Nikyatu Jusu directed Nanny, a psychological horror fable of displacement.
Aisha, played by Anna Diop, is a woman who recently emigrated from Senegal. She nabs a job caring for the daughter of a wealthy couple, played by Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector, living in New York City.
But, she becomes increasingly unsettled by the family’s volatile home life. Ashia’s arrival approaches, and the violent presence invades her dreams and reality, threatening the American dream she is painstakingly piecing together.
Based upon the book by Miriam Toews and screenplay by Sarah Polley and directed by Polley, the Women Talking took place in 2010. The women of an isolated religious community grapple with reconciling their reality with their faith.
According to Polley, the women disagree on essential things and have a conversation to figure out how they might move forward together to build a better world for themselves and their children.
“Though the backstory behind the events in Women Talking is violent, the film is not. We never see the violence that the women have experienced. We see only short glimpses of the aftermath. Instead, we watch a community of women come together as they must decide, in a very short space of time, what their collective response will be.
“When I read Miriam Toews’ book, it sunk deep into me, raising questions and thoughts about the world I live in that I had never articulated. Questions about forgiveness, faith, systems of power, trauma, healing, culpability, community, and self-determination. It also left me bewilderingly hopeful.”
Toews’s book was The New York Times book of the year, so naturally, it should become a film. However, according to producer Dede Gardner from Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production studio, the film departs from the book on many levels.
From the book to the screen, the movie became much bigger. “The book is extraordinary and full of life and humor and wickedness and pithiness,” Gardner said. “Yet, two families of women in a hayloft making a decision for the duration is not an obvious idea for a film. At the same time, I could see its cinematic structure. The thing that the book and the movie really share is that despite all the things that they discuss, there’s a real sense of movement and a victory at the end of it.”
Tommy Wirkola directs David Harbour as Santa Claus in Violent Night. An international team of mercenaries burglarizes a family compound on Christmas Eve. Everyone in the household becomes hostage as the mercenaries try to access hundreds of millions of dollars.
Santa Claus arrives to place the Christmas gifts around the tree when he stumbles on the bad guys and gets combative. He uses all the tactics he knows to save a little girl’s Christmas and her family.
Violent Night is definitely a movie you want to add to your Christmas favorites. Keep your younger kids away because of foul language and sexual references.
David O. Russell directs an all-star cast about a story in the 1930s. Three friends witness a murder and are framed for doing it. While trying to clear themselves, they stumble upon an unbelievable plot in American history.
“I am asking my audience to join this journey; it’s about discovery. Who are these people? Why do they behave as they do? What are they learning? And in so, what do we learn about ourselves?” director Luca Guadagnino.
Bones and All is a story about the first love.
Maren, played by Taylor Russell. She is a young woman learning to survive on society’s margins. Lee, played by Timothée Chalamet, is an intense and disenfranchised drifter.
Maren and Lee meet, hook up and begin a thousand-mile odyssey that takes them through the back roads, hidden passages and trap doors of 1980s America.
Maren is born with a secret and driven by an inexplicable hunger outside all normal human bounds, cannibalism. Unable to be like others, she has long felt like an irredeemable outcast moving from town to town.
When her heartbroken father decides he can no longer help her, Maren has no choice but to head out on her own. Then she discovers she is not alone. There are others like her. Others know this same overpowering need.
Others, like Lee, are small-town rebels. Lee helps Maren survive and grows closer to her. He sees her beyond her forbidden desires, even as they become dangerously vulnerable to one another.
But despite their best efforts, all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and to the last stand that will determine whether their love can survive their otherness.
Watch the trailer, and you’ll see a beautifully crafted story of forbidden love and changing social conventions.
Based on the book by Bethan Roberts, Michael Grandage directs My Policeman. The story follows three young people: policeman Tom, played by Harry Styles, teacher Marion, played by Emma Corrin, and museum curator Patrick, played by David Dawson.
They embark on an emotional journey during the 1950s in Britain. Flashing forward to the 1990s, Tom, now played by Linus Roache, Marion, played by Gina McKee, and Patrick, played by Rupert Everett, are still reeling with longing and regret.
But now they have one last chance to repair the damage of the past.
Grandage sculpts a visually transporting, heart-stopping depiction of three people caught up in the shifting tides of history, liberty and forgiveness.
Written by Kyle Warren and directed by Matt Sobel, Goodnight Mommy is an English-language remake of the Austrian film of the same title.
The story follows twin brothers, played by Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti. They arrive at their mother’s country home, played by Naomi Watts, to discover her face covered in bandages.
She explains she needs to wear the dressings with her recent cosmetic surgery.
They immediately sense that something doesn’t add up because of her odd behavior, doing things their loving mother would never do. She sets strange new house rules, smokes in her bathroom, and secretly rips up a drawing they gave her.
As her behavior grows increasingly bizarre and erratic, a horrifying thought takes root in the boys’ minds. They have a sinking suspicion that the woman beneath the gauze, making their food and sleeping in the next room, isn’t their mother.
In Warren and Sobel’s version of the film, the fundamental theme is “the human need to be either the victim or the hero of one’s own story — never the villain.”
Compared to the original Austrian film relies on aesthetics and tone, the English remake focuses on reimagining character and psychology, emphasizing the drama over the horror elements.
“Some of the specific changes we made were to put one of the twin boys, Elias, at the center of the story, whereas the original largely treats the three main characters democratically,” explains Sobel.
They wanted to bring the audience into Elias’ experience, so they dramatized his thought processes. Another change was to create the role of Mother as not a monster but a flawed human being whose actions take on new meaning once the movie reveals the story’s core mystery.
Sobel and Watts weaved her performance to specific behaviors that make it clear there’s more going on than meets the eye. They made those moments vivid enough that when the viewer reaches the film’s end, they don’t need to return to the beginning immediately to understand what happened.
Damien Chazelle, who directed Whiplash, La La Land, now brings us another side of Hollywood, Babylon.
Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
It’s an original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles led by Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva, including an ensemble cast: Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li and Jean Smart.
Jovan Adepo plays Sidney Palmer in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.
A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.
