November marks the arrival in earnest of 2023 art/indie movies with major Oscar ambitions. Two of the most potent contenders so far this year, director Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla and Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, will be screened in early November as part of their national “platform” releases. Both debuted in late October in New York and Los Angeles, and both started off very well at the box office.
Priscilla
[Watch the trailer. Opens November 3 at Esquire Theatre, Clifton; will likely play in multiplexes as well.]
Priscilla is based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me, about her life with the King of Rock & Roll, whom she met when she was just 14 years old and married seven years later. Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla, and Jacob Elordi is Elvis.
The film has been getting excellent early reviews. Writing for BBC Culture, Nicholas Barber praised its keen sensitivity to its subject. “A year on from Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Presley biopic, here’s the same story again from the perspective of Elvis’ wife. … It’s written and directed by Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette), a specialist in capturing the ennui of wealthy people in luxurious surroundings. Her approach could hardly be in starker contrast with Luhrmann’s. Priscilla is a subdued domestic drama, all soft lighting and soft voices, with no more than a glimpse of Elvis’ concerts or a note of his records—and, mercifully, no sign at all of Tom Hanks’ Colonel Tom Parker.”
The Holdovers
[Watch the trailer. Opens November 10 at Mariemont Theatre; will likely play in multiplexes as well.]
The highly anticipated The Holdovers is directed by Alexander Payne, whose track record includes such wonderful character studies—sometimes subtly bittersweet, sometimes uproariously funny—as Sideways, Nebraska, About Schmidt, and The Descendants.
Here he’s again working with the superb actor Paul Giamatti, who illuminated Sideways with his ability to be both charmingly funny and bitingly cynical. The actor plays a testy teacher at a New England prep school who spends the Christmas holiday on campus with the “holdover” students—really, one problem student, played by Dominic Sessa—and the head cook, Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Things don’t always go easily for him.
Writing for Chicago’s Reader, Maxwell Rabb said, “The Holdovers is going to make a phenomenal Christmas film. … (Payne’s) newest movie offers an authentically heartwarming story about makeshift families—an undertaking worth appreciating at a time when Hollywood’s heart is elusive and cold.”
Not only has there been strong early praise for Giamatti in The Holdovers (he won an Independent Spirit acting award for his Sideways work), but both Randolph’s and Sessa’s acting have also been singled out for excellence.
Anatomy of a Fall
[Watch the trailer. Playing now at Esquire Theatre and Mariemont Theatre.]
What’s already considered one of the best international/foreign movies of this year, the French Anatomy of a Fall starts its second week at the Mariemont. A suspenseful thriller with greater ramifications, this won the top Palme d’Or prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, a testament to its quality.
Directed and co-written by Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall concerns the mysterious death of Samuel, whose body is found outside his chalet in the snowy Alps. He and his wife Sandra, both writers, have been living there with their 11-year-old son. The cause of death could possibly be a fall, a suicide or a murder. And after a police investigation, the wife (Sandra Hüller) goes on trial for killing him. What follows are many revelations about the relationships within the family; this isn’t your average courtroom drama.
Reviewing for The New York Times, Amy Nicholson says about the mysterious Sandra that “her most confounding trait is, if you believe her testimony, an ability to nap while Samuel spends his last living hour replaying a cover of 50 Cent’s ‘P.I.M.P.’ at a volume so earsplitting the steel drums could have triggered an avalanche. The closest anyone comes to a motive is when Sandra’s inquisitors suggest that she was annoyed by the song’s misogynist lyrics. Her lawyer (Saadia Bentaïeb) counters: ‘It was an instrumental version.’ ”
The Persian Vision
[Watch the trailer. Opens November 3 at Mariemont Theatre and AMC Newport on the Levee and West Chester.]
The drama/comedy is an American film written and directed by a woman of Iranian descent, Maryam Keshavarz, and concerns an Iranian family brought together in New York when the father needs a heart transplant. The family’s daughter, Leila, an aspiring filmmaker played by Layla Mohammadi, has to look for her place within the two cultures while also negotiating family relations. Oh, and it has dance numbers! This won the Audience Award and Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
“In The Persian Version, Keshavarz celebrates the intergenerational connection of mothers and daughters,” writes Los Angeles Times critic Katie Walsh. “Billed as a ‘true story, sort of,’ she crams her life story (at least the major beats) as well as her mother’s into this film, which sometimes feels like two or three movies stitched together. That she manages to deftly juggle multiple timelines spanning two countries, flashbacks, medical emergencies, ironic fourth wall-breaking and a couple of dance breaks is impressive, because despite the breakneck pace, it’s not hard to keep track of everything.”
Special Screenings at the Esquire and Mariemont
A full battery of special screenings are lined up for November, including the 1944 film noir Murder, My Sweet, based on the Raymond Chandler novel Fairwell, My Lovely and starring Dick Powell as the great detective Philip Marlowe. It’s at the Esquire at 5 p.m. November 5 and at the Mariemont 7:30 p.m. November 28. There will be a prize for best period outfit.
And, in a booking coup, director Signe Baumane and animator John Koerner of the new film My Love Affair With Marriage will discuss their work after an Esquire screening at 7 p.m. on November 13. Of this “adult animated musical comedy/drama,” Wikipedia says its story chronicles a “23-year quest for Perfect Love and Lasting Marriage set against a backdrop of historic events in Eastern Europe. Pressured by Mythology Sirens to be the ideal woman and unable to free herself from the biology of her own brain, Zelma finds love and loses it multiple times before discovering who she really is. Told from a female point of view, this is a coming-of-age story of love, gender, marriage, abuse, hopes, fantasies, and ultimately, finding a better place for women in society.” Watch the trailer here.
