A First Trailer for "Disobedience"

Chris here. If 2017 doesn't announce Sebastián Lelio as one of our patron saints of actressexuality, I don't know what will. This weekend sees the limited release of his Oscar-nominated A Fantastic Woman with Daniela Vega's breakthrough performance, and later this year Julianne Moore stars in the English language remake of his own Gloria. But audiences should also be getting excited for his gay religious romance Disobedience.

The film stars Rachel Weisz as a woman returning to her strictly conservative Jewish comunity after the death of her father...

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Interview: on the Ghostly Costume Design of "The Beguiled"

 by Nathaniel R

The costume designer Stacey Battat has, to date, worked mostly in female-oriented contemporary indies. That's quite a perfect niche to build a design career from. Or at least it is when the women who've visually helped define your early work are such stylish talented icons themselves. Battat first made her mark on two Parker Posey features in the late Aughts (Broken English, Happy Tears). Soon after she was deep in the Julianne Moore business (Still Alice, Freeheld, What Maisie Knew). Other credits include The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her and Him and Mozart in the Jungle but it's been her partnership with writer/director Sofia Coppola that's come to define her young career.

The two began working together on the LA dreamy Somewhere (2010). Battat proved invaluable to all the fashiongasms of Coppola's arguably most underrated feature The Bling Ring (2013). Then came an atypical challenge: a forgotten girls school deep in the Civil War era.

I spoke with Battat recently by phone to talk about one of the most visually striking films this past year, The Beguiled, and what she brought to it. Our interview, edited for clarity and length follows...

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"Gloria" and "Magdalene" First Looks!

Chris here, with first looks for two of our most beloved actresses. The first is far less dramatic than those fabulous smoking set photos, but comes with some dramatic backstory: Mary Magdalene. Here we see Rooney Mara's biblical woman gorgeous and windblown between smoke breaks...

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Chile's Oscar Submission: "A Fantastic Woman"

Sean McGovern reporting from the London Film Festival

 

There’s a scene early on in Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, when a young man laments the Spanish translation of All About Eve, to Eva al Desnudo. English subtitles tell us it’s “Eve Unveiled”. It also translates to “Eve Naked”. “All About Eve should be “Todo Sobre Eva”,” he says. “But that sounds odd,” replies his mother.

Sometimes a title, or a translation of a title, can make a difference. A Fantastic Woman, in English, basically means an amazing or brilliant woman. The Spanish adjective fantastica has the connotation of something unreal or imaginary, and in this film, writer-director Sebastián Lelio has created a heroine who is indeed fantastical: angelic in the eyes of her man, a threat to his toxic family, and the object of her director's vision... 

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YNMS: A Fantastic Woman

by Ilich Mejía

Since screening at Berlinale earlier this year, and now at TIFF and Telluride, A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantástica in Spanish) has been generating very positive talk. It is Sebastián Lelio's follow up to 2013's wonderful and under-appreciated Gloria. The film stars trans actress Daniela Vega as a waitress mourning her lover in what looks like will be another queer classic from this year. 

Let that stunner of a trailer sink in after the jump and let's discuss the Yes No and Maybe So of it all... 

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