Fall Films 2018

Our Fall Series is here; 8 great films for your viewing pleasure.

All showtimes are 7 + 9:30 pm in
room 1-306 at The College of New Caledonia

November 24th: THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST

The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Director: Desiree Akhavan
USA, 2018 English 90 minutes
Principal Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Jennifer Ehle, Sasha Lane, Forrest Goodluck

After her clandestine romance with her female best friend is revealed, Cameron Post’s (Chloë Grace Moretz, Brain on Fire; The Clouds of Sils Maria) conservative aunt and guardian sends her away to undergo conversion therapy.

Despite dealing with the tragedy of losing her parents in a car crash, Cameron seemingly fits in well with her conservative Montana community: she performs well at school, holds a place on the track team, participates in her local youth group, and has a picture-perfect boyfriend on her arm. However, when she and her best friend Coley are caught embracing after a high school dance, Cameron’s life quickly comes crashing down around her.

Cameron is immediately sent to pray away her “same-sex attraction” at God’s Promise, an evangelical conversion therapy camp, where she’s forced to wrestle with her identity and sexual orientation among a group of similarly stranded youths. After making a real connec- tion with fellow campers Jane Fonda (Sasha Lane, American Honey; Hearts Beat Loud) and Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck, Indian Horse; The Revenant) and seeing some of the devastating effects of the camp’s program on others, Cameron is forced to question the legitimacy of the camp’s dogmatic teachings and decide for herself who she really is.

Winner of the US Grand Jury Prize for best dramatic feature at Sundance, The Miseducation of Cameron Post deftly explores how identities, families, and communities are intertwined through its stellar cast of up-and-coming actors and Desiree Akhavan’s skilled and thoughtful direction.

“Chloë Grace Moretz puts in a career-best turn as a teen sent to ‘pray away the gay’ at a Christian camp in Desiree Akhavan’s compassionate LGBT story.”
– Jordan Hoffman, The Guardian


The TRAILER:

November 17th: RAMEN SHOP

RAMEN SHOP

Dir: Eric Khoo. Singapore, Japan, France, 2018, 89 mins

The way to the heart is always through the stomach in Ramen Teh, a tear-stained tale of broken families and healing recipes. Erik Khoo’s gentle drama is handled with a sincerity that could commend it to incurable romantics and insatiable foodies alike.
 
Food and family has proved a classic combination from Tampopo to Eat Drink Man Woman and Sweet Bean. Ramen Teh feels very much in that tradition with constant scenes of food being lovingly prepared as ingredients are chopped, seasoned, simmered, reduced and transformed into mouth-watering dishes. It is very much a film that should not be approached on an empty stomach.

Food is a way of life for Masato (Takumi Saitoh), a ramen chef in the Japanese city of Takasaki. His working life unfolds to a soundtrack of the contented slurping of noodles and broth. When his dour, distant father dies, Masato discovers a suitcase filled with family photos, souvenirs and notebooks left by his Singaporean mother who died when he was just ten. Masato decides to visit Singapore, exploring the food culture with blogger Miki (Seiko Matsuda), revisiting the places that meant so much to his parents and tracking down surviving members of his mother’s family.

When Masato learns more of his parents’ past, the film slides into glowing flashbacks of their tender romance and veers perilously close to Nicholas Sparks territory. The screenplay by Fong Cheng Tan and Kim Ho Wong is rarely surprising and the dialogue is often too on the nose for comfort. “Did his heart become as hard as stone because of mother?“ wonders Masato as he reflects on his unfeeling father. The discovery of his mother’s diary prompts the remark: “The diary is a quilt of memories that she had stitched together.”

What saves the film from outright soap opera is the delicate restraint and careful observation of Eric Khoo’s direction. He allows the story air to breathe, savours the sights of Singapore and also teases out the way in which this family saga of fracture and reconciliation finds a resonance in the past history between Japan and Singapore. The point is underlined by having Masato visit an exhibition on the Japanese atrocities during World War Two.

Takumi Saitoh cuts a rather diffident figure as the dreamy, gangly Masato but that serves to bring out the quality of the supporting cast with Mark Lee making an impression as Uncle Wee, a culinary enthusiast who comes alive when he teaches his nephew to make the family’s famed pork rib soup recipe.

Seiko Matsuda lends sweet support as Miki whilst Beatrice Chien makes the most of her limited screen time as Masato’s formidable grandmother Madam Lee. The many dishes presented for our delectation could also qualify as a notable supporting act.

