Drama

Pieces of a Woman

  • Title: Pieces of a Woman
  • IMDb: link

Pieces of a Woman movie reviewPieces of a Woman offers impressive performances by Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf as a couple who lose their baby during a lengthy home birth that kicks off the movie. The extended sequence, like the rest of the film, is too long while putting the performances of its actors over any narrative or plot.

Adapting their own play, director Kornél Mundruczó and writer Kata Wéber attempt to sell us on the situation rather than the underdeveloped characters with the idea that we should feel for the couple regardless of any of their other actions. While it is interesting to see the actors hit their marks, Pieces of a Woman works more as an acting exercise than a film.

The film viscerally explores how both characters deal with their loss. In so doing, it produces several strong individual scenes which are loosely tied together by a lot downtime as the film meanders absentmindedly to the next big moment. While Kirby’s character shuts down, LaBeouf and Ellen Burstyn look for someone to blame starting with the midwife (Molly Parker) who was unable to keep their child alive while waiting for EMTs to arrive.

Pieces of a Woman Read More »

The Truth

  • Title: La vérité (The Truth)
  • IMDb: link

The Truth movie reviewMothers and daughters. La vérité, or The Truth, is your basic wacky family tale involving Lumir (Juliette Binoche), her English-speaking husband (Ethan Hawke), and their daughter (Manon Clavel) visiting her famous mother (Catherine Deneuve) who has just released an autobiography and is now working on an avant-garde sci-fi film (which coincidentally also deals with the relationship between a mother and daughter).

The cast elevates what is otherwise a rather straightforward film from Hirokazu Koreeda about the little moments between family members, the struggles of an actor, familial disapproval, the burdens of living with a self-absorbed celebrity, and the scars of memory. Deneuve is obviously enjoying herself as the over-the-top Fabienne Dangeville and the supporting cast forced to put up with her is solid. So too is the unexpected relationship with her co-star Clémentine Grenier which, along with the publication of a book that plays fast and loose with the truth, forces both confrontation and reconciliation between mother and daughter.

The Truth Read More »

Promising Young Woman

  • Title: Promising Young Woman
  • IMDb: link

Promising Young Woman movie reviewReferring to Promising Young Woman as revenge porn may be apt, but it’s also doing writer/director Emerald Fennell‘s devilish film a disservice. Mixing revenge, genuine dramatic underpinnings, and a dark sense of humor, the story twists and turns to squealish delight. Once promising medical student Cassie (Carey Mulligan) now lives with her parents and serves coffee at a small café. And in her spare time she targets men who take advantage of women in compromising positions.

Fennell is careful early on not to show us too much of Cassie’s tactics after she’s sprung her trap, allowing our imaginations to fill in the blanks about what this woman is up to as well about the reasons driving her behavior. The later is hinted at as the script drops breadcrumbs before confirming the events which led to Cassie leaving school. Cassie’s more general attacks become focused as she targets those connected to medical school (Adam Brody, Alison Brie, Connie Britton, and Alfred Molina). However, her plans are complicated by her first relationship in years and a boyfriend (Bo Burnham) who causes her to question the dark turns her life has taken.

Promising Young Woman Read More »

Sound of Metal

  • Title: Sound of Metal
  • IMDb: link

Sound of Metal movie reviewRiz Ahmed stars as one-half of a heavy metal band whose life is turned upside down when the drummer starts to lose his hearing. A recovering heroin addict, Ruben (Ahmed) agrees to go to an insular community for deaf recovering addicts to appease girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) while still refusing to come to terms with what has happened to him.

The film from co-writer/director Darius Marder is one on personal struggle, loss, acceptance, and transformation as Ruben struggles both in finding a new life and his refusal to let go of what he had prior to his hearing loss. Even discounting the imparement, Ruben practices selective hearing in what doctors and others tell him both about the state of his hearing and about the limited help he might receive from expensive cochlear implants.

Although much of it takes place with a couple of montages, we do witness Ruben’s role from outsider to productive member of the deaf community over the course of the film. But despite the help Joe (Paul Raci) and others give to Ruben, the drummer can’t let go of returning to life on the road with Lou.

Sound of Metal Read More »

News of the World

  • Title: News of the World
  • IMDb: link

News of the World movie reviewThe idea of a man travelling from town to town to read newspapers may seem quaint in today’s information age, but the collaboration between Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks offers a classic low-key western that is the dramatic equal to their previous collaboration, Captain Phillips. It may not be The Searchers, but Greengrass offers a wide-open canvas for Hanks to provide one of his better performances in recent years.

Traveling from town to town, reading his collection of recent newspapers, Captain Kidd (Hanks) comes across a lynched soldier and a young girl (Helena Zengel) who, as one character succulently put it, has been orphaned twice. Raised by the Kiowa people who killed her family, only to see the tribe wiped out by Union soldiers, Johanna’s only living relatives live far south towards the home Captain Kidd has avoided since the end of the Civil War.

The set-up is fairly simple, the reluctant Kidd decides to deliver the wild girl no one else seems to be able to control, home. On the road, the pair encounter various obstacles while learning a bit about each other, themselves, and where they belong.

News of the World Read More »