Offering a very natural feel of a father/daughter dynamic, writer/director Charlotte Wells‘ Aftersun offers a moment of time between Calum (Paul Mescal) and Sophie (Frankie Corio) on a vacation in Turkey which occurred on her 11th birthday. Intercutting between filmed scenes and those from the father’s camcorder, a large amount of the movie feels like life playing out naturally making me curious as to how much of smaller moments were scripted.
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Based on the shorts of the same name, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a weird, and heartwarming, little film about a talking shell named Marcel (Jenny Slate) who has been separated from the rest of his family other than his grandmother (Isabella Rossellini). A recently separated documentarian (Dean Fleischer-Camp), who moves into the Airbnb where Marcel lives, begins filming Marcel and his inventiveness around the house which will eventually garner attention from YouTube viewers and even 60 Minutes.
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More than 2,000 years ago Aesop warned us: “Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true!” That idea is central to Pleasure, the stark look at the porn industry through a wide-eyed 19 year-old Swedish teen (Sofia Kappel) who moves to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a star. While she initially sets boundaries, it doesn’t take long for Bella Cherry to begin making compromises while desperately chasing fame hoping to earn a treasured spot on the most exclusive agency in town.
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Centered around Mamie Till (Danielle Deadwyler), Till examines the prelude and aftereffects of the murder of 14 year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi after being accused of flirting with a white woman (Haley Bennett) in her parents’ store.
Director Chinonye Chukwu‘s gut-wrenching film is broken into two-halves, the first 4o minutes gives us the dark foreboding leading to events which take place off-screen after Emmett is dragged from his relatives’ home in the dark of night by armed men. The second-half of the film, which begins with the return of Emmett’s body to Chicago, would spur Mamie into action struggling to get justice for her son in Mississipi, and, failing that, starting the second-half of her life as an educator and activist in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Steven Spielberg‘s semi-autobiographical Hollywood version of his childhood ends on a high note with one of the best scenes of the year (which I certainly won’t spoil for you here). The journey to that moment takes a little longer than it should and feels a bit like a greatest hits album rather than one coherent narrative, jumping around to important moments in the life of Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle & Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) which would mold him into the man and filmmaker he would become.
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