Review: “The Bride!”

In this video for Letterboxd, Jessie Buckley cites Barbara Stanwyck’s performance in the 1933 drama Baby Face as a key influence on her dual role as Mary Shelley and the Bride of Frankenstein in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! (the obvious comp is Elsa Lanchester’s dual role as the same in James Whale’s 1935 film, although […]

Review: “Hamnet”

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet opens with a quote from a 2004 article by Stephen Greenblatt titled “The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet”: “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” It’s a plain, matter-of-fact statement, not the sort of […]

Review: “Men”

The Edenic imagery that propels writer and director Alex Garland’s latest feature film, “Men,” forward shows up early on. Having just arrived at the lavish country home she booked a stay at in order to rest and heal from the death of her husband, Harper (Jessie Buckley) strolls into the estate’s lush garden, plucks an […]