I had the pleasure of meeting Ellen Kuras at a film festival, where we were both on a panel discussing women and minorities in film. It was shortly after 9/11, and Kuras talked about her experience. Living across the water, she invited friends who had no place to stay after the horrific incident to her large home. Together, they watched the smoking rubble. Surprisingly, Kuras said it was both depressing and healing.
Since the film festival, Kuras and I stayed in touch at first, with me lining up an interview with a now-defunct film website. The last time I heard about her was when she received an Oscar nomination for the documentary The Betrayal, which she co-wrote and co-directed while also being the cinematographer. Kuras has won many awards for her cinematography.
Kuras directs Lee based on a pivotal decade in the life of American war correspondent and photographer Lee Miller, played by Kate Winslett. Miller’s singular talent and unbridled tenacity resulted in some of the 20th century’s most memorable images of war, including an iconic photo of Miller herself, posing defiantly in Hitler’s private bathtub.
Miller had a profound understanding and empathy for women and the voiceless victims of war. Her images display both the fragility and ferocity of the human experience. Above all, the film shows how Miller lived her life at full throttle in pursuit of truth, for which she paid a huge personal price. This forced her to confront a traumatic and deeply buried secret from her childhood.
The supporting cast includes Josh O’Connor, Andrea Riseborough, Andy Samberg, Alexander Skarsgård and Marion Cotillard.
When I saw that Kuras had directed this film, I was super excited for her and delighted at her success.
This is the extraordinary true story of eccentric British artist Louis Wain, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Wain’s playful, sometimes even psychedelic, pictures helped to transform the public’s perception of cats forever.
CLAIRE FOY and BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH in THE ELECTRIC LIFE OF LOUIS WAIN
Photo: Jaap Buitendijk
Moving from the late 1800s through the 1930s, we follow the incredible adventures of this inspiring, unsung hero as he seeks to unlock the “electrical” mysteries of the world and better understand his own life and the profound love he shared with his wife, Emily Richardson, played by Claire Foy.
Co-written and directed by Will Sharpe, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain follows the extraordinary life of Wain, who painted incredible images of cats. These paintings inspired the public to view cats as domestic pets instead of feral animals that eliminate rodents.
Sharpe describes the challenge of capturing Wain’s inner world as most exciting. “I immediately felt a connection to his pictures, which are full of humor and delightful little details about daily life, but also, sometimes, seemed to have an undercurrent of restlessness and worry, or even sadness.”
“I wanted to take the spirit of those pictures — the wild colors and patterns, the funny tableaux, even the psychedelia — and to fold it into the world of our movie. The more I read about his life, the more I was struck by his courage in facing multiple challenges and how heroically he seemed to face them. It felt like an epic Odyssean life, and I knew there was a story here that could be really uplifting, transporting, and, hopefully, relatable for many people.”
Sharpe’s primary roadmap through the artist’s life came with the love story between Wain and Emily when developing the script.
“I thought the way that the love story was structured, in a slightly unusual and on the surface of it in an unfortunate way, left space for a lot of beauty to be mined,” Sharpe says.
Louis met Emily when she was the governess to his sisters. They had quite a controversial relationship and subsequent marriage. “They had to fly in the face of convention, and there would have been a lot of pressure on them not to be together,” says Sharpe
With the death of his wife so early in his life, Louis Wain’s story also deals with grief, another facet of the love he holds for Emily, which acts as a catalyst for realizations he makes during his later years in life.
“Grief is a theme in this movie, and all of it is tied together under the umbrella of love,” explains Sharpe. “What Louis realizes is that the reason he felt pain is because he loved Emily and that his love for her and Peter (the cat) has inadvertently helped him to appreciate the love that was around him—his friends and family and the people who enjoyed his work.”
Sharpe wanted to present Emily as the person who helped Wain learn what love is — so that he had something to reconnect with at the end of the story.
Cumberbatch feels that Wain’s is a moving story, who leaped at the chance to take the leading role. “I was drawn to him because of his artistry. I also found him incredibly persuasive in a very gentle way. And the fact that he was so talented and lived through so much tragedy, I found that whole journey just extraordinary.”
The rest of the cast includes Andrea Riseborough, Toby Jones, Sharon Rooney, Aimee Lou Wood, Hayley Squires, Phoebe Nicholls, Adeel Akhtar, Asim Chaudhry, Richard Ayoade, Julian Barratt, Sophia di Martino, Taika Waititi, Nick Cave and Olivia Colman.
Written and directed by Andrew Heckler, Burden is a true story about Michael “Mike” Burden, played by Garrett Hedlund, an ardent young South Carolina Ku Klux Klan member.
He rose to the rank of Grand Dragon – and walked away from all of it with the help of his new love and an unlikely ally, the African American religious leader and social activist Reverend David Kennedy, played by Forest Whitaker.
Mike Burden, rejected by his own racist family and raised by Klan leader Tom Griffin, played by Tom Wilkinson, becomes a pillar of the KKK and proponent of the divisive Redneck Shop, a Klan memorabilia store.
But then Mike meets and falls in love with Judy Harbeson, played by Andrea Risborough, a single mother deeply opposed to the Klan and Mike’s allegiance to the group.
Cut off from the only family he has ever known, Mike and Judy reach out to the Reverend, Mike’s former mortal enemy. In turn, Reverend Kennedy proves the power and conviction of his faith when he accepts Mike’s disavowal of the Klan and welcomes him into his home and church.
Together, they face down irate and vengeful Klan members and win over Reverend Kennedy’s skeptical parishioners, forming a genuine bond and forging a path toward redemption and forgiveness.
Heckler is known for directing Armageddon and the TV series Ally McBeal. Burden won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the Sundance Film Festival 2018.
The second trailer tells more of the story and journey of this former Klansman and the priest.
The three movie clips show exceptional acting and directing skills.
Directed by Nicolas Pesce, The Grudge stars Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Betty Gilpin, Lin Shaye, and Jacki Weaver.
The screenplay by Nicolas Pesce and a story by Nicolas Pesce and Jeff Buhler, The Grudge storyline, comes from the film Ju-On: The Grudge, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu.
Produced by Sami Raimi, The Grudge is a twisted take on Shimizu’s horror classic. I couldn’t watch the trailer because it was too scary.
The featurette explains how the story is based on a Japanese film, yet the American version is scarier. If you love horror, you will love this featurette.
The following three clips show how creepy and scary the movie is. The bathtub scene is the worst one out of all the clips — super frightening.
