Claire Scanlon directed The People We Hate at the Wedding based on the book of the same name by Grant Ginder. With a very talented cast, the movie follows a family during the week leading up to their half-sister’s wedding in England.
Ben Platt, Allison Janney and Kristen Bell
Tensions rise among the siblings, and it’s full of laughs and silliness with, hopefully, a lesson to learn about accepting your family.
Scanlon is also an editor who won an Emmy for editing Single-Camera Comedy Series for The Office episode: Finale. Her other movies include Set It Up and Unbreakable Kimmy.
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.”
“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.
Based on the short story “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” by A. S. Byatt and co-written and directed by George Miller for the screen, Dr. Alithea Binnie, played by Tilda Swinton, is an academic. She’s content with life and a creature of reason.
While in Istanbul attending a conference, she encounters a Djinn, played by Idris Elba, who offers her three wishes for his freedom. This presents two problems. First, she doubts he is real; second, because she is a scholar of story and mythology, she knows all the cautionary tales of wishes have gone wrong.
The Djinn pleads his case by telling her fantastical stories of his past. Eventually, she submits and makes a wish that surprises them both.
Co-written and directed by Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky, The Good House follows Hildy Good, played by Sigourney Weaver. Hildy is a wry New England realtor and descendant of the Salem witches.
Thomas Bezucha also co-wrote the script with the directors. Bezucha’s credits include writing and directing Let Him Go and six episodes of the Secret Invasion mini-series.
She loves her wine and secrets, yet her compartmentalized life unravels as she rekindles a romance with her old high-school flame, Frank Getchell, played by Kevin Kline. She becomes dangerously entwined in one person’s reckless behavior.
The situations ignite long-buried emotions and family secrets, propelling Hildy toward a reckoning with the one person she’s been avoiding for decades — herself.
The Good House additionally stars Morena Baccarin and Rob Delaney.
Written by Bragi F. Schut and directed by Julius Avery, Samaritan follows a young boy, played by Javon “Wanna” Walton. He begins a journey to see if the mythic superhero, Samaritan, played by Sylvester Stallone, is still alive after disappearing 25 years ago.
Directed by Emmy winner Maria Schrader, She Said is from the screenplay by Oscar winner Rebecca Lenkiewicz.
Based on the New York Times bestseller, She Said stars two-time Academy Award nominee Carey Mulligan (Promising Young Woman, An Education) and Zoe Kazan (The Plot Against America limited series, The Big Sick). Together they play New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, who broke one of the most important stories in a generation.
The story helped propel the #Metoo movement, shattered decades of silence around the subject of sexual assault in Hollywood and altered American culture forever.
The Academy Award-winning producers of 12 Years a Slave, Moonlight, Minari, Selma and The Big Short bring the New York Times bestseller: She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement to the screen.
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, Black Adam is full of action and adventure, following Dwayne Johnson, who plays the latest DC antihero.
Touted, “the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe is about to change.”
The cast includes Pierce Brosnan, Sarah Shahi and Noah Centineo.
Collet-Serra’s directing chops include mainly horror movies, such as House of Wax, Orphan and The Shallows. He has worked with Liam Neeson in several thriller films, like Unknown and The Commuter.
Adapting author Paul Gallico’s famous 1958 novel Mrs.’ Arris Goes to Paris for the screen, writer and director Anthony Fabian create a modern-day fairy tale. The message is about pursuing your dreams, friendship’s power, and the importance of remaining true to who you are.
In post-World War II London, Ada Harris, played by Lesley Manville, earns money cleaning houses. She’s led a lonely life since her beloved husband, Eddie, went missing in action, but she’s not the type to brood over any misfortune or complain about her circumstances.
Still, the ever-pragmatic Ada sees an unimaginably lovely Christian Dior gown hanging in the master bedroom of a wealthy client. She’s surprised to feel an overwhelming pang of desire—owning something so otherworldly, so beautiful, an actual work of art — why that could change things for a person.
Ada takes on extra jobs and saves as much as possible, trying her luck at the racetrack. Ada can finally afford to pay for a Dior dress when all seems lost. She bids farewell to close friends Vi, played by Ellen Thomas, and Archie, played by Jason Isaacs.
She goes to Paris to visit the prestigious House of Dior and turn her dreams into reality. Yet when she arrives, Ada is met with a series of surprising setbacks, not least of which is Dior’s intimidating Madame Colbert, played by Isabelle Huppert, who bristles at the notion of a common charlady wearing haute couture.
Ada refuses to leave Paris without her dress, whatever obstacles come her way. Her unwavering commitment charms idealistic Dior accountant André, played by Lucas Bravo, kindly model Natasha, played by Alba Baptista, and the aristocratic Marquis de Chassagne, played by Lambert Wilson, Paris’ most eligible bachelor.
Ada soon discovers that, in changing her own life, she changes the lives of all those around her. She might even help save the House of Dior itself.
Fabian’s feature film work up until that point was mainly family dramas based on true stories, yet he felt a particular affinity for the material. Having lived in Paris as a boy and attending boarding school in England, he could appreciate both cultures at the heart of the story. “I understood these two worlds extremely well, London and Paris,” Fabian says. “I felt it was a story that I could tell in an authentic and accurate way.”
Initially brought on as a director for hire, Fabian eventually gained the rights to adapt and produce himself. He began working on an entirely new screenplay while searching for other partners to collaborate with. He turned to Carroll Cartwright, with whom he had previously worked on the feature Louder Than Words. Together, they wrote the first drafts, while prolific film and television writer Keith Thompson and A Girl with a Pearl Earring writer Olivia Hetreed gave the script a final polish.
Fabian wanted to clarify why getting a beautiful haute couture artifact became such an obsession for Mrs. Harris throughout the adaptation process. “The book gives you the bones of the story, but not the flesh,” he says. “It doesn’t really explain why Mrs. Harris wants this dress, other than in the most frivolous and superficial terms—it had to be more profound. Ultimately, I wanted to suggest that Ada Harris’ heart is healed by going on this journey. She is a widow who has put her heart on ice, and this dress is an inanimate object that she can love without betraying her husband. Somehow, the dress becomes a catalyst for opening her heart and allowing her to love again.”
