Tag Archives: rebecca hall

NETFLIX’S PASSING: SCREENING AND CONVERSATION

Who: Rebecca Hall, Ruth Negga, André Holland, David Nugent
What: Screening and conversation
Where: 92nd St. Y, 1395 Lexington Ave. at 92nd St., Buttenwieser Hall and 92Y online
When: Friday, December 3, $25 in person, 6:30; $20 online, 8:20
Why: In her directorial debut, Passing, award-winning actress Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Machinal) makes her father, the late Sir Peter Hall of the RSC and the National Theatre, proud. The black-and-white Netflix drama stars Tessa Thompson as Irene “Reenie” Redfield, a Black woman living in Harlem who meets up with an old friend, Clare Kendry (Ruth Negga), who is living her life passing as a white woman. Although Reenie is uncomfortable with Clare’s decision, she takes advantage of certain situations where she can pass as well. As Clare starts spending more time with Reenie, her secret threatens to be exposed. Set during the Harlem Renaissance, the tense, beautifully photographed Passing, based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, also features André Holland as Reenie’s husband, Brian Redfield, Alexander Skarsgård as Clare’s bigoted spouse, John Bellew, and Bill Camp as Hugh Wentworth, a friend and mentor to Reenie. On December 3, the 92nd St. Y is hosting a rescheduled hybrid event in which the Ethiopian-Irish Negga (Loving, Shirley), Alabama-born Holland (Selma, Moonlight), and London native Hall will screen and discuss the film with Hamptons International Film Festival artistic director David Nugent at Buttenwieser Hall; the conversation can be livestreamed beginning at 8:20.

NYFF59: THE FIFTY-NINTH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand star in Joel Coen’s NYFF59 opener, The Tragedy of Macbeth

FIFTY-NINTH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, Howard Gilman Theater, Francesca Beale Theater, Alice Tully Hall, Damrosch Park, and other venues
September 24 – October 10, $17-$25
www.filmlinc.org/nyff2021

For its fifty-ninth year, the New York Film Festival, running September 24 through October 10, returns in person, primarily at five venues at Lincoln Center but also with a handful of satellite screenings at Anthology Film Archives downtown, BAM Cinemas in Fort Greene, the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, and the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville.

The opening-night selection is the hotly anticipated The Tragedy of Macbeth, Joel Coen’s Shakespeare adaptation starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as the ambitious couple seeking power at all costs. Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, a neo-Western based on a cult novel by Thomas Savage and with Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Benedict Cumberbatch, is the centerpiece choice. The closing-night selection is festival favorite Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, in which two women, played by Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit, meet in a maternity ward in a story about pain and trauma.

The main slate features a wide range of works from international directors; among the highlights are Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, which takes place on Fårö, where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked; Gaspar Noé’s tender Vortex; Futura, an Italian omnibus by Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher; Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, about a real-life seventeenth-century nun; Radu Jude’s Golden Bear winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn; Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, inspired by a Haruki Murakami short story; Rebecca Hall’s Passing, an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 Harlem Renaissance novel; Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman, in which an eight-year-old girl deals with loss; Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s sci-fi punk musical Neptune Frost; and Hit the Road, the debut of Panah Panahi, son of fest fave Jafar Pahanhi.

Fans of Lou Reed can check out Todd Haynes’s new documentary, The Velvet Underground, about the revolutionary band, as well as Songs for Drella, Ed Lachman’s 1990 concert film of Reed and John Cale’s song cycle for Andy Warhol. Apichatpong Weerasethakul is back at the festival with Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton as an ex-pat botanist, and the short film Night Colonies, part of Currents Program 7: New Sensations. And unstoppable South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo has a pair of Main Slate films, In Front of Your Face and Introduction.

Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is part of NYFF59 Revivals

Among the other works in the Currents section, focusing on socially relevant fiction and nonfiction films, are Wang Qiong’s All About My Sisters, Denis Côté’s Social Hygiene, Shengze Zhu’s A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces, and Claire Simon’s I Want to Talk About Duras. Revivals include Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street, Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Miklós Jancsó’s The Round-Up, Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s Sundance winner Chameleon Street, Jack Hazan and David Mingay’s Rude Boy starring the Clash, and Christine Choy’s Who Killed Vincent Chin?

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune leads the Spotlight section, along with Marco Bellocchio’s Marx Can Wait, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut The Lost Daughter, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, and Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon, with Joaquin Phoenix. And finally, NYFF59 pays tribute to the centenary of cofounder Amos Vogel’s birth with a seven-program Spotlight sidebar consisting of cutting-edge, avant-garde, experimental shorts and features Vogel brought to Cinema 16 from 1947 to 1963 and the New York Film Festival between 1963 and 1968.

