Philomena

Movies to See Right Now

by
AMERICAN HUSTLE
AMERICAN HUSTLE

Some of this week’s recommendations are on my Best Movies of 2013. Recommended:

  • American Hustle is the most gloriously entertaining movie of the year – with Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Jeremy Renner at their best.
  • The French drama Blue Is the Warmest Color, with its stunning performance by 19-year-old actress Adèle Exarchopoulos, currently tops my list of Best Movies of 2013 – So Far.
  • The city of Rome dazzles in The Great Beauty, already a favorite for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
  • I really liked and admired the funny, poignant and thought-provoking family portrait Nebraska from Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants).
  • Philomena, with Judi Dench and Steve Coogan is an emotionally satisfying gem.
  • The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is another fine thriller from that franchise, with another amazing performance by Jennifer Lawrence.
  • Go for Sisters has three more great characters in a thriller from indie guru John Sayles.
  • The spare survival tale All Is Lost has a grimly powerful performance by Robert Redford.
  • I also like the wickedly subversive Holiday comedy White Reindeer, which is available streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Sundance Now, GooglePlay and XBOX.

Not So Much

  • I found Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks to be sentimental and predictable.
  • The Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis is about an unlovable loser – and I didn’t love the movie, either.

Movies to See Right Now – Holiday Movie Guide

by

american hustleLook for The Movie Gourmet’s list of this year’s top movies this Tuesday.  Until then, here is my guide to the Holiday movies.

Recommended:

  • American Hustle is the most gloriously entertaining movie of the year – with Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Jeremy Renner at their best.
  • The French drama Blue Is the Warmest Color, with its stunning performance by 19-year-old actress Adèle Exarchopoulos, currently tops my list of Best Movies of 2013 – So Far.
  • The city of Rome dazzles in The Great Beauty, already a favorite for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
  • I really liked and admired the funny, poignant and thought-provoking family portrait Nebraska from Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants).
  • Philomena, with Judi Dench and Steve Coogan is an emotionally satisfying gem.
  • The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is another fine thriller from that franchise, with another amazing performance by Jennifer Lawrence.
  • Go for Sisters has three more great characters in a thriller from indie guru John Sayles.
  • The spare survival tale All Is Lost has a grimly powerful performance by Robert Redford.
  • I also like the wickedly subversive Holiday comedy White Reindeer, which is available streaming on Amazon, iTunes, Sundance Now, GooglePlay and XBOX.

Not So Much

  • I found Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks to be sentimental and predictable.
  • The Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis is about an unlovable loser – and I didn’t love the movie, either.

Movies To See This Week (and a milestone for The Movie Gourmet)

by
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS
INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

There is NO BETTER TIME to go to the movies than THIS WEEKEND.  Of the films opening widely today, I recommend the gloriously entertaining American Hustle, with Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner and Louis C.K. at their best. I haven’t yet seen the other promising movies opening today: the Coen Brother’s Inside Llewyn Davis,  Tom Hanks as Walt Disney in Saving Mr. Banks and Go for Sisters (by my favorite indie writer-director John Sayles). And you can still several of the best movies of the year:

  • The French drama Blue Is the Warmest Color, with its stunning performance by 19-year-old actress Adèle Exarchopoulos, currently tops my list of Best Movies of 2013 – So Far.
  • The city of Rome dazzles in The Great Beauty, already another contender for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
  • I really liked and admired the funny, poignant and thought-provoking family portrait Nebraska from Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants).
  • Philomena, with Judi Dench and Steve Coogan is an emotionally satisfying gem.
  • This weekend, I will write about The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, another fine thriller from that franchise, with another amazing performance by Jennifer Lawrence.

You can still find some of the earlier top 2013 movies in theaters: the flawless true story thriller Captain Phillips; the space thriller Gravity – an amazing achievement by filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón with what may be Sandra Bullock’s finest performance; and 12 Years a Slave, an unsparingly realistic depiction of the horrors of American slavery.

Make this a 2-3 movie weekend!

[Note: Sunday’s We Remember Billy Jack was The Movie Gourmet’s 1000th post.  Thanks to all of you for your support.]

Philomena: an emotionally satisfying gem

by

The title character in Philomena, is an Irish woman who was shipped off to the nuns as a pregnant teen and whose toddler was adopted without her genuine consent.  Now over forty years later, she wants to find what has happened to her son.  Philomena (Judi Dench) is a simple woman, whose deep faith has been unable to resolve her sense of loss.  She enlists a British journalist (Coogan) to help her in the investigation.  The journalist takes them on a journey that finds her answers – and some of those answers are wholly unexpected.

The nuns in the 1950s flashback are cartoonishly nasty, contrasted with their modern counterparts – just as evil but with slickly modern PR skills.  Philomena’s faith enables her victimhood, but then an act of transcendence reveals her to be the most Christian character.

Of course, Dench is always excellent, but Coogan’s performance shows an unexpected range.  His character has just had his high-flying career derailed and has lost the smug confidence that Coogan’s characters usually impart.

Director Stephen Frears (High Fidelity, Dirty Pretty Things, The Queen) has a big success with Philomena, a nice rebound from his most recent efforts (Tamara Drewe, Lay the Favorite).   Philomena is an emotionally satisfying success – the unexpected gem of Fall 2013.

Mill Valley Film Fest upcoming

by
THE PAST

Here’s a heads up for San Francisco Bay Area (and especially Marin) movie fans.  The Mill Valley Film Festival usually offers an early peek at some prestige fall releases, and that is definitely the case this October.

I think the three most promising films are:

  • The Past: The Artist’s Berenice Bejo won Best Actress at Cannes as a Parisian woman divorcing her Iranian husband in Paris amid an increasingly messy family life.  By the director of Oscar-winning A Separation.
  • All Is Lost with Robert Redford as a man battling impossible odds when something goes horribly wrong on his trans-ocean solo voyage.
  • the historical slavery epic 12 Years a Slave (but the only screening, with director and star, is already sold out).

Other films with lots of buzz include:

  • Nebraska:  Director Alexander Payne follows his Sideways and The Descendants with a black and white indie.  Bruce Dern won Best Actor at Cannes for portraying an addled Montana grump who thinks he’s won a junk mail sweepstakes.  His son drives him to Omaha to claim the nonexistent prize, stopping to see some relatives and have some road trip adventures along the way.   There’s also some buzz about the performance of June Squibb (who acted in Payne’s About Schmidt) as the old man’s wife.
  • Philomena:  Judi Dench stars as an Irish woman seeking the son she was forced to give up for adoption.  Co-stars Steve Coogan in a non-ironic role.
  • Blue is the Warmest Color:  This film, which many critics thought was way too long, nevertheless won the top prize at Cannes. Actresses Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux (Farewell My Queen, Midnight in Paris) are reportedly spectacular in this three-hour love story.  One of the explicit sex scenes takes over twenty minutes (TWENTY MINUTES!).
  • The Rocket:  A boy takes his family across war-scarred Laos to enter a rocket contest.  It looks like the kind of movie that I usually don’t like, but it won major awards at the Berlin and Tribeca film fests.

Eventually, I’ll have descriptions and trailers for all these films on my Movies I’m Looking Forward To.  Scroll down to “Later Fall – Prestige Season”.   The Mill Valley Film Festival will run October 3-13  at the Rafael in San Rafael, the Sequoia in Mill Valley and three other Marin venues.