The Last Jedi builds greatly upon 2015’s The Force Awakens, and as we’re brought up to speed with iconic Jedi du jour Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), the young and Force-friendly Rey (Daisy Ridley) some awkward humor and winning one-liners (Rey quips to Luke, trying to get his tutelage “I’ve seen your schedule, you’re not busy!”), and some pervasive porgs, Johnson also gives us the best directed film in the franchise to date.
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Writer-director Rian Johnson delivers a Star Wars film that is everything a blockbuster should be exciting, unpredictable, and above all, fun. Here the teachers, led by Miss Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) and students (including Elle Fanning and Angourie Rice) seem more than willing to help and soon, sexual tensions give way to dangerous rivalries in a film that so often, even surreally, moves and swirls like a subjugated fairy tale. Set in Virginia during the Civil War, The Beguiled finds the desperate Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell), an injured Union soldier and a deserter seeking refuge at an all-female Southern boarding school. Cullinan’s 1966 novel “A Painted Devil”, Coppola (who also wrote the screenplay and won the Best Director Award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival) smartly and slowly unravels her tale via the female gaze in a film that, if one is patient with it, slowly pulls you under its sunlit and fainéant spell. Ostensibly both a remake of the Southern Gothic erotic thriller by Don Siegel from 1971 and also an adaptation of Thomas P. “I loved the sexual repression under the high lacy collars in the heat of the South, and how under all the melodrama, there were themes I could relate to about the power struggle between men and women,” writes director Sofia Coppola in the LA Times of her award-winning film, The Beguiled, adding: “…I loved that the story was about hierarchies in groups of women, something I’ve looked at with my earlier work.” Without further ado, let the roundup commence, and in 2018 let’s catch up in the queue and compare notes, shall we? Enjoy! The auteur is alive and well, arthouse and blockbusters are plentiful, documentary films are on fire, genre films are stronger than ever, and let’s just echo it all once more for posterity: female-led projects are popular, bankable, and breathtaking, as are strong women characters.
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So many of our favorite films from 2017 feature brilliant women either in front of the lens or behind it –– from Wonder Woman to Rumble to Lady Macbeth to Lady Bird to Faces Places to The Beguiled –– what phenomenal females!īeyond that, just a cursory glance at the titles assembled here in our 30 Best Movies of 2017 (and do please note that narrowing the titles down to a workable 30 titles was no small feat –– I cringe at the many worthy films that didn’t make the cut, and a lengthy Honorable Mentions section aims to tow the line) shows a wonderful and wide-ranging miscellany.
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With the gender balance being bravely argued it is with joy that a suiting Hollywood ending be reflected in Taste of Cinema’s year end roundup. The bright lights in Tinseltown were especially revealing in 2017, not only displaying the cinematic spectacles that the motion picture industry is famous for but also, as the story of the year boldly blazons, but avowing the predators who have toiled there for too long.