![]() That's how an artist begins her work: sketching out the outline and making preliminary judgements about what goes where. Portrait of a Lady on Fire opens with the simple image of a hand drawing charcoal lines across a blank piece of paper. The movie is as moody and deliberate as its protagonist, owing less to a straightforward thriller like Taken and more to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a journey into the underworld on faith alone, in which love is tested, harsh truths are revealed, and heartbreak is inevitable Neon So begins director Michael Sarnoski's film Pig, which spins a meditative, emotional tale of companionship and acceptance of loss around a subdued performance from Cage the likes of which haven't been seen in a very long time. One evening, the man's pig is stolen by a violent gang, and he vows to do everything he can to bring her back. He talks to his pig, he cooks meals for his pig, and he forages with his pig for truffles, the rare, delicious subterranean mushrooms he sells to a prickly upstart truffle distributor (Alex Wolff) who pulls up onto his property in his yellow Camaro once a week. In a small cabin, somewhere in the austere wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, lives a shaggy-haired monosyllabic man ( Nicolas Cage) and his smush-faced, red-furred truffle hunter pig (Brandy, understudy Cora). ![]() This coming-of-age story is incredibly well acted: Feldstein and Dever land every punchline even as they convey the strains of a meaningful female friendship, and it's almost unfair to single out a supporting performance because they are all perfect gems, but if you're twisting our arm, we'll pick one: Billie Lourd as a druggie, almost magical rich kid, is brilliant. Olivia Wilde's directorial debut is the raucously hilarious story of two high achieving high school seniors, Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), who have spent the past four years of their lives studying to maximize their chances of getting into their preferred prestigious Ivy League colleges only to find out a bunch of the popular kids are also going to really good schools. A lot of comedies in the interim have come close-see, for instance, 2018's Blockers-but none has felt like a true heir. But the arrival of a new nun, Sister Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), throws a wrench into Benedetta's relationship with the Lord, the two consummating their forbidden affection, igniting the ire of the Abbess (Charlotte Rampling), and devising a scheme to take over the convent itself.Įver since Superbad came out in 2007, there were calls for a female version of the Apatovian classic. When novice Benedetta (Virginia Efira) joins a convent in 17th century Italy, she begins having visions of Jesus looking like something off the cover of a romance novel, striding towards her across golden fields and galloping on horseback to save her from ruffians. Brown's book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (which itself is based on actual facts), is none of those things, a shocking, sexy, hilarious film that is hysterical in every sense of the word. "French lesbian nun historical drama" sounds like a joke, or like the typical sort of trashy European film festival offering that ultimately ends up being morbid and depressing, but Paul Verhoeven's Benedetta, based loosely on Judith C. When Jane reaches out to a smarmy HR person, played by Succession 's Matthew Macfadyen, she quickly realizes that speaking out is futile. Instead, it is about the systems in place that have allowed his behavior to go on for so long. But this is not a story about triumph over the evil that men like Weinstein perpetrate. A meeting with an actress extends late into the night. ![]() ![]() A new, very pretty woman arrives from Idaho with no experience and is put up in a fancy hotel. Jane's unseen boss is quite evidently a stand-in for Harvey Weinstein, and over the course of her otherwise monotonous day, Jane starts to realize something is amiss. But director Kitty Green has made a silent scream of a film, which is so quietly unsettling it becomes hard to shake. A young woman (played by Ozark 's Julia Garner)-whose name is apparently Jane, although it's never said in the movie-goes to work at the office of a high-powered Hollywood executive before the crack of dawn and heads home long after the sun has set. ![]()
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