Cynthia Nixon's Emily Dickinson Dwells In Possibility of Miranda Hobbes

Daniel Crooke here, new contributor. As daily updates make their way stateside from the Berlinale, certain titles that can’t help but infiltrate and overtake your curiosity. One such film is Terence Davies’ A Quiet Passion. What a time to be alive when the promise of a film starring the soulfully efflorescent Cynthia Nixon as the spiritually untethered Emily Dickinson exists on this planet. While reactions to the poet’s biopic have been highly mixed, the overlapping of these two mustang personas is an undeniable attraction.

Obviously much of Dickinson’s public face continues to be debated – that’ll happen when you like what you like and forget the rest – but there’s still a respected wealth of fascinating, cogent theories about the manner in which Emily lived. And no study needs a peer review about how perfectly Nixon’s signature role encapsulates this iconoclast who ditched polite society for a personal universe of her own reckoning.

The ultimate role research for Emily Dickinson lies in playing the sage and self-determined Miranda Hobbes for six seasons of Sex and the City. Six reasons why after the jump...

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Berlin: 'Genius' starring Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth

 Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival, TFE's first time at Berlinale! Here is his take on Michael Grandage's Genius.

Berlinale is known for inviting one or two Hollywood pictures to the festival every year to add glamour to the sprawling selection of mostly arthouse curios. One of those films in this year’s edition was Michael Grandage’s first feature as a director, Genius. A period piece based on a true story, the film came to the festival with high expectations, given the distribution deal with Lionsgate already in place, and the pedigree of everyone involved, including thrice Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Logan, and Oscar winners Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman in the cast. But this was all before the film was screened and faced walkouts and unintentional laughs.

Maxwell Perkins (Firth) was the editor and invisible hand behind some of the biggest American masterpieces of literature in the 1920s, including novels by Ernest Hemingway (Dominic West) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Guy Pierece). Perkins is a family man, living in an expansive estate with his wife Louise (Laura Linney) and five daughters. As one would expect of the editor responsible for taming wild characters such as Hemingway and, eventually, Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law), Perkins is a gentleman of the highest order, calm and gentle, but serious all the same. [More...]

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Berlin: The Latest from Mia Hansen-Løve and André Téchiné

 Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival, TFE's first time at Berlinale! Here are the two French films from the festival’s Competition section (the group of film's Meryl Streep & jury are seeing).

L’AVENIR (Mia Hansen-Løve)
Mia Hansen-Løve has established herself as one of world cinema’s most exciting young filmmakers in the past few years. Her latest, L’Avenir (Things to Come) came to Berlinale as one of the festival’s most anticipated films. Starring Isabelle Huppert as Nathalie, a middle-aged philosophy teacher on the verge of significant changes in her personal and professional life, L’Avenir is an intimate, life-affirming character study with a superb star turn from Huppert...

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Berlin: Fire at Sea

Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival for The Film Experience this year, our first time at Berlinale!. Tonight, previous Venice winner, Gianfranco Rosi's Fuocoammare.

Gianfranco Rosi shocked the film world with his Golden Lion win at Venice for Sacro GRA a few years ago. At Berlinale, the true shock would be for his latest film, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare), to leave the festival empty-handed. The Italian maestro’s seamless hybrid of documentary and fiction is a self-reflexive and compassionate meditation on Italy’s crisis of cultural identity in the face of an unprecedented wave of refugee migration.

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Berlin: "Midnight Special" with Michael Shannon & Kirsten Dunst

Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival for The Film Experience this year, our first time at Berlinale!. Tonight Jeff Nichol's follow up to Mud.

With Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter and Mud, Jeff Nichols has become one of the most intriguing, and divisive, American directors working today. His latest film, the unclassifiable Midnight Special, will no doubt continue the same trajectory. Starring his favourite actor Michael Shannon, along with Joel Edgerton and Kirsten Dunst, this religious fable in the mold of science fiction is a crowd-pleaser that, despite a crucial directorial misstep, delivers a thoroughly riveting experience.

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