Jessica Chastain – Spinning Platters

Film Review: “The Good Nurse”

A bad nurse rising: Horrifying true story becomes chilling thriller

ICU night shift nursing colleagues Charlie (Eddie Redmayne) and Amy (Jessica Chastain) become close friends.

Anyone who has ever spent any significant time in a hospital knows how much blind faith patients put in the medical staff. You’re sick or injured and helpless and scared: you not only trust the doctors and nurses caring for you, but you’re beyond grateful to them for helping you get healthy and back to your life. But what if a nurse didn’t have your best interest at heart, but the exact opposite? Suddenly the hospital would no longer be a safe space of healing and comfort, but a house of horrors. Such is the chilling premise of the terrific new film The Good Nurse.

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Film Review: “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”

The eyes have it: Chastain shines in Bakker biopic

Andrew Garfield is Jim Bakker and Jessica Chastain is Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

“If you follow blindly, in the end all you are is blind,” Tammy Faye Bakker’s mother Rachel tells her daughter in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. As directed by Michael Showalter (The Big Sick; Hello My Name is Doris), the film, while heavy on the eye imagery, largely glosses over just how blind Tammy Faye actually was to her husband Jim’s defrauding of the couple’s vast televangelist ministry. Nevertheless, the picture is still a lot of fun, and features a showstopping turn from a nearly unrecognizable Jessica Chastain as Tammy Faye.

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Film Review: The Zookeeper’s Wife

Profiles in courage: Inspiring true WWII story worth seeing

Antonina (Jessica Chastain) and her husband Jan (Johan Heldenbergh) face danger as they undertake a heroic humanitarian mission during the German occupation of Warsaw.

Another film to consider in the context of Passover, but for entirely different, and far more somber, reasons happens to open the same day as In Search of Israeli Cuisine. The eve of Passover on April 19, 1943 marked the burning and total destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto by Nazi forces, in which, over the course of a month, despite a valiant uprising, thousands of mostly Jewish Ghetto occupants were either killed or deported to concentration camps. That horrific incident is one of many detailed in The Zookeeper’s Wife, a well-crafted, emotionally powerful film that tells a true story of resistance and selfless heroism in Warsaw during World War II.
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Film Review: Miss Sloane

Dark look at American politics also a top notch thriller

An emotionally fragile Esme (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, l.) is coached by her unflappable mentor and boss Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain).

When a line is repeated more than once in a film – especially in a film that is a high stakes political thriller – you know the screenwriter is giving you a clue to the film’s secrets. So when ruthless political lobbyist Elizabeth Sloane (a fierce Jessica Chastain) tells us that “lobbying is about foresight, about anticipating your opponent’s moves, and devising counter measures…. It’s about making sure you surprise them, and they don’t surprise you,” take it to heart as you study the machinations of the dueling lobbyists in Miss Sloane, director John Madden’s smart, absorbing new drama.
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Film Review: The Martian

Scott captures our imagination with riveting survival story

Abandoned astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) checks out his Martian surroundings.

No movie better exemplifies Kurt Vonnegut’s assertion that “science is magic that works” than Ridley Scott’s engaging new film The Martian. Based on Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, Scott’s picture is less a fantastical science fiction story like his Alien or Blade Runner, and more a pure and utterly gripping survival story, in the vein of pictures like Castaway or even 127 Hours. Only here, our hero isn’t trapped somewhere with the luxury of oxygen like a canyon in Utah or a remote tropical island, but years away from any human help, alone in outer space, on the inhospitable planet Mars.

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Film Review: A Most Violent Year

Top-notch thriller explores the underside of the American dream

Oscar Isaac’s Abel and Jessica Chastain’s Anna discuss their business problems.

Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac were overlooked during yesterday’s Oscar nominations, which is a bit disheartening, since they both give tremendous performances in writer/director J.C. Chandor’s newest film, A Most Violent Year (which opened in New York and L.A. in December, making it eligible for this year’s Oscars). Chandor, whose previous pictures include the pulse-quickening, terrific Margin Call and last year’s lost-at-sea thriller All is Lost, is a master at pulling his audience into a visceral time and place, and his skill remains exceptionally sharp, as evidenced here in his latest film.

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Film Review: Interstellar

A space opera. A sci-fi blockbuster. A heavy hitter. Just enjoy the ride.

Matthew McConaughey gives the thumbs up to space travel.

*NOTICE: Many people have tried tirelessly to avoid exposure to any spoilers or plot details (or anything, really) regarding Interstellar. I found it hard to write about Interstellar without mentioning ‘anything, really’, so be forewarned*

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