Paul King directed Wonka, starring Timothée Chalamet, who appears as playful, funny and charismatic as Willy Wonka. Produced by David Heyman, who brought us the Harry Potter franchise and other films, like Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood, the story follows Wonka during his formative years.
The focus is on young Willy, how he met the Oomp-Loompas on his early adventures, and how he established his candy manufacturing business.
Only Heyman can plan such a powerful cast, including Olivia Colman, Ryan Gosling, Hugh Grant, Sally Hawkins and Rowan Atkinson.
From Denis Villeneuve’s and Jon Spaihts’s screenplay, Dune: Part Two follows Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet, uniting with Chani, played by Zendaya, and the Freman. They’re on a conquest to revenge against the conspirators who destroyed Paul’s family.
Denis Villeneuve directs the sequel by continuing with unique cultures and a storyline based on the book written by Frank Herbert.
Facing a decision between the love of his life and the fate of the universe, Paul must fight a terrible future only he can foresee.
Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Rebecca Ferguson, Christopher Walken, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem also star.
“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.
Based on Frank Herbert’s book and directed by Denis Villeneuve, Dune follows Paul Atreides, played by Timothee Chalamet, who goes on a mythical and emotionally charged journey. Paul is a brilliant young man born into a destiny beyond his comprehension.
He travels to the most dangerous planet in the universe to ensure his family and people’s future. Malevolent forces explode into conflict over the pant’s exclusive supply of the most precious resource in existence, a commodity capable of unlocking humanity’s most significant potential. But it is those who can conquer their fear that will survive.
Villeneuve co-wrote the screenplay with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth. Hans Zimmer composes the music for the science fiction film. The rest of the cast includes Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgard, Javier Bardem, Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista.
Directed by the elusively funny Wes Anderson, The French Dispatch is a love letter to journalists set in an outpost of an American newspaper in a fictional 20th-century French city that brings to life a collection of stories published in “The French Dispatch” magazine.
The cast is an A-list of Hollywood superstars, including Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, Elisabeth Moss, Billy Murray, Owen Wilson, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Liev Schreiber, Frances McDormand, Adrien Brody and Benicio Del Toro.
According to IMDB, The New Yorker reported a piece that outlines some characters, subjects, and situations described in this movie, along with the corresponding The New Yorker articles, themes, and writers that Wes Anderson references. These include:
Arthur Howitzer Jr., played by Bill Murray, inspired by the New Yorker’s founding editor Harold Ross.
Herbsaint Sazerac, played by Owen Wilson, inspired by the writer Joseph Mitchell
Julian Cadazio, played by Adrien Brody, inspired by Lord Duveen, the subject of a 1951 six-part New Yorker profile by S. N. Behrman
Roebuck Wright, played by Jeffrey Wright, inspired by James Baldwin and A. J. Liebling, who were both New Yorker contributors over the years.
Lucinda Krementz, played by Frances McDormand, inspired by Mavis Gallant, She wrote a two-part 1968 piece on the student uprisings in France. This character also shares a last name with Jill Krementz, a photographer whose work has often appeared in the New Yorker and is the widow of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut.
The New Yorker also reported in the same piece that the movie takes place in a fictional French town called “Ennui-sur-Blasé.” “Ennui” and “blasé” are both English words, albeit both terms originate from the French, which means roughly the same thing: world-weary boredom, apathy, and sophistication. It is relatively common for French place names to contain the word “sur” (“on”) between two other words as a geographic descriptor. for example, the French Riviera village name “Beaulieu-sur-Mer” translates as “beautiful place on the sea.” So if it were a real place name, “Ennui-sur-Blasé” would mean, more or less, “Boredom-on-Apathy.”
For Anderson, the filmmaking process is 100% organic from start to finish. That begins with the writing. “It’s a real adventure to work on these things,” says longtime collaborator Jason Schwartzman, who co-wrote the story with Anderson and Roman Coppola and plays the role of the magazine’s cartoonist. “The stories are sort of concocted in real-time. There’s not some big outline or something that you’re filling in. You’re literally creating each moment as you get to it. It’s sort of like building a bridge while you’re on the bridge, and that’s what’s really exciting. When you wake up in the morning, you really have no idea what could happen to the story, to the characters, and that is such an exciting place to be. It’s free form but focused, and Wes is the captain of the ship.”
