Review: Mary Shelley

by Jason Adams

In the summer of 1816 one of the most legendary of literary happenings occurred - the poet Percy Shelley and his wife Mary went to stay at the poet Lord Byron's house near Lake Geneva for the summer. Mary's step-sister Claire wrangled them an invite (or so she said) since she was having an affair with the spitefully torrid Lord himself. Also joining them at the house was the Lord's physician John Polidori, who also fancied himself somewhat of a writer. And birthed from those weeks of most gothic merrymaking was basically the entirety of the horror genre to come: Mary Shelley would come up with her lovely little monster Frankenstein, while Polidori would write "The Vampyre," the inspiration for a certain Bram Stoker a swift generation later.

The story of that time and place has been well-trod by fiction before...

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How to Wait for "How to Talk to Girls..."

by Chris Feil

It's been so long since the first much salivated over set photos of Nicole Kidman as a spiky haired punch in How to Talk to Girls at Parties, that she's had an entire awards run and career resurgence in the meantime! The John Cameron Mitchell adaptation of Neil Gaiman's short story got a quiet esponse when it debuted in last year's Cannes (outside the competition) and there hasn't been much news since. But now there's a trailer...

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Halloween Hangover -- More Celebrity Costumes!

by Nathaniel R

Lady Gaga as Edward Scissorhands! (Hmmm, she might make a great fit for a future Tim Burton movie.) ICYMI we rounded up celebrities who got all dolled up for the holiday on Halloween night - many in movie-themed costumes!

But the pictures kept on coming so here are a handful more. Sarah Michelle Gellar, and more after the jump...

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TIFF: Elle Fanning is "Mary Shelley"

Our ongoing adventures at TIFF

In the summer of 1816 legendary Romantic literary figures Mary Shelley (and stepsister Claire Clairmont), Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori were holed up in a Swiss estate and challenged each other to write scary ghost stories. From that fateful contest two famous works of horror emerged ("Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus" in 1818 and "The Vampyre" in 1819 -- neither of them actual ghost stories!). Ken Russell attacked this collision of authors with his trademark sexual abandon and visual insanity in Gothic (1986) and his wasn't the first or last film to stare with fascination at that morbid contest 201 years ago. We return to that summer for a good chunk of Haifaa al-Mansour's Mary Shelley but with far different intent.

Haifaa al-Mansour, the first Saudi female film director (she previously directed Wadjda) is more interested in the trailblazing of Mary Shelley (née Godwin) as a female author -- and the unique challenges that came with her gender in the literary world of 1818 -- than in the creation of Frankenstein...

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"Werk Werk" The Beguiled does Hamilton

You may think you didn't need to see Colin Farrell doing his best hair flip to "The Schuyler Sisters" from Hamilton, but you'd be wrong.

Our hearts are bursting. It turns out the little girls of The Beguiled made a Hamilton lipsync video while goofing around on set to accompany a donation to Lin-Manuel Miranda's "immigrants get the job done" coalition (we mentioned the contest the other day)... May this challenge others to donate, too! Oona Lawrence leads us as Aaron Burr, with Emma Howard as Angelica, Angourie Rice as Eliza, and little Addison Riecke as Peggy.

You may think you're loving the video in the first minute but wait til the rest of the stars start popping up. Everyone is in this! Heaven.