This week's screenings featured rather a lot of strong women, starting with
Harriet, in which Cynthia Erivo plays the tough-minded slave rescuer Harriet Tubman. The film's a bit too reverent for its own good, but Erivo is terrific.
Frozen II reunites sisters Elsa and Anna for an even more thrilling adventure that has huge action beats and some properly developed emotion too. Greta Gerwig offers a new adaptation of
Little Women, with a strikingly good cast (Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Timothee Chalamet, Meryl Streep) and a refreshingly sharp tone, although the structure is a bit problematic. And then there was the haunting Appalachian drama
Them That Follow, starring Alice Englert and Olivia Colman as members of a freaky snake-handling church.
Further afield, there was the offbeat British comedy-thriller
Kill Ben Lyk, which amusingly combines a whodunit with a slasher horror romp. The dark British drama
Into the Mirror is an involving, internalised exploration of identity and gender. From Hong Kong,
Adonis is a fascinating and somewhat over-sexed exploration of fate and art. And
Romeo and Juliet: Beyond Words creates a strikingly inventive new genre, moving the ballet into real-world sets to recount Shakespeare's timeless story with physicality and music rather than dialog. It's beautiful.
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Coming up this next week, we have Chadwick Boseman in
21 Bridges, Aaron Eckhart in
Line of Duty, Edward Norton in
Motherless Brooklyn, Patrick Schwarzenegger in
Daniel Isn't Real, and
The Amazing Johnathan Documentary. I'm also chasing several year-end awards-worthy titles before voting deadlines, which are looming less than a month away now...
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