The official name of the New Yorker-inspired magazine is The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, a publication inspired by the history of The New Yorker and the origins of two of the people who made it what it is: Harold Ross, the magazine’s co-founder, and William Shawn, his successor, both inspirations for Bill Murray’s character and both born in the Midwest. “Kansas seems to me like the most American place in America,” says Anderson. “I mean, really, in the end, The French Dispatch isn’t publishing for the people of Kansas. They’re publishing for America.”
Creating the story’s striking still-life passages, Anderson actually asked the actors to freeze in place. “It’s a game I play with my daughter,” says del Toro, “it’s probably one of the earliest things that I remember playing as a kid, and suddenly… we’re doing it, every actor from Tilda Swinton to Henry Winkler, all these legends, all playing the game. And it’s contagious. It’s really nice to see actors going back to their childhood and playing, Simon Says. There’s something very freeing about it. And I felt like it added to the film in another way. Wes could have frozen the action digitally, but there’s something about the actors actually freezing that makes it… you can feel it, you can touch it, and the audience can feel the joy behind it.”
Based on the perennial novel by Louisa May Alcott and written for the screen and directed by Greta Gerwig, Little Women comes to the movie houses once again with Saoirse Ronan in the lead role as the Alcott’s distinctly other-self, Jo March.
Most of you are familiar with Gerwig’s Lady Bird, where Ronan played Lady Bird, a teenage girl trying to find the meaning of life through a coming of age and innocence. Gerwig also casts another alumnus from the movie, Timothée Chalamet, who plays the neighbor Laurie.
Jo reflects back and forth in her fictional life as Gerwig crafts the beloved story of the March sisters. They are four young women, each determined to live life on her terms, which is timeless and timely.
The sisters in the movie include Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern as Marmee, and Meryl Streep as Aunt March. New York Film Critics Circle (2019) awarded Laura Dern Best Supporting Actress for both Little Women and Marriage Story.
Gerwig tight directing brings new life to Little Women, as you can see in this clip.
I like this movie clip because it’s clean and smooth, and the message is clear.
The movie shot beautifully, love Dern as the mother.
I love this clip with Letts. It’s so good.
The next set of featurettes tells the story of making the movie.
Written and directed by Greta Gerwig, Little Women comes to the movie screen once again with a stellar cast of women and a couple of men. Many renditions of the classic book have come to us over more than 100 years of moviemaking.
The first adaption of Little Women was a British silent film in 1917 starring Gaiety Girl Ruby Miller. In 1918, U.S. silent film starred Dorothy Bernard. The first talking movie starred Katherine Hepburn and directed by George Cukor in 1933. The second movie starred June Alyson and Elizabeth Taylor with Mervyn LeRoy directing in 1949. The third starring Wyona Ryder in 1998. Then, a modernized version in 2018 starring Melanie Stone.
Gerwig, who directed the sleeper hit Lady Bird, crafted Little Women in a way the draws both the classic novel and the writings of Louisa May Alcott. The movie unfolds as the author’s alter ego, Jo March, reflects back and forth on her fictional life.
In Gerwig’s take, the beloved story of the March sisters – four young women each determined to live life on her terms — is both timeless and timely.
Portraying Jo, Meg, Amy, and Beth March, the film stars Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, with Timothée Chalamet as their neighbor Laurie, Laura Dern as Marmee, and Meryl Streep as Aunt March.
Gerwig’s signature filmmaking shines through with stunning backdrops and charming costumes.
Co-written and directed by Felix Van Groeningen, Beautiful Boy follows the real story from the memoirs of father and son David and Nic Sheff. The movie stars Steve Carell, Timothée Chalamet, and Maura Tierney.
Groeningen is a Belgium writer and director. One movie he directed is The Broken Circle Breakdown, which earned an Oscar nomination for the Best Foreign Film. The movie won several awards, including Label Europa Cinemas at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Based on the best-selling pair of memoirs from father and son David and Nic Sheff, the movie chronicles the heart wrenching and inspiring experience of survival, relapse, and recovery in a family coping with addiction over many years.
The two movie clips show the discomfort of trying to reach your child when personal contact is lost.
David Sheff’s memoir is called “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction,” and Nic Sheff’s memoir is called “Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines.”
Interestingly, kids get diagnosed with learning disabilities and given methamphetamines. They become addicted to them.
Watch the movie trailer and see some fine, fine acting by both Carell and Chalamet. Chalamet as Nic literal morphs in the restaurant scene. I didn’t even recognize him at first.