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For both fans and aspiring artists, music has always served as an escape from and a way to express feelings about life experiences. In the musical drama “Patti Cakes,” Geremy Jasper tells a gritty blue-collar Cinderella story about one girl’s relationship with rapping and how it frees her from a dysfunctional life.
While social media outlets are the smartphone era’s most immediate form of connection, they have also become a global addiction with the power to cause serious mental health issues. In the satirical “Ingrid Goes West,” actors Aubrey Plaza and Elizabeth Olsen tell a cautionary tale about loneliness, delusion and how personal technology has rewritten our definition of love.
In the final chapter of his American West trilogy, writer Taylor Sheridan uses a Native American reservation as the setting for a sinister crime thriller that’s aware of just how Darwinian life can be, particularly for the marginalized.
In the drama “Personal Shopper,” director Olivier Assayas reunites with Kristen Stewart to take us through one woman’s time spent grappling with life’s unanswerable questions. Is there an afterlife? Do our loved ones ever leave us? Can we truly move on? These questions haunt all of us. Deeply thought-provoking and hard to classify, this eccentrically told picture uses its titular profession to examine how even what we can’t or don’t see can leave their marks forever.
Sometimes, it takes an outside perspective to re-evaluate the possibilities of storytelling. Last year, in Japan, Makoto Shinkai’s anime film “Your Name” surpassed the high bar set by 2002’s global smash “Spirited Away” to become the country’s biggest hit of 2016, and the highest-grossing anime film worldwide. A coming-of-age drama that utilizes body swapping to comment on purpose, serendipity and interconnectedness; “Your Name” knows how to tell a seemingly familiar story like you’ve never seen it before.
In the French-language horror film “Raw,” writer-director Julia Ducournau uses the taboo desires of cannibalism to comment on sexuality, becoming a woman and the balance of freedom versus control. And what better place to explore this concept than the first year of college, when freshmen are finally away from their parents and free to see what they can get away with?
Human beings are inherent explorers and risk takers. But, in the science fiction/horror film “Life,” that need to look for and want more comes at a disturbing price. With an ensemble cast led by Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds, “Life” isn’t afraid to go down grisly avenues to tell us to be careful what we wish for, as it uses the hybrid genre’s classic themes to craft a story that isn’t derivative in its execution.
When Asghar Farhadi’s “The Salesman” won the Academy Award for best foreign language film at the 2017 Oscars ceremony, five years after his first win for “A Separation,” the man himself was noticeably absent. While some may have seen the Iranian Farhadi’s win as a message of political defiance in Trump-era America, the effect of the travel ban on the film’s relationship to our domestic market is impossible to ignore.. Farhadi uses the universal medium of film to consider the intimate intensity of domestic life.
In 2016, two countries debuted two different films about interracial couples. The first, “Loving,” tells the story of Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, whose love paved the way for legalizing interracial marriages in America. Like “Loving,” the second film, Amma Asante’s “A United Kingdom,” now playing stateside, focuses on the bond between two progressive people of different races growing up in times where their peers’ mindsets haven’t caught up. But “A United Kingdom” expands on these timely themes, demonstrating how love always packs more punch than hatred ever could.
“Vagina.” An incredibly intimate (and often taboo) part of the body. Long overdue for dignity and respect in a society that deems the word foul, stinting female sexual liberty while encouraging its violation. Last weekend, the Rice Women’s Resource Center continued its annual performance of “The Vagina Monologues”, to riveting effect.
In an era of increased sexual consent awareness and trigger warnings, Paul Verhoeven has produced a film that walks a fine line between nonconventional empowerment and graphic exploitation in its storytelling. Now that the French-language film “Elle” has opened stateside, it’s time to see if American audiences will either try out or reject such an in-your-face, sensitivity-ignorant production. Anchored by a magnificent performance from Isabelle Huppert, “Elle,” French for “her,” is an unfathomably messed up yet fascinating take on what strong independent 21st century women can go through.
In coming-of-age films, the teenage protagonists usually find themselves straddling the abyss, one foot firmly in the ignorant bliss of childhood and the other foot in the unfamiliar confusion of the adult world. J.A. Bayona’s “A Monster Calls” differs in that its barely teenage protagonist has been prematurely foisted into the adult world. But, because of the overwhelmingly mature nature of what he has experienced, he cannot return to the world of children. Though it has elements of fantasy, “A Monster Calls” isn’t afraid to look into the darkness that can suddenly plague any child’s life and acknowledge that, even for young people, life can become complicated.
There are days that permanently alter the course of history. Nov. 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was brutally assassinated, was one of them. It was an older generation’s 9/11, the kind of infamy where people remember where they were when they first heard about it. Kennedy’s violent demise left behind a grieving nation and a 34-year-old widow with two young children. In a spectacular English-language cinematic debut, Chilean director Pablo Larrain, and Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Portman focus on that grieving widow, first lady Jackie Kennedy, in the aftermath of such a painful cultural trauma.
A legend of Latin American literature, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was also a fierce political activist. Long before his mystery-shrouded death in 1973, his ideals often clashed with those of his government, at one time forcing him into exile. In the “anti-biopic” “Neruda,” writer and director Pablo Larrain combines the facts of one such clash with the fiction of a detective story, creating an unconventional cat-and-mouse game about the stories we create for ourselves.
In the summer of 2011, audiences prepared to say their final goodbyes to Harry Potter, the cultural phenomenon that shaped a generation’s values. But, in today’s reboot-driven cinema-scape, we know that franchises are never finished for good. Five years after the groundbreaking original franchise’s final chapter, fans get to return to that wondrously magical world in the spinoff prequel “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.” Introducing an entirely new cast of characters that expands one of the most captivating universes ever conceived. The film, penned by J.K. Rowling herself, brings back the imagination-igniting spirit of her original stories, copositioning it with disturbingly relevant themes of identity repression and fear of the unknown.
Apparently, two things don’t seem to be cool or make money in today’s Hollywood: originality and musicals. In our current IMAX 3-D, superhero-centric, reboot-everything world, those qualities feel like a bittersweet memory from a golden past. Yet, somehow, an original musical with star power that feels akin to classic Hollywood has landed, and it has become this season’s most hotly anticipated film. Starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in their third creative collaboration, “La La Land,” from “Whiplash” writer and director Damien Chazelle, is cinematic pixie dust with toe-tapping, heart-singing magic at its fingertips.
