Colette (2018)

Score: 5 / 5

It's the kind of star vehicle Keira Knightley thrives on, but that doesn't make it any less fabulous.

Knightley plays Colette, the titular novelist whose narrative voice frames the film. She introduces the story of a woman whose artistic passions and worldly proclivities have long been denied -- herself. Married off at a young age to influential Parisian writer "Willy", played by Dominic West, she quickly becomes acclimated to bohemian city life where she begins to experiment in writing and in love-making. That is, knowing her philandering husband is on the town and making money off the books she writes (as we know, women couldn't possibly have had their own names published), she decides to name quite a different kind of name for herself.

Colette is the kind of absorbing costume drama we all love, even those of you who say you don't. It's nearly impossible to resist the vibrant colors, exotic accents, erotic play of propriety, and stringed score. Even without the trappings so meticulously detailed, the story itself is intoxicating. This is exactly the kind of wonderfully feminist, queer, and artistic story that will never really get old. Colette's finding herself is our finding ourselves.

We've seen the story before, of course, and we will again. Thankfully, however, like Big Eyes and other recent examples, this film has a joyous ending. Despite its melancholic tribulations typical of any plot, here we have a queer woman who empowers herself absolutely, almost never wavering, and rises victorious above the greedy, stupid men who seek to suck her gifts and abilities dry. Taken in its entirety, Colette is a sumptuous feast for the senses, the intellect, and of course the heart. There's no disdain on my part. This is a great flick.

IMDb: Colette

Still Alice (2014)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Julianne Moore deserves all the praise she got for this movie, but the film itself wasn't nearly as well-received. And I don't know why. Timely, tragic, poignant, and beautiful, Still Alice was perhaps the most emotionally brutal film of last season's Oscar race. Not unlike 2013's similarly underpraised August: Osage County, this film depicts a horror that plagues us all in a manner both iconic and empowering. In our Age of Information, what could be more devastating than a disease that infects our brain and makes us lose sight of our knowledge, experiences, and memories? That is the phenomenon Still Alice seeks to explore.

Moore infuses great charisma and even greater compassion into her character -- who we know from the first scene to be doomed -- and allows us to understand every single step on her complex emotional journey. Her family, including Alec Baldwin, Kate Bosworth, Kristen Stewart, and Hunter Parrish, are no less praiseworthy for their raw reactions and vulnerable sympathies. Writer/directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland wrote an uncommonly intelligent screenplay and directed the film with such an objective approach that the film avoids needless sentimentality.

Perhaps our directors' greatest triumph is in their empathetic approach to such a devastating, terminal disease. They effectively put us inside the protagonist's world, withholding some contextual information from us so that we feel as bewildered as the woman with Alzheimer's. She goes running around her campus (Columbia), and halfway through the background blurs while we zoom in on her face, registering her pain and confusion while being completely unable to help her find her way. Later, she gets lost in her own home when she tries to find the bathroom, in a scene strikingly reminiscent of one in The Judge, and her embarrassment is almost too much to watch.

The climax of the film comes when our hero makes a seemingly foolproof plan to end her own suffering via an overdose of sleeping pills. The directors make a dangerous gamble -- but one that pays off brilliantly -- by infusing the scene with more comedy than in the rest of the film. Poor Moore views the video message (given by herself) but forgets the suicide instructions before she can carry them out. Time and again she tries, until finally she is interrupted by her nurse and spills them. Finally, when the disease has progressed so much as to destroy her ability to speak (did I mention? She's a linguistics professor. Sound like Wit (2001) much?), her aspiring actor daughter (played effectively by Kristen Stewart) reads Angels in America to her. After reading a section, she asks her mother what the monologue was about. "Love" is her response. And as the lights come up in the house, everybody was sobbing.

IMDb: Still Alice