And over a holiday season in which black girls will be able to count down, for the first time, to the day a vice president who looks like them takes the oath of office, the greatest gift that Jingle Jangle offers is an empowering world that looks less like invention and more like real life. While Ron Howard’s adaptation showcases those same societal ills, it takes a more personal and less sociological approach. They thought the scene wasn’t real. 8:42 AM PDT 5/27/2012 With his slick sense of style and brash, arrogant swagger, Cash Boykins (Stephen Dorff) feels like a clear nod to MMA fighter Conor McGregor. It went through different distributors. We did it for a program on public television called American Playhouse that lasted all through the ‘90s. It’s not a coincidence that this entrepreneurial family is black, as Talbert dreamt up Jingle Jangle as a musical holiday film that would reflect young audiences who have never seen heroes who look like them in films like Elf, Home Alone, and A Christmas Story. In a desperate state, Camille attends a New Year’s Eve party, gets drunk, passes out, and wakes up in a hospital back in 1985. But Vanguard lacks the spatial coherence and relative physical fidelity of such collaborations, its frantic cuts on action obscuring both the sexagenarian Chan’s diminished pace and the feats of the younger performers. That film has always remained…I don’t want to say popular, but it’s been shown in festivals over the years. By expanding Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” Chopra and screenwriter Tom Cole grant refreshing dimensionality to Connie’s antagonists—both her conservative mother, Katherine (Mary Kay Place), and an alluring but menacing suitor, Arnold Friend (Treat Williams). Let me ask you this, how old are you? Were you at all conscious when making the film about how it was going to be in conversation with other films that portrayed adolescent sexuality that played into rape culture with their aggressive male characters? Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in, Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2019. What kind of world did Connie live in? Different universes completely. Yes. I was the first to use documentary techniques to make a film [set during pregnancy] about a person, rather than a big event. So, suddenly, I’m being revived! When she explains to Charlotte her reluctance to commit herself to another person, comparing her situation to a fossil being collected and placed under glass, Mary starts to come across as a little too self-aware, appearing far removed from either historical veracity or emotional truth. I caught up with Chopra shortly before Smooth Talk began its exclusive virtual engagement at Film at Lincoln Center. The tensions that drive Jingle Jangle’s distractible plot neither make much sense nor feel particularly high-stakes. Heartbroken Frenchwoman flashes back to her 1980s schooldays. Mamaw’s stolidly fixed nature provides the support that the insecure teenage Vance (Owen Asztalos) cannot get from Bev, who’s inattentive and prone to abusive flights of rage. In the real world, poachers largely sell their wares to wealthy Chinese buyers. Lionizing an individual makes it seem a bit too much like she has arrived to save us all, that her struggle is enough. But the film also has something that transcends time in the borderline allegorical centerpiece confrontation between Arnold and Connie. Terms of Use | Director: Nathan Grossman Distributor: Hulu Running Time: 97 min Rating: NR Year: 2020, Enter to Win Blu-rays of The Killing Floor, DVDs of Monstrum, a Jiu Jitsu Digital Code, and More, Our Preview Section Is Your Most Complete Guide for All the Films Coming Your Way Soon, Blu-ray Review: Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends on the Criterion Collection, We’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or subscription fees—so if you like what we do, consider becoming a SLANT patron, or making a PayPal. If we’ve done our job right, it shouldn’t leap out at you. Do you know Vincent Canby, then the critic for The New York Times? The film is an uncanny reflection of the jingoism that Hollywood has been wrapping in glossy spectacle and exporting for decades. Nanau’s unobtrusive camera follows the events as they unfold, which puts the viewer in the anxiety-giving position of television audiences enthralled by the most surreal of breaking-news cycles. Director: Noémie Lvovsky We see her father, Svante, adjusting his life to accommodate her schedule and ambitions—waking up early to drive her to summits like she’s on a traveling sports team—and her mother, Malena, packing her lunch and crying with pride at the important woman her daughter, at 16, has already become. