Review: Freeland

Hannah GersenLeave a comment
Freeland (2021)
Written & Directed by Mario Furloni and Kate McLean

The late-blooming actress Krisha Fairchild anchors Freeland, a wispy slice-of-life movie that never really gets going, despite its timely subject matter and Fairchild’s compelling lead performance. Set in Humboldt County, California, Freeland focuses on a marijuana farmer, Devi, whose business has been adversely affected by the legalization of pot in California. Her under-the-radar business is suddenly getting a lot of competition, and she hasn’t obtained a permit to sell her product legally, because of fees and bureaucratic red tape. At the beginning of the film, Devi has some hope that she’ll be able to keep afloat with out-of-state sales, but when one of her biggest clients bails, she realizes she’s going to be stuck with a lot of unsold product. She asks her small staff of three to work unpaid during the harvest period, promising a bigger payout later. They reluctantly agree and the tension between Devi and her increasingly disgruntled workers is what drives the story.

Continue reading “Review: Freeland” →

Catching Up With Cruella

Hannah GersenLeave a comment

Cruella (2021)
Director: Craig Gillespie
Writers: Dana Fox and Tony McNamara

Well, I finally caught up with the unholy mess that is Cruella. Honestly, it was pretty enjoyable despite spanning about five different genres. It was kind of like The Queen’s Gambit meets The Devil Wears Prada meets Project Runway meets The Empire Strikes Back with a splash of Dickens and a little bit of heist thrown in for good measure. Is that how it was pitched? Or did Disney just realize they had this really cool-looking villain and wanted to make a movie around her? That’s a great idea, except that Cruella, in this movie, isn’t really a villain. If I understood it correctly, she never even killed any puppies. That’s the whole point of Cruella! I remember being terrified of her as a child, but also, enthralled. She was always one of my favorite villains–that slinky dress, that cigarette holder. Now that I think about it, Emma Stone’s Cruella doesn’t even smoke. What the hell?

Continue reading “Catching Up With Cruella” →

Review: Bergman Island

Hannah GersenLeave a comment
Bergman Island (2021)
Writer & Director: Mia Hansen-Løve

Bergman Island is a movie for Bergman fans, and so I’ll lay my cards on the table: Fanny and Alexander is one of my all-time favorite movies, something I like to put on every year around the holidays. I also love Scenes from a Marriage, and recently watched the new gender-swapped HBO adaptation, starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain. HBO’s version, directed by Hagai Levi, is a Very Serious Homage, an attempt to make something as wrenching and honest at the original. Mostly, it feels like a showcase for the two leads, and while I appreciated it, I didn’t necessarily look forward to watching it. Bergman Island is a much more enjoyable tribute, one that questions Bergman’s legacy and even pokes fun, but doesn’t denigrate it. Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve, it zooms in on a filmmaking couple, Chris and Tony, (Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth) who attend an artist’s retreat on Fårö, an island off the coast of Gotland, Sweden, where Bergman lived and which he often used as a filming location. It’s a movie about filmmaking, marriage, and the relationship that female artists have with the Great Men who have inspired them. I loved it for its playfulness, for its honest grappling with Bergman’s filmography, and for Vicky Krieps’s restless, mischievous portrayal of a female artist trying to break free of her male influences.

Continue reading “Review: Bergman Island” →

Review: Our Friend

Hannah GersenLeave a comment
Our Friend (2021)
Director: Gabriela Cowperthwaite
Writers: Brad Ingelsby and Matthew Teague

This movie has to be one of the most underrated of the year, but I’ll admit that I’m not the most impartial critic when it comes to stories about mothers dying of cancer. I lost my own mother to the disease twenty years ago, and I appreciate movies that look at the experience honestly. I felt that this movie did, which surprised me, because the reviews from film festivals described a film that was a weepie, overly sentimental mess. As a result, Our Friend was released in January, dumped in the theaters before anyone was really going back, and placed on streaming at a premium price. Now it’s streaming on Amazon Prime and I hope it will get a second chance on the platform. I started watching it on a whim, thinking I would turn it off after twenty minutes, but instead I found myself immersed in a beautifully acted and directed ensemble film about friendship, ambition, marriage, and dying.

Continue reading “Review: Our Friend” →

Documentary Review: Through the Night

Hannah GersenLeave a comment
Through the Night (2020)
Director: Loira Limbal

I didn’t have much awareness of overnight childcare centers until I watched Through the Night, a documentary about a married couple, Deloris and Patrick Hogan, who run Dee’s Tots, a 24-hour daycare in New Rochelle, New York. Sadly, I don’t think my ignorance is unusual, and is likely shared by the many members of Congress who have consistently declined to fund public childcare, even after the pandemic revealed how necessary it is to working parents. Although not overtly political, Through the Night is quietly radical as it shines a light on the work of caregiving. It’s highly skilled labor that is essential to the health of children and families, yet childcare workers are often overworked and underpaid. To the extent that the government has childcare policies, they are designed to fit a model of a nuclear family with one stay-at-home parent. Director Loira Limbal shows the reality: many parents (usually mothers) are raising children on their own, and their jobs do not offer the pay, benefits, or flexibility to accommodate child-rearing.  

