Rooster is the new feel-good comfort sitcom of the season, and it commands your perfect attendance this semester. But if you want to be lame and go to Cancun for a week or whatever, fret not, because Rooster is streaming for your convenience.
The warmth, richness and approachability of this lovely film from Singaporean director Anthony Chen, a graduate of Britain's National Film and Television School, returns him to the family drama style of his 2013 debut Ilo Ilo; with care and connoisseurship, he again draws on the influences of Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang, but Chen's instincts are less oblique. He dots the I's and crosses the T's; the film-making is forthright and wholehearted though not unsubtle.
A fatally overdosed mother called Jacey is unceremoniously bundled into a trunk at the start of this southern US-set drama; the uncredited actor who plays her should probably have a word with her agent, as the role is surely in contention for a world record as the least likely to boost your career. Jacey is just one of the drug casualties littering director Dan Kay's underpowered film about the US's super-strength opioid crisis, as her two bereaved daughters desperately tread water in the aftermath.
Finnegan's Wake: An Immersive Ghost Story, presented by 13th Floor Theater, plunges audience members into the beautiful, dysfunctional Finnegan-Plurabelle family. Scenic designer Treigh Buchet, lighting designer Meghan Schultz, and ephemera designer Michelle Josette Crashette transfigure the San Francisco Mint into an Irish family home on the banks of a mystical river. Audience members are free to explore the spaces before the show begins with libation in hand. When the dinner bell rings, the show commences.
After many years of absence, the father (Skarsgard) returns to the family home after the death of his ex-wife. He intends to reconcile with his daughters and film a screenplay he has written. He wants to cast his youngest (played by Renate Reinsve), an actress, in the lead role. But she, still angry at him, refuses. And so, he turns to a younger star, played by Elle Fanning.
Joachim Trier isn't 100 percent comfortable with the fact that his Oscar contender, " Sentimental Value," is being labeled a melodrama. But then again, he was never comfortable with the idea of ever making a film that could be interpreted as one. On the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, the self-described "counterculture punk" said his decision to tackle the emotional family story was his most difficult.
There are emotional strands that feel laboured it doesn't help that the snippets we hear of Gustav's script sound obvious and tired but Sentimental Value is so frequently and convincingly moving in how it zeroes in on the gaps in affection and acceptance that neglect creates within a family. If art wants to be redemptive, it needs to make honest and sincere connections between its players. It's a familiar maxim that Trier makes lively again: art is not just excavation, but rather renewal.
"In the way that Jonathan Franzen's early family epics and Ann Patchett's family dramas burrow into you, Buckeye will become a part of you. As the characters evolve over the years, you'll root for their happiness, cry out for their pain, and forget that this is just a novel. With the family unit as its beating heart, Buckeye is a triumphant and timeless novel that you won't want to end." - Al Woodworth, Amazon editor
"In Your Dreams," a new animated feature from Netflix, is a colorful movie filled with imaginative sights: a world of living breakfast food, a flying bed, a gigantic sand castle in which the legendary Sandman resides. But like the best children's movies, the actual story is grounded in Earth: The main characters, Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and Elliot (Elias Janssen) are ordinary suburban children whose parents (Simu Liu and Cristin Milioti) are dealing with financial trouble that's straining their marriage.
Anniversary: Brutal and eerily more plausible with every ticking second, director Jan Komasa's skin-crawling thriller imagines a horrific near future where democracy has fallen and American families are at war with each other. Given present circumstances, that might seem a hard sell for already shellshocked viewers. But the extreme scenario presented here should not dissuade you from seeing it. Consider it a dire warning of where the nation could plummet
No movie with Imelda Staunton and Bill Nighy can be entirely without interest and they're heading up a mighty cast here under the direction of the great Argentinian film-maker Pablo Trapero, making his English-language debut. He has co-written the screenplay with another A-lister: Canadian actor and director Sarah Polley. And yet the resulting picture, adapted from the 2013 novel by David Gilbert, feels nebulous and laborious.
Walter Salles' " I'm Still Here," which won the Best International Feature Film Oscar earlier this year, calmly but powerfully observes a real-life personal struggle under a dictatorship in Brazil during the early 1970s. While never overlooking the grim and horrific aspects of that time, the movie stays focused on small but resonant human moments, and these intimate interactions become all the more poignant to us as the story eventually arrives at its two-part epilogue.
Paper Bag Plan: Oakland native Anthony Lucero's exceptional follow-up to his indie sweetheart East Side Sushi will likewise melt hearts and sooth aching souls. Lucero's beautiful film is filled with empathy, insight and compassion as functioning alcoholic dad Oscar (Lance Kinsey, giving one of the most graceful performances of the year) seeks ways to make his quick-witted 25-year-old disabled son Billy (Cole Massie, in a phenomenal performance) more self-sufficient due to his own dire health diagnosis.
Welcome, friends, to The Girlfriend, an adaptation of the excellent psychological thriller by Michelle Frances, and an answer to the question many of us have surely pondered just how much of an incest vibe can one get away with instilling in a shiny prestige miniseries, and can anyone get Robin Wright to star and make the whole thing disturbingly credible?
Elsa works at a care facility for elderly people and lives with her mother and younger brother; they are all stuck in the kind of limbo that comes with unresolved family mysteries. One day, Elsa encounters Franck once more as a voice. It seems that an alien presence may be able to return him to his home planet, if Elsa is prepared to help them out with a little favour:
Karis Kelly's play, awarded the Women's Prize for Playwriting in 2022, masterfully captures a family’s reunion in Northern Ireland, focusing solely on the women present. The narrative navigates humor and pain through rich character dynamics and familial tensions, particularly expressed through the matriarch Eileen and her daughters Gilly and Jenny, each grappling with inherited traumas while humorously confronting their pasts.
A menopausal assassin is a compelling character, combining a woman losing oestrogen with the lethal intrigue of a gunslinger, reflecting on empowerment amidst societal constraints.
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