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. But the scene that manages the most awe is a quieter nighttime sequence in which three generations of inventors—grandfather, mother, and young daughter—collaborate side by side as they rebuild a broken toy. Tom [Cole], my husband who wrote the script, and I just wanted to create something believable about this girl. The film ultimately puts her on a pedestal as much as her younger lover does, and Anning’s symbolic grappling with societal forces ends up keeping the audience at a similar distance. She also reviewed Joyce at 34 and said that I shouldn’t have been allowed to make the film because, clearly, I was able to afford a nice apartment. Ammonite’s class dynamic is established early on, as close attention is paid to the details of Mary’s manual labor, and we see her stubbornly refuse to accept money from a wealthier acquaintance, Elizabeth Philpot (Fiona Shaw), with whom she appears to have some kind of fraught emotional history. Chopra discusses the joys of reappraisal, and why she doubts John Hughes could believe in the universes he created on screen. I didn’t even think about what would happen after I made it. Cast: Noémie Lvovsky, Samir Guesmi, Judith Chemla, India Hair, Julia Faure, Yolande Moreau, Michel Vuillermoz, Denis Podalydès, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Vincent Lacoste, Mathieu Amalric Director: Noémie Lvovsky Screenwriter: Maud Ameline, Noémie Lvovsky, Pierre-Olivier Mattei, Florence Seyvos Running Time: 110 min Rating: NR Year: 2012 Buy: Video, Review: They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain, Review: Sound of Metal Is a Tender, Singular Portrait of Addiction, Review: Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel on Criterion Blu-ray, Review: On a Magical Night’s Dalliance with Screwball Humor Is Featherweight. We get, for example, extended footage of Thunberg’s much-publicized meeting with Emmanuel Macron. Fareeda is working to protect elephants from poachers—mostly, it seems, via social media. With the wisdom of hindsight, she struggles to rewrite history, resisting classmate Eric’s advances to save her adult self from future heartbreak, and forcing her mother to address some undetected health problems. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about the culture of his Kentucky Appalachian family, many of whom moved to Ohio but never quite adjusted to life there. Cast: Gabriel Basso, Glenn Close, Amy Adams, Haley Bennett, Freida Pinto, Bo Hopkins, Owen Asztalos Director: Ron Howard Screenwriter: Vanessa Taylor Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 116 min Rating: R Year: 2020. Depending on the scene, Omar aims to extract revenge by attempting to murder Qin, kidnapping him, or holding the man’s family hostage in exchange for information. A pirate ship bursts out of a lake, but look again and it’s only an overturned canoe. For the longest time, I didn’t hear anything, and then suddenly this year they got very active. Denis Podalydès, one of a duo of comedy film-making brothers with a large local following, also plays a small but significant role. Perhaps the most shocking moment in the film is a cut to Frank Grillo’s Harrigan finally, though still vaguely, reacting to something Wylie says after long stretches where the hermit might as well be Jake’s imaginary friend. I showed the film to one group, and half thought Connie had a dream about Arnold Friend. As laden with meaning as the fossils in Mary’s seafront shop and home in Dorset, Ammonite’s imagery is often just as lifeless; though technically impressive, it rarely illuminates much that isn’t already obvious about the characters or narrative. They didn’t interfere at all. I think people who are probably 20 years older than you—anybody starting in their mid-50s—would know the film if they were aware of films. And this character, Arnold Friend that Joyce Carol Oates created [sighs]…there are a lot of lunatics around. Well, first of all, it [came out] 35 years ago. Following in the footsteps of Letitia Wright’s Shuri, Black Panther’s superhero teen tech innovator, Journey, in all her unmitigated engineering brilliance, ought to serve as a hero for any kid who dreams of building robots, solving theorems, or inventing something brand new of their own. Svante recounts how Thunberg, who often feels overwhelmed and needs to shut off for periods of time, spent almost four years suffering from selective mutism, talking only to her sister and her parents. I don’t think I was thinking about that. A large part of it the confrontation with Arnold Friend. That was the most extreme form of it. Exactly. Somewhat more memorable, if inscrutable, is Clarke Peters’s daffy take on a pawnshop owner who almost exclusively speaks in Mad Hatter quotes. