Opening for a limited one-week run, we have Maestro, actor-director Bradley Cooper’s second feature film, after his assured, award-winning feature debut, A Star is Born. Maestro, too, is predicted to pick up some awards love, with potential Academy Award nominations in the Best Picture, Actress, Actor, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Production Design, and Sound categories. And deservedly so. While I think other films could edge it out and win the awards, Maestro is a film that reminds us just how powerful an art cinema can be, and I’d urge not just any keen followers of the Oscars race but all cinema lovers, to grab this brief chance to see Maestro, with its gorgeous sound and music and beautiful images, on the big screen before it heads to a streaming platform. Biopics often turn out to be mediocre films, bound by certain expectations for how a real life person should be portrayed or for how a life story should be told, hamstringing creative filmmaking choices, but Cooper here uses the all the powerful tools of cinema at his disposal in an inventive and often exhilarating approach to the biopic. While still encompassing a clear sense of the sweeping tale of the life and love of Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) and his wife Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), Cooper creatively uses elements like intermittent black and white cinematography, varying aspect ratios, dreamlike fantasy sequences, and playful, skipping chronology to capture not just the staid narrative beats of these lives but the more abstract--and just as vital--emotional textures and tones of what it means to be human. The final result is a wonderful portrait of a brilliant, complicated man, and his equally fascinating, complicated wife, a rich experience that does not pretend to contain the Bernsteins, but rather to give us a taste of their vibrant complexity. We also have two special events this week: the delightful modern classic, Elf, our Kid Pickford selection, and a preview screening of the film that has everyone talking this year, Poor Things.
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Elf never fails to charm my socks off on every re-watch, and it’s a fixture in our house every Christmas. There’s a pure, sincere joy at the heart of Elf that I adore. It’s a film that, as a comedy, could have easily been cloying or mean-spirited or self-satisfied or snide or cynical, but it isn’t ever any of those things. It has a joyful innocence about it, personified beautifully and irrepressibly in Will Ferrell’s characterization of Buddy the Elf, a character whose big-hearted love, genuine belief in the goodness of others, and open-eyed wonder at the marvels of the world around him, irresistibly draw us in, and the laughs throughout the film are, thus, the warmest, jolliest kind. Join us on Sat., Dec. 16, 1:30; Sun., Dec. 17, 10 am; or Wed., Dec. 20, 10 am. Tickets are just $6. |
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Finally, I’ll have more to say about this next week, when it opens for its full run, but for those who’d like to be among the first to see one of the most entertaining, audacious, and critically acclaimed films of the year, we have a special preview screening of Poor Things. Poor Things is the newest film from the madly inventive brain of Yorgos Lanthimos, the same director who brought us Dogtooth, The Lobster, and the Pickford hit, The Favourite. And much like those wildly unique earlier films, there’s really nothing else out there like Poor Things, a sort-of satiric steampunk fairytale and reimagining of the Frankenstein story. Here, Willem Dafoe plays the Dr. Frankenstein figure and Emma Stone plays his creature: a suicide victim reanimated and implanted with the brain of a fetus, a creature who becomes the woman Bella and to whom life and the world present a series of adventures and self-discoveries. It’s fantastically deranged, it’s exhilarating, it’s hilarious, and Emma Stone, in particular, gives the performance of a lifetime. If you know anything about the previous Lanthimos work, you know that Poor Things is not a film that will be for everyone, but for those up for the journey, it will, unquestionably, be an unforgettable experience. See you at the movies, friends! Melissa |
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