
weekend watchlist: is it good to be the queen?
Plus a teenage con artist, a skewering of late-night comedy, and more… (First published September 18th, 2022, on Substack and Patreon.)
film criticism by maryann johanson | handcrafted since 1997
Plus a teenage con artist, a skewering of late-night comedy, and more… (First published September 18th, 2022, on Substack and Patreon.)
Zosia Mamet, Kristin Scott Thomas, Patricia Clarkson, Maika Monroe, Ellen Burstyn, and Catherine Keener are all starring in new movies this week… but good luck finding them on a screen near you.
Sally Potter’s brutally snappy take on the classic British drawing-room comedy hauls it into the 21st century with a cutting takedown of the anxieties and hypocrisies of well-off left-wingers.
‘It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it’ implies that there aren’t some people who actually enjoy doing a dirty job. As much as The Perfect Storm is an intense and terrifying man-against-nature action movie, it’s an unsentimental and uncliched drama about, as mythologist Joseph Campbell termed it, following your bliss: doing what you’re ‘made to do’ even in the face of opposition from all around you, even to the point of risking your life.