The TRAILER:

November 10th: MARIA BY CALLAS

Maria by Callas

Director: TomVolf
FRANCE, 2017 French, English, and Italian w/ English subtitles 113 minutes
Documentary
With: Maria Callas, Fanny Ardant, Aristotle Onassis


Pulling back the curtain on one of the world’s most recognizable voices, Tom Volf ’s Maria by Callas presents an intimate and carefully constructed portrait of revered soprano Maria Callas through a compilation of found footage, photographs, home videos and records, personal letters, and rare behind-the-scenes footage.

Iconic both onstage and off, Maria Callas’ talent and operatic artistry brought her legions of fans and admirers from around the world. However, despite her success and widely esteemed talent, Maria’s artistic life was often eclipsed by her celebrity. With rumours, scandals, and intense public scru- tiny plaguing her throughout her career, Maria frequently found herself forced to defend her work ethic and shield her personal life from the public, ultimately leading her to feel torn between her two identities: Maria and Callas.

Meticulously weaving together rare archival material and employing Fanny Ardant’s (Paris je t’aime; Elizabeth) careful voicework to bring Maria’s writing to life, Volf introduces a new generation of fans to Maria’s magnetic personality, unquestionable artistry, and transcendent vocal performances, while also complicating the prevailing narrative surrounding her personal life and public image.


The TRAILER:

November 3rd: TRANSIT

Transit

Director: Christian Petzold
GERMANY/FRANCE, 2018 German, French, and French Sign Language w/ English subtitles 101 minutes
Principal Cast: Franz Rogowski, Paula Beer, Lilien Batman


From German auteur Christian Petzold (Barbara; Phoenix), Transit is an expertly crafted, anti-historical experiment that fol- lows one man fleeing the Nazi invasion and launches into a narrative mind game, in one of the most daring pieces of filmmaking to date.

When Georg (Franz Rogowski, Victoria) decides to flee Paris for Marseille on the eve of the Germans’ occupation of the city, he discovers a stranger’s personal effects in his bag. Among them are papers guaranteeing a Mexican visa and two love letters. Once he realizes they belong to Weidel, a writer who took his own life for fear of persecution, Georg intends to hand them over to the Mexican consulate in hopes that the letters will find their way back to Weidel’s widow. But when the consul accidentally identifies Georg as Weidel, he assumes the dead man’s identity in a last-ditch effort to escape. In a twisted turn of events, Georg meets Weidel’s widow, Marie (Paula Beer, Frantz), and they fall madly in love. From there, the story launches into a tangled matrix that defies time and crosses parallel worlds, straddling both past and present. Both subtle and dynamic, Rogowski’s performance leaves you truly captivated, allowing you to suspend your disbelief and be transported across multiple timelines.

Through the historic yet contemporary architecture of a technology-void Marseille, Petzold challenges viewers to question the landscape of past and present. Based on Anna Seghers’ 1994 novel, Transit is an arthouse gem that rewards the attention it demands.

“Transit invites viewers to trace their own specula- tive connections between Seghers’ narrative and the contemporary rise in neo-Nazism and anti-refugee sentiment, all while its principal story remains achingly moving.” – Guy Lodge, Variety


The TRAILER:

October 20th: THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS

Three Identical Strangers

Director: Tim Wardle
UK, 2018 English 96 minutes  Documentary
With: Robert Shafran, David Kellman, Eddy Galland


In Tim Wardle’s Sundance Special Jury Prize– winning documentary, a chance encounter brings three identical triplets together nearly two decades after they were separated at birth and adopted by separate families. However, their elation at their reunion is soon under-mined by the realities of fame, family, and a creeping suspicion that something sinister tore them from one other in the first place.
Robert Shafran arrives at college ready to reinvent himself, but when strangers continue to refer to him as “Eddy,” their welcomes quickly become unnerving. Robert soon finds himself face-to-face with his exact double: Eddy Galland. The pair’s astonishment at finding each other and the incredible story of their past and chance meeting is quickly picked up by local media, catching the attention of David Kellman, their identical triplet.

With the three brothers happily reunited and busy taking full advantage of their new- found celebrity, their parents take up the less pleasant task of investigating what separated the three young men in the first place. When their questions are met with evasive and unsatisfactory responses from the triplets’ adoption agency, a larger conspiracy bubbles to the surface, with an indeterminate number of victims at play.
A film of triumph and tragedy, and a true testament to the power of documentary film, Wardle’s Three Identical Strangers leads its audience through an emotional journey about how we understand our families and ourselves.