Of special note is the observance this month of the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The event has haunted our country and all those alive at the time and still with us. The Esquire and Mariemont will each have one screening of two conspiracy-related movies about the event: Oliver Stone’s artfully made, if questionable, JFK (1991, with Kevin Costner as New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison) and the groundbreaking 1967 documentary Rush to Judgment. Made by the great documentarian Emile de Antonio, it’s based on the best-selling 1966 Mark Lane book, Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald. The questions Lane posed have never fully gone away. The Mariemont screens JFK at 7 p.m. November 6 and Rush to Judgment at 7:30 p.m. November 8; the Esquire has JFK at 7 p.m. November 7 and Rush to Judgment at 7:30 p.m. November 16.
Aftersun
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 7:30 p.m. November 27 at the Woodward Theater, Over-the-Rhine.]
The Woodward Theater’s film programmer, Jonny Shenk, has had good experiences booking films that, while not new, never commercially played in Cincinnati when released. A couple of months ago, he booked Emma Seligman’s 2020 Shiva Baby just ahead of that director’s smash Bottoms coming to town. Now the Woodward will show Aftersun, a 2022 film by Scottish director Charlotte Wells in which an 11-year-old girl and her 30-year-old dad go on vacation in Turkey at a time when he’s trying to hide the emotional stress he’s been under. As the dad, Paul Mescal was nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar.
“We’re interested in screening the film because we think it merits the big screen presentation that it didn’t get originally, and because of the calendar tie-in with a new anticipated Paul Mescal film called All of Us Strangers (releasing in December),” Shenk says via email.
Stop Making Sense
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 7:30 p.m. November 13 at the Woodward Theater.]
The venue’s concert-worthy speakers should be put to good use when it presents a restored version of Stop Making Sense to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Talking Heads’ classic concert film. I wrote about the film’s re-release in my column last month.
Black Barbie
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 7 p.m. November 10 and 4 p.m. November 11-12 at the Garfield Theatre, downtown.]
Cincinnati World Cinema is again presenting the documentary by Lagueria Davis that tells the story of an aunt, Buelah Mae Mitchell, who worked for the Mattel toymaking company for 45 years and long wanted it to introduce a Black Barbie doll. It returns to the downtown screen after earlier showings in August and October.
The Stones & Brian Jones
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 6 p.m. November 7 at Speed Art Museum Cinema, Louisville.]
You should definitely visit the Louisville museum’s cinema at some point, where curator Dean Otto brings in about 10 movies a month. Some also come to Cincinnati, true, but others don’t for a variety of reasons; he books fascinating new and restored older films that appeal to cinephiles and presents them in a respectful environment.
The Stones & Brian Jones is the latest music documentary from the quirky British filmmaker Nick Broomfield. While some of his earlier music films like Kurt & Courtney and Biggie & Tupac came off as sensationalistic to many, his Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love was a breakthrough in 2019, touching and poetic. It wove his own story into the relationship that Leonard Cohen and Marrianne Ihlen had on the Greek island of Hydra.
The life and early death of Jones could go either way—the brilliant and musically exploratory Stones member had left the band in June 1969 amid strained relations with the others. About a month later he was found dead at the bottom of his pool. Here’s hoping Broomfield sees in this life some of the same poetry, perhaps tragic poetry, he found in Marianne & Leonard.
Rustin
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 6 p.m. November 10, 3 and 6 p.m. November 11, and 12:30 and 3 p.m. on November 12 at Speed Art Museum.]
Bayard Rustin was an important civil rights leader who was a key figure in the planning of the historic 1963 March on Washington. But he was also maybe too controversial to be highly visible in that movement—he was a gay pacificist and socialist. In the film Rustin from director George C. Wolfe (a Tony-winner director and playwright), Coleman Domingo—himself an Emmy winner for a guest role on HBO’s Euphoria—brings the forgotten leader to life. Also in the cast is Chris Rock as Roy Wilkins, the longtime NAACP leader. This is tentatively coming to Netflix on November 17, but there are sure to be those who want to see an important biopic in the theater.
The Cassandra Cat
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 6 p.m. November 18 and 12:30 p.m. November 19 at Speed Art Museum.]
Here’s a film for lovers of the Czech New Wave, a free-spirited and creatively imaginative, but short-lived, genre that peaked in the Prague Spring of 1968, when the Czechs were able to experience some democratic liberties amid the Cold War. It ended when Russian troops occupied the country, returning Czechoslovakia to its status as an autocratic Iron Curtain country.
Made in 1963, The Cassandra Cat was an early New Wave film but an influential one. Now rediscovered, it tells of a magician and his assistant who bring their magic cat to a Bohemian village, where the cat causes havoc by its ability to use colors to reveal the true nature of people: yellow for the unfaithful, purple for liars, red for lovers. As the Speed Cinema’s notes point out, it was “ahead of its time in experimenting with stylized color and extended political metaphor. The Cassandra Cat is director Vojtêch Jasný’s triumphant excursion into fantasy as a mirror of real-life social divisions and hypocrisies.”
Facebook Comments