Annette Bening stars as a single mother who reaches out to a few friends to help giver her teenage son good life lessons in filmmaker Mike Mills’ tribute to his own mother.
Tag: Elle Fanning
‘My Neighbor Totoro’ on HBO Max
Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan’s living treasures, a beloved filmmaker whose animated films number among the most beautiful and most enchanting productions ever drawn by hand. In this day of CGI productions, the aging artist still personally draws his key frames and defining characters, with a love and craft that comes through every frame. […]
‘The Neon Demon’ on Amazon Prime and free on Hoopla
The Neon Demon (2016) – “I can’t sing, I can’t dance, I can’t write… no real talent. But I’m pretty, and I can make money off pretty.” We first meet Jesse (Elle Fanning), a 16-year-old girl from Middle America looking to leverage her youth and innocent beauty into a modeling career in Los Angeles, made […]
Angelina Jolie is ‘Maleficent’ on Disney+
Maleficent (2014) does sort of a “Wicked” number on the story of Sleeping Beauty’s evil sorceress, casting her as the tragic figure of a dark fantasy (but not too dark for children—barely) of a revisionist fairy tale. Angelina Jolie plays the adult Maleficent, a fairy who watches over and defends the natural and supernatural wilds […]
‘Ginger & Rosa’ on Showtime and free on Kanopy and Hoopla
Ginger & Rosa (2012) offers something we don’t usually see in the movies: a sensitive and nuanced portrait of two teenage girls, best friends since childhood, growing up and growing apart as they forge separate identities and diverging personalities and interests. It’s set in the volatile era of early 1960s London, before the Beatles but […]
What to stream: ’20th Century Women’ on Amazon Prime, plus ‘T2,’ ‘Gypsy,’ and more
20th Century Women (2016) stars Annette Bening as Dorothea, a single mother of a teenage boy (Lucas Jade Zumann) determined to give him good life lessons with a little help from her friends. Elle Fanning is her son’s best friend, who escapes her troubled family and is warmly welcomed Dorothea, and Greta Gerwig and Billy […]