Perched on the edge of a bridge, clad in a Victorian mazarine dress, Emma Stone takes a desperate plunge into the River Thames, setting the stage for Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things. The most recent picture from the distinguished auteur of the Greek Weird Wave transcends weird, embracing provocative entertainment. A Golden Lion-winner at the Venice Film Festival, this ceaselessly unfurling, risqué sci-fi drama, a cinematic adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, marks a bold departure for Lanthimos.
Following the dramatic descent, the screen transitions to black-and-white, unveiling Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a peculiarly face-mutilated surgeon lecturing a class. Taking his devoted student Max McCandles (Ramy Youseff) under his wing, the doctor escorts him to partake in a pivotal experiment within a Frankenstein-like dwelling teeming with mutated entities — duck-headed dogs, bird-goats, and chickens sporting bulldog heads. Among them dwells the protagonist, Vera Baxter (Emma Stone), a mentally-challenged young woman.
Following the dramatic descent, the screen transitions to black-and-white, unveiling Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a peculiarly face-mutilated surgeon lecturing a class. Taking his devoted student Max McCandles (Ramy Youseff) under his wing, the doctor escorts him to partake in a pivotal experiment within a Frankenstein-like dwelling teeming with mutated entities — duck-headed dogs, bird-goats, and chickens sporting bulldog heads. Among them dwells the protagonist, Vera Baxter (Emma Stone), a mentally-challenged young woman.
- 11/27/2023
- by Levan Tskhovrebadze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Marguerite Duras was a renaissance woman. An author, playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker, her life and work spanned the 20th century and yet she is often forgotten by cinephiles, or at least remains something of a footnote, mainly known for her screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour and her novel The Lover, which was made into a film in 1992. But she also made almost 20 films, two of which are finally getting a well-deserved Criterion release, India Song (1975) and Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977) While separated by a few years, the films could be considered companion pieces. Both look at the lives of women trapped in loveless marriages, who look to the outside for intellectual and physical stimulation. Both could be considered about female jouissance, or...
[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...
[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...
- 2/20/2023
- Screen Anarchy
The Criterion Collection has unveiled its February disc offerings and, fittingly, one can celebrate Valentine’s Day with one of the best trilogies on love and loss: Krzysztof Kieślowski’s newly restored Three Colors Trilogy, now available in 4K. Also joining the 4K club is Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused.
Elsewhere in the lineup is Marguerite Duras’ India Song, paired with the lesser-seen Baxter, Vera Baxter, Robert Townsend’s debut feature Hollywood Shuffle, and, also fitting for Valentine’s Day, Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.
Find artwork below and further details here:
The post The Criterion Collection’s February 2023 Lineup: Three Colors and Dazed and Confused on 4K & More first appeared on The Film Stage.
Elsewhere in the lineup is Marguerite Duras’ India Song, paired with the lesser-seen Baxter, Vera Baxter, Robert Townsend’s debut feature Hollywood Shuffle, and, also fitting for Valentine’s Day, Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.
Find artwork below and further details here:
The post The Criterion Collection’s February 2023 Lineup: Three Colors and Dazed and Confused on 4K & More first appeared on The Film Stage.
- 11/15/2022
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
Look into the series Criterion Channel have programmed for August and this lineup is revealed as (in scientific terms) quite something. “Hollywood Chinese” proves an especially deep bench, spanning “cinema’s first hundred years to explore the ways in which the Chinese people have been imagined in American feature films” and bringing with it the likes of Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly, Cimino’s Year of the Dragon, Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, and Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet—among 20-or-so others. A three-film Marguerite Duras series brings one of the greatest films ever (India Song) and two lesser-screened experiments; films featuring Yaphet Kotto include Blue Collar, Across 110th Street, and Midnight Run; and lest we ignore a Myrna Loy retro that goes no later than 1949.
Criterion editions include The Asphalt Jungle, Husbands, Rouge, and Sweet Smell of Success; streaming premieres for Loznitsa’s Donbass, Béla Tarr’s watershed Damnation, and...
Criterion editions include The Asphalt Jungle, Husbands, Rouge, and Sweet Smell of Success; streaming premieres for Loznitsa’s Donbass, Béla Tarr’s watershed Damnation, and...
- 7/25/2022
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
No two ways about it: April’s a great month for the Criterion Channel, which (among other things; more in a second) adds two recent favorites. We’re thrilled at the SVOD premiere of Hamaguchi’s entrancing Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, our #3 of 2021, and Bruno Dumont’s lacerating France, featuring Léa Seydoux’s finest performance yet.
Ethan Hawke’s Adventures in Moviegoing runs the gamut from Eagle Pennell’s Last Night at the Alamo to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, while a 14-film John Ford retro (mostly) skips westerns altogether. And no notes on the Delphine Seyrig retro—multiple by Akerman, Ulrike Ottinger, Duras, a smattering of Buñuel, and Seyrig’s own film Be Pretty and Shut Up! That of all things might be the crown jewl.
See the full list of April titles below and more on the Criterion Channel.
—
3 Bad Men, John Ford, 1926
Aar paar, Guru Dutt,...
Ethan Hawke’s Adventures in Moviegoing runs the gamut from Eagle Pennell’s Last Night at the Alamo to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, while a 14-film John Ford retro (mostly) skips westerns altogether. And no notes on the Delphine Seyrig retro—multiple by Akerman, Ulrike Ottinger, Duras, a smattering of Buñuel, and Seyrig’s own film Be Pretty and Shut Up! That of all things might be the crown jewl.
See the full list of April titles below and more on the Criterion Channel.
—
3 Bad Men, John Ford, 1926
Aar paar, Guru Dutt,...
- 3/25/2022
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
Mubi's series Hypnotic Incantations: A Marguerite Duras Focus is showing September - October, 2020 in the United Kingdom and United States.In 1955, Jacques Rivette famously wrote that Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy “opens a breach… that all cinema, on pain of death, must pass through.” For Rivette and many others, the film heralded nothing less than the arrival of a modern cinema—and not five years later, Alain Resnais, with a screenplay from Marguerite Duras, took up this challenge with Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Following the film’s seismic premiere, Eric Rohmer declared it either “the most important film since the war” or “the first modern film of sound cinema,” its overture of tangled, ash-covered limbs even echoing the embalmed couple Ingrid Bergman turns away from in Voyage to Italy’s memorable Pompeii-set passage. With her seminal script, Duras could thus claim to have widened the gap opened by Rossellini,...
- 9/4/2020
- MUBI
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Marguerite Duras's India Song (1975) is now showing April 4 - May 3, 2020 in the United States.The quintessential Marguerite Duras heroine suffers inwardly as the outside world shakes, its distant echoes gently, but inexhaustibly knocking at her front door. This woman appears in Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977), solemnly recounting the sallow conditions of her marriage as chirpy luau-inflected music from a neighboring party invades the room; she is in Nathalie Granger (1972), a film about women whose days are spent in relative silence doing yard work and staring out windows. News of external violence plays on the radio, and the appearance of a bumbling salesman unsettles the drudgery of their daily lives. The films of Marguerite Duras are adept at generating this particular tension, this conflict between the psychic world of the individual and the external one with its countless, unimaginable problems.
- 4/17/2020
- MUBI
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