Frances Ha
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| Funny, flirty, and shot in crisp black and white, Noah (The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg) Baumbach’s latest is like today’s Manhattan, perfectly capturing the rhythms of an over-educated, underemployed generation. | |||||||||||||
| Frances, played with expert oddness by co-writer Greta Gerwig (Greenberg, Damsels in Distress), is a struggling dancer. Despite the fun she’s having at 28, without a solid job or stable partner, she is flailing. All elbows and punchlines, Frances develops a romance with a male friend, but both have trouble with the ground rules. Unable to make it as a dancer, her greatest triumph to date is her friendship with Sophie (Mickey Sumner), a dour-looking, tart-tongued girl who matches her sense of humor quip for quip. Sincerely ironic and ironically sincere, the film maintains an openness and generosity toward its characters, conferring charm and substance on even the most mundane interactions. For all the awkwardness Frances displays, this movie loves her. | |||||||||||||
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist
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| Adapted from the award-winning novel by Mohsin Hamid, Mira Nair’s (Salaam Bombay!, Monsoon Wedding, The Namesake) latest film tracks the divergent pull of two cultures, bringing the book to screen with both passion and insight. | |||||||||||||
| Beginning in Lahore, Pakistan in 2011, academic Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed) is interviewed by American foreign correspondent Bobby (Liev Schreiber) amidst a climate of anti-American unrest and the abduction of one of Changez’s American colleagues. Himself a ‘person of interest’ for the CIA, Changez tells Bobby the story of his life in New York in the previous decade: how, fast-tracked as a financial analyst (and hatchet man) in a prestigious Wall Street company, this educated Pakistani Muslim was forced, in the wake of 9/11, to re-examine who he really is. Bolstered by a talented cast featuring Kiefer Sutherland, Kate Hudson, and Om Puri, Nair’s film carefully manipulates the viewers’ prejudices, encouraging us to look at multiple sides of a conflict more complicated than it first appears. In English and Urdu with subtitles. |
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To the Wonder
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| Just over a year after The Tree of Life won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven, Badlands, The Thin Red Line) returns with To the Wonder – at once a delicate tale about three individuals whose fates entwine, and a film that captures the ecstasies of the natural world on this giant gorgeous planet. | |||||||||||||
| After falling in love with the beautiful Marina (Olga Kurylenko) in Paris, Neil (Ben Affleck) brings her home to Oklahoma, where he gets a job as an environmental inspector. In a town dependent on the oil industry, whose product is seeping upward and threatening crops and homes, the residue of Neil’s earlier life and Marina’s feelings of foreignness create cracks in their relationship. As his interests drift toward his childhood friend Jane (Rachel McAdamns), what appear to be simple motivations open up to reveal enduring truths. Visually poetic, Malick’s work plays out like a modernist symphony, revolving around themes of politics, faith, and human intimacy. Gloriously engaged with cinematic form itself, Malick liberates himself from conventional narrative to pursue a more associative approach, constructing a film that elicits pure, subconscious feeling, and that finds freedom in the transcendental. In English and French with subtitles. |
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