughter Aghdas (Fakhri Khorvash) as the nominal head of the family. Unmarried and childless, Agdas’ health confines her to a wheelchair, dependent on her young maid Kanizak (Shohreh Aghdashloo).
Shohreh Aghdashloo and Fakhri Khorvash in CHESS OF THE WIND. Courtesy of Janus Pictures.
Aghdas assumes that she now owns her family’s ancestral home, but her mother’s second husband Hadji Amoo (Mohamad Ali Keshavarz) claims the inheritance for himself ans prepared to bully Aghdas and Kanizak out on the street. Hadji is despicable, a thuggish deadbeat who treats everyone badly, including his own adult nephews Ramazan (Akbar Zan Janpour) and Shaman (Shahram Golchin). Ramazan has his own designs on marrying Aghdas for her property, and Kanizak allies herself with Shaman.
Hadji, a horrible person, is now a danger to everyone, and his death would be universally convenient. Fortunately, the mansion’s decor features Ottoman antiques including a flail, a traditional Persian weapon, and an antique pistol. Hadji is indeed murdered, and the plan is for his body to be stashed in the cellar and dissolved in acid.
But Aghdas hears from the local authority, the police commissar, that Hadji, whom we know to be dead, has been recently seen in pubic. Aghdas becomes more unsettled when that report is echoed by some street musicians. The police commissar shows up with two of Hadji’s creditors, who are allowed to search for him. (A modern audience may not immediately grasp that the guys who bring back the commissar are creditors, who have been stiffed by Hadji.) As their search leads to the cellar, the plots hints of Clouzot’s Diabolique.
Shahram Golchin and Akbar Zan Janpour in CHESS OF THE WIND. Courtesy of Janus Pictures.
Chess of the Wind takes a cynical view of human nature, reminiscent of Claude Chabrol. Everyone acts out of the most venal self-interest. There is forgery, destruction of documents, murder and cover-up. Even the family physician and the police official may have their own scams going. The last twenty minutes is Shakespearean – every sinner gets his or her due.
It’s hard to imagine what offended the Iranian authorities the most – the immoral scheming, the female agency, or a startling moment of woman-on-woman intimacy.
The darkness of the story is mirrored by brooding music and a dark visual palette. The darkness of the house and its inhabitants is contrasted by a Greek Chorus of gossiping washerwomen outside in the bright light. Director Mohammad Reza Aslanisaid that the look of Chess of the Wind was inspired by the paintings of Vermeer and de La Tour.
Shohreh Aghdashloo in CHESS OF THE WIND. Courtesy of Janus Pictures.
It’s hard to fathom, but Chess of the Wind, with its astonishing originality and quality, was the first film directed and written by Mohammad Reza Aslani. Aslani was a poet, who made this film at age 33. He devoted his career to a literary magazine, and his only other feature film came 30 years later.
The performances are uniformly excellent, led by the internationally acclaimed Fakhri Khorvash, who plays the central character of Agdhas.
Shohreh Aghdashloo in CHESS OF THE WIND. Courtesy of Janus Pictures.
Chess of the Wind was debut film for actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who plays the maid. She left Iran after the Revolution and built a career in Hollywood, amassing 91 screen credits. Aghdashloo was nominated for the Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in House of Sand and Fog.
Chess of the Wind is now streaming on Criterion (included), Amazon and AppleTV. Here’s the trailer, courtesy of Film Forum.
Photo caption: Greta Lee and Willem Dafoe in LATE FAME. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
In the character-driven gem Late Fame, Willem Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, a Greenwich Village poet of the late 1970s, whose work is rediscovered by a band of twenty-something would-be literati. His moment of modest fame long-vanished, Ed has been working as a postal clerk for 37 years, and his fellow dive bar patrons don’t even know about his published work.
Ed is tracked down and accosted by the determined young man Wilson Myers (Edmund Donovan), who has learned that Ed, whose work Myers worships, is still extant. Myers invites Ed to meet his circle of friends, who see themselves as a new wave of artists – and, crucially – one that will be written about in the future like the Algonquin Roundtable or the Beat Poets. They even brand themselves as the Enthusiasm Society. In fact, although they insist that they are poets, playwrights, essayists and the like, they are posers, sheltered from the real world by their rich parents.
Ed, baffled and initially made uncomfortable by the adulation, finds that being exalted isn’t so bad. It’s been long time since he’s been around people who like poetry, and he enjoys encouraging the youngsters. Of course, Ed comes from a time and place before it was even imaginable that loft living would become fashionable, so he is a fish out of water with the youngsters.
It doesn’t take long for Ed to be introduced to the Enthusiasm Society’s muse and sexy den mother, the fortyish actress Gloria (Greta Lee). Gloria has a need to control her environment, so she has utterly enchanted “her boys”, who are under her spell as was Odysseus with Calypso’s. It’s inevitable that she will turn her charms on Ed.
The Enthusiasm Society rails against influencers and clickbait, but, of course, they are also all about bringing attention to themselves. What Ed doesn’t figure out initially is the source of their ambition. When Ed was their age, he was driven to create art; in contrast, they are driven to be recognized as artistes (whether or not they create any art). They even introduce Ed to an agent who can make him money – but not for his poetry.
Late Fame is a portrait of a man who is comfortable in his own skin. If Ed was ever disappointed that he didn’t become rich and famous, he has long left any bitterness behind him. But Ed may never have been ambitious. He once created art, and he’s proud of it, but he’s content to be who he is. He has his integrity. Will Gloria and his new admirers tempt him away from his equanimity and fulfillment?
Willem Dafoe in LATE FAME. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Willem Dafoe, one of our greatest screen actors, delivers another tour de force. Dafoe takes Ed through his suspicion, confusion, amusement, re-awakened ego, yearning and basic decency.
Greta Lee gets to play a complex character who masks her own insecurity with flamboyance. Gloria is one of those many very talented actors who is not likely to ever star, or even earn a living from her acting. Unlike Ed, who doesn’t need acclaim or approval, Gloria fills an emotional need with her own pose and with her domination of the “boys”. Lee, who can sing, also pulls off a cabaret performance.
Donovan is very good as the intensely earnest Myers, a seemingly ridiculous fanboy with a much darker side.
Writer Samy Burch, Oscar-nominated for her May December original screenplay. based this script on on the century-old novel by Arthur Schnitzel. Both Late Fame and May December reveal Burch to be a master of vivid character portraits.
Director Kent Jones (Hitchcock/Truffaut) delivers verisimilitude with the various Manhattan settings – the bohemian, the gritty and the opulent.
Late Fame opens August 21 in Bay Area theaters, including the Smith Rafael Film Center.
