At least the film doesn’t default to assuming that gothic necessitates a glum visual palette. Cinematographer Sara Mishara’s work here often recalls Gordon Willis’s images in the way she bathes many of the Montreal interiors in muted earthy tones and low-key chiaroscuro lighting to evoke a sense of claustrophobic doom appropriate for these characters; when Felix and Meira temporarily flee to Brooklyn, however, Mishara’s color palette becomes noticeably more expansive, with a flood of neon blue most memorably punctuating an intimate hotel scene. Uneven Romance with Vague Liberation Theme, A love story and culture clash that's not a love story or culture clash, The stillness of romance, religion, grief and loneliness, Traditions as weakness and self-determination as strength. Felix and Meira is tender and sad, and wonderfully shot in snowy Quebec, but ultimately fails to connect.

Our conversation covered what the documentary might have looked like without Fox Rich’s video archives, why she didn’t feel the need to explain racism in the film, as well as how the forces of collaboration and intuition inform her filmmaking process.

In one, Jean Genet gets drunk with Marisa (Katia Horn), the kooky mother of one of Alice’s gay classmates, and they start being a little too honest about what they think of their own children. While this premise might seem implausible, it is explored with subtlety and respect. I think the bottom line of that and respect are the ingredients of making something that I think can live outside of the opaqueness of what you’re describing. Cast: Fionn O’Shea, Lola Petticrew, Sharon Horgan, Barry Ward, Simone Kirby, Evan O’Connor Director: David Freyne Screenwriter: David Freyne Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films Running Time: 92 min Rating: NR Year: 2020.

So when the slight ringing in Ruben’s ears the night before turns into a dull roar, leaving all surrounding noises muffled beyond recognition, it’s not merely his professional livelihood that’s at stake, but his mental and spiritual well-being as well. The theme of the movie 'Felix & Meira' made in 2014 by the Quebecois film director Maxime Giroux may seem unusual to most of the audiences, but it is in fact one of the main themes of Jewish literature and cinema. Where Borat mined the humor of reaction—how do unsuspecting, and mostly well-meaning, people react when confronted with a ludicrous foreigner who says wildly un-PC things?—the sequel too often feels like it’s desperately struggling to shock its unwitting participants and coming up short, as evidenced by an outlandish fertility dance performed at a debutante ball. Underneath Ham on Rye’s mystery and grandeur, then, is a theme that’s traditional to teen movies: children’s fear of selling out like their parents. The story is little changed from Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 Gothic novel or Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 Oscar-winning adaptation. And into her universe comes a secular man, an artist of sorts, a lost soul who feels empty because a strict father has never shown him love or interest since he didn't follow in the man's footsteps, it's inferred. When cut between commonplace scenes of Fox interfacing with the bureaucratic maze of the carceral state, the rushes of her past feel both tantalizingly close and also impossible to reclaim—all while her future with Robert appears indeterminate.


It’s always gratifying to see a movie in which an ostensibly closed-off community is depicted humanely rather than voyeuristically. Masterworks is uncomfortable with the modern iteration of auteurism, which has been corrupted from its French New Wave origins by being utilized as often macho shorthand that denies the contributions of other craftspeople involved in a film’s production. It’s the sound of agony and ecstasy intertwined—a form of sonic transcendence that is, for Ruben, every bit as alluring as the heroin addiction that he kicked some four years earlier. Much of the film’s middle section details what’s either a waking nightmare for Mrs. de Winter (the most effective parts of the story plug into relatable anxieties over being found out or not measuring up) or extensive gaslighting campaign. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead built alluringly mysterious worlds in films like Resolution and The Endless. But there’s a gravitas to Dating Amber that keeps pricking us little by little until it completely takes over in the film. Unfortunately for Borat, Johnny is eaten on the journey over by his 15-year-old daughter, Tutar (Maria Bakalova), who stowed away in the same shipping container as the primate. He plans to do exactly what’s expected of him—that is, to join the army and marry a nice girl who will probably just make him sleep on the living room couch like his mother (Sharon Horgan) does to his father (Barry Ward).

Then we get to know Felix, a secular Jew whose father is dying.
And there was, riffing off of your last question before, just not even needing to have a literal reason for why we ended it the way we did. It is of a girl called Meira and French Felix, each who adopt their known cultural traits. The climactic confrontation with Giuliani inside the Mark Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, during which Tutar poses as a conservative journalist in order to make her move on “America’s Mayor,” is perhaps Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’s most shocking and uncomfortably hilarious scene—not simply for the already-infamous hand-in-his-pants moment. From a point of view that that illuminates the effects of the facts.” Fox is, actually, briefly in Alone.

They’re choppily and timidly edited in ways that direct the eye away from the action, as if to obscure any hokeyness that might become apparent from close scrutiny.

Throughout, Nolasco’s frames are also filled with much hair—hairy faces, butts, and backs, suggesting a queer sexuality cobbled together with the coarseness of the men’s local environment, despite the clearly foreign influence of Nolasco’s hyper-stylized aesthetics. The mustachioed Kazakh journalist—whose racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and downright backwardness are leavened by his blithe optimism—became so recognizable—in part, through the ubiquity of bad impersonations and cheap Halloween costumes—that he had to be effectively retired. The unspoken rules that she keeps breaking—asking the wrong questions, venturing into the wrong rooms, studying a menu incorrectly—all seem to lead back to the same source: Manderley is still in the ghostly grip of Max’s recently deceased wife, Rebecca.

There’s no separation between that and the system. Film Friday (4/17): This Week's New Movies & Trailers.

As these characters grow in complexity, their ingenues also evolve in nuance, becoming less fantasy projections of Anderson’s own desire to prove himself than startlingly unique expressions of rootlessness and ambition.

It is a gentle, nuanced look at two people from very different communities who connect and fall in love. It is always good to be able to define yourself.

And as it turns out, the weaves are also alive, and they’re literally out for blood, at least those being offered at a mysterious salon where Anna, looking to make her mark on Cult as a VJ, is sent to by Zora. © Beija Flor Filmes. Like Glenn Kenny’s Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, Masterworks pushes back against the simplistic, bro-ish language of adulation, and attending backlash, that often obscures a major artist’s achievements.

In this case, it’s one that has to do with jealousy, or the impossibility of intimacy in such queer configurations where sex is public only if it’s clandestine but affection must be refused for the sake of social survival. Though someone like Zora could easily have been a thin antagonist, you instead feel the context of age, beauty norms, and societal pressure that shaped who she is and what she wants to do.

Martin Dubreuil is also very good as Felix who is in search of something but is not quite sure what. So Felix travels and is now back in his own flat in Montreal, perhaps in Westmount, a Jewish enclave of Anglophone Jews. This is a shame because Giroux has a deeply resonant core of an idea here, of people either trapped in cultural prisons of their own imagining or yearning to break free from such preconceived notions. In 2006, at the height of George W. Bush’s so-called war on terror, Borat was often mistaken for an Arab.

Felix and Meira’s dominant tenor of is one of quiet restraint, but there are times when such restraint crosses the line into willful reticence; Giroux seems afraid to even show the two love-struck characters sharing a kiss, cutting away lest such a moment of raging passion puncture the film’s relentlessly dour surface. Following the sunny, happy-go-lucky Riviera opening, the film pivots into psychodrama mode once it relocates north to the gloomier English seaside. In a way, it can be an addictive drug all its own.

Meira feels estranged from this world of ultra Orthodox Jews, living in Montreal. Riley’s rakish gleam is similarly energizing, particularly when the story turns into a late-developing courtroom drama about how or even if Rebecca died.