Joey Magidson
Welcome back to my Home Movies! Today, we have another rough week, though it’s quality over quantity. Leading the way is the independent drama Cowboys, as well as a pair of strong new Criterion Collection releases. Aside from that, there’s…not much. Oh well. Read on for more!
Joey’s Top Pick
Cowboys
A Tribeca Film Festival award winner, Cowboys is the sort of indie that too few see, and that’s a shame. Jillian Bell and Steve Zahn impressively stretch themselves, while filmmaker Anna Kerrigan showcases some major talent. We spoke to Kerrigan here about her movie, and she sells it quite well. So too did our own Mitchell, with their rave review, right here on the site:
Winner of the U.S. Narrative Best Screenplay and Best Actor awards from last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, writer/director Anna Kerrigan has delivered a touching story of a family struggling through complex issues with Cowboys, her sophomore feature. Set in the Montana wilderness, the movie concerns a father, Troy (Steve Zahn, that Best Actor winner), and mother, Sally (Jillian Bell), who have opposing reactions when their assigned female at birth child, Joe (Sasha Knight), reveals that he is a transgender boy. As Troy begins to deal with mental illness on top of the already simmering tensions, this family’s difficulties only seem to escalate, until Troy makes a decision that will irrevocably change everything.
Also Available This Week
Ottolenghi & The Cakes of Versailles
Vanquish
Criterion Corner
Irma Vep
From The Criterion Collection: “Olivier Assayas’s live-wire international breakthrough stars a magnetic Maggie Cheung as a version of herself: a Hong Kong action-movie star who arrives in Paris to play the latex-clad lead in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic silent crime serial Les vampires. What she finds is a behind-the-scenes tangle of barely controlled chaos as egos clash, romantic attractions simmer, and an obsessive director (a cannily cast Jean-Pierre Léaud) drives himself to the brink to realize his vision. Blending blasts of silent cinema, martial-arts flicks, and the music of Sonic Youth and Luna into a hallucinatory swirl of postmodern cool, Assayas composes in Irma Vep a witty critique of the nineties French film industry and the perennial tension between art and commercial entertainment.”
Masculin féminin
From The Criterion Collection: “With Masculin féminin, ruthless stylist and iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard introduces the world to “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” through a gang of restless youths engaged in hopeless love affairs with music, revolution, and one another. French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud stars as Paul, an idealistic would-be intellectual struggling to forge a relationship with the adorable pop star Madeleine (real-life yé-yé girl Chantal Goya). Through their tempestuous affair, Godard fashions a candid and wildly funny free-form examination of youth culture in pulsating 1960s Paris, mixing satire and tragedy as only Godard can.”
Stay tuned for more next week!
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