Read the rest over at The Common . . .

Retro Review: The Piano

Hannah GersenLeave a comment
The Piano (1993)
Writer & Director: Jane Campion

I’ve been meaning to watch The Piano for almost thirty years. It came out in 1993, when I was fifteen, a shade too young to see it — by my parent’s estimation, at least. It was deemed too sexually explicit, which only made me more curious about it, especially since it didn’t look like a particularly sexy movie, with its poster featuring a lady in a bonnet and a piano on a beach. I became even more intrigued when Anna Paquin won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. I wondered how a little girl could give a big enough performance to win an Oscar. But I guess my curiosity wasn’t that strong, because I never tried to sneak to it in a second-run theater. I don’t remember it as something that teenagers were especially interested in, at the time. It was regarded as art-house movie for grown-ups, maybe a bit snoozy. Horrifyingly, I am now about the same age as my parents when they first saw it.

Continue reading “Retro Review: The Piano” →

Review: How It Ends

Hannah GersenLeave a comment
How It Ends (2021)
Written and Directed by Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein

Zoe Lister-Jones is at the center of her third directorial effort, an apocalypse comedy about a woman trying to get to a party on the last day on Earth. The twist is that she’s accompanied by a younger version of herself, a spirit who is suddenly visible on this final day, when everyone has a heightened sense of reality. In a recent interview on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, Lister-Jones explained that the plot was partly inspired by all the inner child work she’d been doing in therapy. That might sound cringeworthy and at best heavy-handed but this little indie is buoyant and goofy, and gently sends up L.A.’s wellness culture, COVID-deniers, and even the existential anxiety many of us are grappling with as the climate crisis becomes more obvious. Shot entirely outdoors in L.A. during the pandemic, How It Ends is also a record of life under lockdown, showing the eerie stillness of the streets and skies.

Continue reading “Review: How It Ends” →

Review: Charlatan

Hannah GersenLeave a comment
Charlatan (2021)
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Writer: Marek Epstein

Charlatan is the third Agnieszka Holland movie to be released in the U.S. in the past year, and I feel like she’s been my special discovery. Although Holland is one of Poland’s most prominent directors, and has worked extensively in American film and television, I had no awareness of her until last summer, when I watched Mr. Jones, an absorbing biopic/thriller about Gareth Jones, the Scottish journalist who first reported the Soviet famine to the West. Then, a couple of months ago, I screened Spoor, an adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead, and I loved it for its scrappy cast of characters and environmental themes. Holland has a knack for finding good stories, both from real life and fiction, and Charlatan is no exception, as it focuses on the healing talents of a botanical expert who can diagnose people by examining their urine. Yep, that’s pee in the jar above. There’s a lot of uroscopy in this odd biopic about real-life Czech herbalist Jan Mikolášek, who was something of a celebrity in his time.

Continue reading “Review: Charlatan” →

Review: Fully Realized Humans

Hannah GersenLeave a comment
Fully Realized Humans (2021)
Director: Joshua Leonard
Writers: Joshua Leonard and Jess Weixler

I’m pretty sure I’ve worn Jess Weixler and Josh Leonard’s deflated, slightly glazed expressions in the above film still. They’re all dressed up for their baby shower — and these are possibly the nicest clothes they’ve worn in weeks — but instead of getting encouragement from their friends, they are forced to listen to a litany of complaints about parenthood. If you’ve been a first-time parent, you’ve been in this etiquette-defying situation. It’s one of the details this low-budget indie gets right as it tries to capture the mood of the final weeks of pregnancy: the anxiety, the mania, and the last-ditch efforts to prepare for the unknown. I also appreciated how this film don’t overstay its welcome. At 76 minutes, Fully Realized Humans is just the right length for a comedy with a somewhat thin premise. But I have to admit that it didn’t feel like a fully realized movie (sorry, couldn’t help myself). It felt more like a pilot for a new series, or maybe a missing episode from Joe Swanberg’s Easy.

Continue reading “Review: Fully Realized Humans” →

Movies I Watched on Vacation

Hannah GersenLeave a comment

I’m back from a two-week vacation in Maine where I swam in the ocean every day, ate lobster rolls, hiked through moss-covered forests, and, on the nights when it was too cloudy to look at the stars, I watched a few movies. Here are a few quick thoughts, and I’ll be back to full reviews next week.

Continue reading “Movies I Watched on Vacation” →