Cinematically, Yours
This Week’s Movie Reviews
TÁR & Till

Cate Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly being in motion. In TÁR, she's as inscrutable as ever.

     After a sixteen year absence from the screen, writer-director Todd Field (IN THE BEDROOM, LITTLE CHILDREN) returns with TÁR, which has garnered rave reviews and a six-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. Blanchett stars as Lydia Tár, a groundbreaking orchestra conductor whom we meet as she's preparing for her much anticipated performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony. But her life begins to unravel in a singularly modern way. TÁR riffs brilliantly on the discordant side of fame-fueled power. "The movie belongs to Blanchett, in a turn so exacting and enormous that is feels less like a performance than full-body possession." -Entertainment Weekly. TÁR opens in the Rose this Friday, 10/28. As this will be a popular movie, and we are still at reduced seating, advance tickets are advised.

     TILL reminds us that before Emmett Till's barbaric murder in Mississippi in 1955 by white supremacists, he was a 14-year-old boy with a doting mother. Director Chinonye Chukwa's haunted and haunting film doesn't show Till's torture and death, "a decision that is a clear, empathically ethical artistic choice." (NY Times). Instead, Chukwa focuses on Emmett's widowed mother Mamie (a superb Danielle Deadwyler), as she's swept up in a larger national civil rights drama.

     In March Congress finally approved a bill - known as the "Emmett Till Antilynching Act" - making lynching a federal hate crime. Nearly 70 years after his death, his legacy and body remain contested ground. "In the end, what makes "Till" cut deeply is Chukwu's insistence that before Emmett was a victim of pathological racism and an emblem for change, he was a boy, a friend, a cousin, a grandson, and Mamie's son - a beautiful, loving and loved child." TILL opens in the Starlight Room Friday. Advance tickets well advised. 

     It's not just Halloween, but the 100th anniversary of NOSFERATU, considered to be the most unsettling vampire movies of all time. It plays in the Starlight this Saturday night at 7:30, and tickets are selling fast. 

     BONNIE AND CLYDE was one of the seminal movies from the '60s that ushered in a new revolution in Hollywood. It remains as vital and exhilarating today as when it was released in 1967. It's our classic feature in the Starlight Sunday; only 12 tickets remaining.

Cinematically Yours,
Rocky