Linking on Empty

• Washington Post reviews a new book on Elizabeth Taylor & Montgomery Clift's friendship
• TFE <--- in case you missed it we discussed every one of Clift's films for his centennial this past fall
• Vulture To say we're thrilled to hear that Todd Haynes will be reuniting with Julianne Moore for his next film, is an understatement. It's a psychodrama called May December in which Natalie Portman will play an actress who is playing Moore's character in a movie based on her scandalous love affair.
• IndieWire Why Brooke Smith is running an Emmy campaign on her own without the studio's blessing (I mean she has a point about paying your dues. But we know from years of experience and category fraud that Hollywood cares very little about non-leads.

Queer horror, Jane Campion's latest, Harrison Ford, fav musicals, Sex and the City, and more after the jump...

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Movie review: "Censor"

By Tim Brayton

Giallo homages, modernising the sordid, stylish vibe of Italy's cultishly beloved, violent and colorful 1970s thrillers, have gone from being an odd little niche project to a veritable cottage industry over the last decade. It takes more than just dousing a movie in candy colors to stand out, and so that's the first thing to praise about Censor, the extraordinarily self-assured debut feature by Welsh director Prano Bailey-Bond, is that it has so much to offer. Though it is very candy colored.

The film, currently open in limited release, isn’t exactly a giallo homage, to be honest. Above all else, it's a love letter to the Video Nasties, the notorious list of movies targeted for prosecution on home video by the British government’s Department of Public Prosecutions in the 1980s, when the film is set...

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Tribeca 2021: This "Poser" Sneaks Up on You

by Jason Adams

It is said that our 20s are spent trying to figure out who we are, accumulating likes and dislikes, testing out identities like stage costumes for some great reveal, to be determined. You fake it until you make it, the "it" being some semblance of a self. It's a precarious and unsettling time for a lot of people, and Ori Segev and Noah Dixon's film Poser, screening at Tribeca, does a fine job actualizing on-screen that amorphous state of flirting with emptiness, giving us a slow-burn Single White Female for the 21st century in the process...

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One and Done? Toni Collette

by Matt St Clair

Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe. Those are just a few of the grand talents from Australia to grace the big screen. Then there’s someone who doesn’t have the same kind of Oscar record as those A listers: the painfully unsung Toni Collette who, despite having an eclectic fascinating career with roles that range in size, genre, accent, etcetera, in many noteworthy films, somehow only has one Oscar nomination under her belt. 

The Nomination

Her sole bid (thus far) came in 1999 when she was nominated in Best Supporting Actress for her role as Lynn Sear, a working-class mother whose child can see ghosts in The Sixth Sense...

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Best International Feature: Indonesia, Senegal, Thailand

by Cláudio Alves

Tomorrow we'll know which 15 films made the Academy's shortlist in the Best International Feature Film category. In this series of capsule review trios, I've looked at 27 films whose quality spanned from shoddy propaganda to caustic masterpiece. To end in a round number, I'd like to shine a light on three films that are very unlikely to be chosen by AMPAS. Three features whose singular oddness and inspiringly weird ideas deserve to be celebrated, even though one of them can be called faultless. Join me, as I try to describe the wonders of an Indonesian horror flick with historical ambitions, a Senegalese tragedy with Shakespearean proportions, and a Thai coming-of-age tale centered on the ideologies inherent to minimalist interior design…

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