“A gripping, stranger-than-fiction account of a real-world medical conspiracy, the film begins as a human-interest story and builds to an impressive work of investigative journalism into how and why they were placed with the families who raised them.”
– Peter Debruge, Variety


The TRAILER:

October 13th: THE CHILDREN ACT

The Children Act

Director: Richard Eyre
UK, 2017 English 105 minutes
Principal Cast: Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci, Fionn Whitehead


Adapted by Booker Prize–winning author Ian McEwan from his own novel, this riveting drama stars two-time Academy Award winner Emma Thompson (The Legend of Barney Thomson; Alone in Berlin) as a British High Court judge tasked with making a decision that will speak to our most fraught questions regarding religious tolerance — and could mean life or death for an innocent young man.
Judge Fiona Maye (Thompson) is married to her work, which has become a problem for her husband, Jack (Stanley Tucci, Spotlight; Margin Call), who announces that he wants to have an affair. Treating the matter more as an annoyance than a life-altering crisis, Fiona kicks Jack out and focuses on her current case. The question: should a couple who are Jehovah’s Witnesses be permitted to deny a life-saving blood transfusion to their leukemia-stricken 17-year-old son (Fionn Whitehead, Dunkirk)? Fiona finds herself taking unusual measures to determine her verdict — measures that will have far-reaching consequences.
Directed by Richard Eyre (Notes on a Scandal), The Children Act brims with intelligence, sophistication, and intrigue. The elevated tension places unusual focus on its protagonist’s every word and gesture — a challenge Thompson meets with virtuosity. Her Fiona is a cauldron of conflicted feelings bubbling beneath a veneer of composure. As she finds herself sliding deeper into a mire of professional compromise and personal desperation, we come to empathize with her singular burden... and wait for the outcome with keen anticipation.

“The Children Act is that rarest of things: an adult drama, written and interpreted with a sensitivity to mature human concerns.”  – Peter Debruge, Variety


The TRAILER:

September 29th: LEAVE NO TRACE

Leave No Trace

Director: Debra Granik
USA, 2018 English 109 minutes
Principal Cast: Ben Foster, Thomasin McKenzie, Dale Dickey

Following her breakout hit Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace is an intimate and complex coming-of-age story following a father and daughter struggling to maintain their unconventional lifestyle, set against the rugged terrain of the Pacific Northwest.
Will (Ben Foster, Hell or High Water; Kill Your Darlings) is a PTSD-inflicted veteran and widower living off the grid with his daughter, Tom (Thomasin McKenzie, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies), in a public park near Portland. When Tom makes a mistake that alerts the authorities to their existence, the family is removed from the park and placed in a home by state officials. Immersed in a world she has never experienced, Tom is drawn to the friendships, community, and comforts of her new surroundings. Meanwhile, Will is confronted with the triggers of the modern world.
Leave No Trace is a surprisingly endear- ing portrait of a father and daughter forced to contemplate whether family survival means sticking together or letting go. The lush Oregon landscape expertly contrasts the tension-filled narrative, with Foster delivering one of his most memorable performances to date — though it’s McKenzie who truly makes her mark. From the director who launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career, Leave No Trace is sure to make McKenzie a newcomer to watch.

“Once again, Granik introduces us to a kind of fam-ily that cinema rarely captures believably, and she does so with a style that’s both lyrical and realistic at the same time, anchored by a pair of unforgettable performances.”
– Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com

The TRAILER:

September 22nd: HEARTS BEAT LOUD

Hearts Beat Loud

Brett Haley
USA, 2018 English 97 minutes
Principal Cast: Nick Offerman, Kiersey Clemons, Toni Collette, Blythe Danner, Sasha Lane


Frank (Nick Offerman, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl; Danny Collins) owns a record shop in Brooklyn, where his passion for music is still felt through the torn posters on the wall and makeshift record crates. A widower, Frank has raised his daughter, Sam (Kiersey Clemons, The Only Living Boy in New York), alone for the last 11 years, and he’s having trouble coming to terms with her imminent departure for university.

While Sam is taking summer school in preparation, Frank convinces her to take a study break for a jam session, where they create their first original song, “Hearts Beat Loud.” Realizing the song’s potential, Frank uploads it to the internet. When he hears their song playing in a coffee shop, he wants to pursue the band and Sam’s talents as a musician and songwriter. While Sam discourages him, she struggles with leaving in her own ways: her discovery of her passion for music and her relationship with her girlfriend Rose (Sasha Lane, American Honey; The Miseducation of Cameron Post) create emotional turmoil that serve as fodder for her songwriting talents.

Director Brett Haley (I’ll See You in My Dreams; The Hero) moves the audience through emotionally charged moments with beautiful original music written by his longtime collaborator Keegan DeWitt. At the heart of the film is a story about family, saying goodbye, and making way for new beginnings.

“Music is the tie that binds a Brooklyn father and daughter in a film that refuses to go sappy on us thanks to the tough core of intelligence and wit that Nick Offerman brings to the party.”
– Peter Travers,Rolling Stone



The TRAILER: