Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch brings to life a collection of stories from the final issue of an American magazine published in a fictional 20th-century French city. Written and directed by Wes Anderson, the film stars Benicio del Toro, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright, Adrien Brody, Timothée Chalamet, Léa Seydoux, Tilda Swinton, Mathieu Amalric, Lyna Khoudri, Stephan Park, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Liev Schrieber, Elisabeth Moss, Edward Norton, Willem Dafoe, Lois Smith, Saoirse Ronan, Christoph Waltz, Cécile de France, Guillaume Gallienne, Jason Schwartzman, Tony Revolori, Rupert Friend, Henry Winkler, Bob Balaban, Hippolyte Girardot, and Anjelica Houston.
Trailer viewable HERE
Marjorie Lawrence was born in 1907 and grew up in Winchelsea, country Victoria, Australia, dreaming of becoming an opera star. She went to Paris to study singing in 1928 and became the greatest Wagnerian Soprano in France, before being lured to the USA to perform at the Metropolitan, where she famously rode her horse Grane into Siegfried’s pyre in a performance of Wagner’s Gotterdammerung. She also performed Salome at the Met, delivering an enticing “Dance of the Seven veils” that shocked and delighted New York audiences, winning critical acclaim. At the height of her career, Marjorie was tragically cut down by polio at the age of 33. Remarkably she partially recovered from the illness and continued singing in a wheelchair. In 1955 M-G-M made a movie of her life, “Interrupted Melody” starring Glenn Ford and Eleanor Parker, which won an Academy Award.
Trailer viewable HERE
From award-winning writer/director Justin Chon, Blue Bayou is the moving and timely story of a uniquely American family fighting for their future. Antonio LeBlanc (Chon), a Korean adoptee raised in a small town in the Louisiana bayou, is married to the love of his life Kathy (Alicia Vikander) and step-dad to their beloved daughter Jessie. Struggling to make a better life for his family, he must confront the ghosts of his past when he discovers that he could be deported from the only country he has ever called home.
Trailer viewable HERE
Z O L A
From acclaimed writer/director Janicza Bravo, Zola’s stranger than fiction saga, which she first told in a now iconic series of viral, uproarious tweets, comes to dazzling cinematic life. Zola (newcomer Taylour Paige), a Detroit waitress, strikes up a new friendship with a customer, Stefani (Riley Keough), who seduces her to join a weekend of dancing and partying in Florida. What at first seems like a glamorous trip full of “hoeism” rapidly transforms into a 48-hour journey involving a nameless pimp, an idiot boyfriend, some Tampa gangsters and other unexpected adventures in this wild, see-it-to-believe-it tale.
THE POWER OF THE DOG
Severe, pale-eyed, handsome, Phil Burbank is brutally beguiling. All of Phil’s romance, power and fragility is trapped in the past and in the land: He can castrate a bull calf with two swift slashes of his knife; he swims naked in the river, smearing his body with mud. He is a cowboy as raw as his hides.
The year is 1925. The Burbank brothers are wealthy ranchers in Montana. At the Red Mill restaurant on their way to market, the brothers meet Rose, the widowed proprietress, and her impressionable son Peter. Phil behaves so cruelly he drives them both to tears, reveling in their hurt and rousing his fellow cowhands to laughter – all except his brother George, who comforts Rose then returns to marry her.
As Phil swings between fury and cunning, his taunting of Rose takes an eerie form – he hovers at the edges of her vision, whistling a tune she can no longer play. His mockery of her son is more overt, amplified by the cheering of Phil’s cowhand disciples. Then Phil appears to take the boy under his wing. Is this latest gesture a softening that leaves Phil exposed, or a plot twisting further into menace?