Tag: Matthew Libatique

Film Feature: Carrie and Chris Pick the 2019 Oscars

Film critics Carrie and Chris on who will – and who should – win the 91st Academy Awards

The 91st Academy Awards air this Sunday, February 24th, on ABC at 5:00 pm PST (with the requisite pre-show fashion assessments starting hours before). As they did last year, Spinning Platters film critics Carrie Kahn and Chris Piper share their predictions – and hopes – for the major categories.  Guild awards – often harbingers of Oscars to come – have been all over the map this year, so there may actually be some genuine surprises. Tune in on Sunday to see how things play out, and to find out if we correctly read the minds of Academy voters.

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Film Review: mother!

If a stranger knocks at your front door…

Jennifer Lawrence’s Mother struggles with hostess duties as Javier Bardem’s poet entertains.

Standing before an unpainted bedroom wall, a young and thoroughly domesticated woman ponders which shade of eggshell will look just so. She mixes up a tester, applies a strip, and steps back to regard her work. Elsewhere an older man inhabits his writing study, conjuring magic onto the page and thence to his readers. Later the two will enjoy her hearty meal, and settle into reading by the fire.

But something isn’t right. A sound, or maybe a feeling, forces the woman to cock her ear. She moves as quietly as possible, propelled by a feeling she can’t explain, to peek in on the man. He isn’t writing. He’s just sitting, waiting, watching. Something isn’t right.

Such is the ominous atmosphere of Darren Aronofsky’s latest film mother!, which only partly succeeds, through the use of the horror genre overlaid with biblical themes, at offering a portrait of female anxiety.

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