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. The film’s noble efforts to stake a claim for this scientific pioneer’s place in history culminate in an ostentatiously obvious shot toward the end, when Anning pays a visit to her most prized fossil in the British Museum. Come Away, a film that is part Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland origin story, and part British family drama, often seems similarly caught up in its own cleverness at the expense of its far more convincing heart. Cast: Stephen Dorff, Elizabeth Reaser, Darren Mann, Donald Faison, Said Taghmaoui, Karrueche Tran, Drew Starkey, Ava Capri Director: Nick Sarkisov Screenwriter: David McKenna Distributor: IFC Films Running Time: 117 min Rating: R Year: 2020. Freaking her out more her parents who are dead turn up. So, to me, it was believable that this whole scene would take place. | Cookie Settings. At Smooth Talk’s NYFF Live talk, Laura Dern mentioned that people take different messages out of it. Our discussion covered how she and Cole built upon Oates’ slender source text, the joys of rediscovery and reappraisal, and why she doubts John Hughes could believe in the universes he created on screen. Just as Mary is forced to subjugate her passions and scientific interests to more mundane financial demands, including selling her most prized fossil to the British Museum in order to cover her bills, she also lets her own desires be reined in by feelings of guilt related to being her elderly mother’s (Gemma Jones) only surviving child. I Am Greta shows that her unlikely transformation into the de facto leader of a millions-strong movement possesses the heroic, poetic irony that the condition that can make social life a struggle for her also forms a part of her personality that makes her uncompromising drive, and thus her rise, possible. Though Smooth Talk debuted to favorable reviews and won the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize in 1986, the film has fallen off the radar somewhat in recent years. But Jingle Jangle’s songs are joyful diversions, as they illuminate character more pointedly and emotionally than the script. Pencil etchings on a table come to life, gesturing wildly for Peter to abandon his studies and take to the woods. The most affecting footage Grossman captures, in a film full of such intimate moments, is that of Svante taking life-saving classes in case—it goes intrusively unspoken—there’s an attempt on Thunberg’s life. Camille Rewinds is a French language film with English subtitles, about an old woman with an adult daughter who is who works as an actor who seldom gets work and small parts when she does. How did you go about striking that balance and making sure that, when the film shifts, it didn’t feel too jarring? Camille Rewinds opens with a bravura title sequence, a montage of liquor and cigarettes and assorted bric-a-brac tumbling across a dark backdrop in slow motion, followed by a surprised looking cat. But there are a few moments later in the film where the themes are spelled out a little too clearly, undercutting Winslet’s impressive restraint. TWITTER Less inspiring are the looks Grossman gives us at the diplomacy behind Thunberg’s stirring speeches. She’s referred to, she has a name, but the first line is: “She was a familiar figure in the malls.” The story so frightened me when I read it, I read it years before we made it. She’s a very extreme feminist. She temporarily stands in front of a painting and is literally framed, in profile, alongside other portraits of exclusively well-heeled old men, receiving the institutional validation that Ammonite elsewhere seems to suggest is essentially meaningless. In Collective, Alexander Nanau trails investigative reporters exposing the astonishing offshore fraud scheme involving hospital disinfectants which led to dozens of avoidable deaths in the wake of the fire. It felt very strange to me because she lived in my mind as [those characters]. Fate, it seems, has granted Camille a second chance. There’s a push and pull between Mary’s need for independence and her sense of filial duty, and these elements combine to make her wary of pursuing a relationship with anyone, let alone a woman from such a different background as Charlotte’s. A strong local crowd-pleaser in Cannes, Camille Rewinds closed the Directors’ Fortnight and picked up a minor prize, the Prix SACD. But destiny is not so easily persuaded, and Camille eventually comes to learn that some life choices can be changed while others must simply be embraced. Thus Camille’s life as a kind of midlife Bridget Jones is neatly encapsulated in prologue form. It’s all a pleasant enough idyll, or maybe even a dream, but as an exercise in philosophically grounded whimsy, Camille’s time travels fall short. When a terrorist who’s taken Lei captive tries to impress the agent by speaking in Mandarin, a stone-faced Lei answers with a noble quotation about knowing oneself, followed by the admonition, “You have learned our tongue but not our ethics.” A very hokey line, but then, perhaps not too far off from something Captain America might grumble at a villain in a Marvel film. Decades later, Jangle is withering away as a depressed pawnbroker facing foreclosure when his estranged granddaughter, Journey (Madalen Mills), shows up, eager to show off her own STEM-cultivated genius and join forces with her once-extraordinary grandfather.