ANIMAL

Rebecca Hall is mesmerizing as a woman battling a sudden mental illness in Animal (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Atlantic Stage 2
330 West 16th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 2, $60
atlantictheater.org

Rebecca Hall gives a blistering performance as a woman struggling to deal with debilitating anxiety in Olivier Award-winning director and playwright Clare Lizzimore’s Animal, which opened last night at Atlantic’s Stage 2 theater. The intimate, emotionally involving play takes place on Obie-winning designer Rachel Hauck’s spare set, a small, horizontal space where the characters occasionally bring in a few chairs or a table, the audience of ninety-eight sitting in a handful of rows on opposite sides of the room. Hall is Rachel, a young woman who is suffering from mental illness brought on by an unnamed incident. About to visit a doctor, she asks her worried husband, Tom (Morgan Spector), “What if my thoughts change?” wondering if he will leave her. “Then good,” he responds supportively. “That’s what thoughts are supposed to do.” Rachel is seeing a psychiatrist, Stephen (Greg Heller), in the belief that she just needs the doctor to sign off on a piece of paper that will allow her to go back to work and resume a normal, healthy life. “The ultimate aim is for you to be able to stand in the middle of a storm, be buffeted on every side by the world, but remain centered,” Stephen says, explaining that there is no simple form for him to fill out and that it will take more sessions and complete honesty for her to get better. Back home, Rachel has trouble helping Tom take care of his ailing mother (Kristin Griffith), who is confined to a wheelchair. Meanwhile, a mild-mannered stranger named Dan (David Pegram) breaks into the house, titillating Rachel even as she demands him to leave. Rachel wants to pretend that she’s fine, that she’s ready to rejoin life, but deep down she knows that there is something that she is refusing to face. “I’m crying at counters, weeping into the arms of the checkout girls, not ’cause I’m sad, or depressed or — ’cause I hate myself,” she tells Stephen, whom at one point she envisions as a little girl (Fina Strazz). Rachel’s inability to separate fantasy from reality leads to a shocking, unforgettable conclusion.

Tom (Morgan Spector) and Rachel (Rebecca Hall) try to save their marriage in New York premiere of Clare Lizzimore’s Animal (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Animal is a beautifully perceptive play, as Lizzimore (The Mint, The Rage) and director Gaye Taylor Upchurch (The Last Match, The Year of Magical Thinking) wade through the morass of one woman’s severe mental illness. However, there are more than a few bumpy patches, particularly when Rachel and Tom, at opposite sides of the stage, pick up microphones and speak as if they’re suddenly absurdist confessional comics, and there are a few instances where the dialogue lapses into more of a graduate school thesis than dramatic narrative. Heller ( The Who and the What, Belleville) is excellent as Stephen, soft and gentle with the extremely fragile Rachel while not being afraid to occasionally challenge her. But the play belongs to Hall (Machinal, As You Like It), who is mesmerizing as Rachel, a woman who doesn’t understand why she has fallen apart. Throughout the eighty-five-minute play, she wears the same loose-fitting gray sweats, hoodie, and ever-present tight hat — as if she’s physically keeping her pain inside her. The revelation at the end is no mere gimmick or M. Night Shyamalan gotcha; rather, it is a surprise that one doesn’t see coming, much like mental illness itself.

TRANSCENDENCE

Johnny Depp plays a scientist who has more than just his eyes on the future of artificial intelligence in TRANSCENDENCE

TRANSCENDENCE (Wally Pfister, 2014)
Opens Friday, April 18
www.transcendencemovie.com

In 2005, futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, forecasting the next stages of artificial intelligence and its effects on humanity. That idea is taken to a whole new level in Wally Pfister’s overblown and ultimately ridiculous Transcendence. Johnny Depp stars as Dr. Will Caster, an AI expert targeted by R.I.F.T. (Revolutionary Independence from Technology), a terrorist group led by Bree (Kate Mara) that is calling for “Evolution without Technology.” After a conference, Will is shot, and his wife, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), and best friend, Max (Paul Bettany), consider uploading Will’s brain into his supercomputer, PINN (Physically Independent Neural Network), before he dies. While Evelyn wants to keep her lover alive any way possible, Max considers the potential ramifications if they succeed. And succeed they do, beyond their wildest expectations — and far beyond any kind of plausibility, leaving the audience openmouthed in amazement.

Max Waters (Paul Bettany) and Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall) meld man and machine in sci-fi thriller

Oscar-winning cinematographer Pfister has shot most of Christopher Nolan’s visually dynamic films, including Memento, Inception, and the Batman reboot, but his first directing foray is a major disappointment after a promising beginning. Written by debut screenwriter Jack Paglen and photographed by Jess Hall (The Spectacular Now, Hot Fuzz), Transcendence, of course, looks great, although its visual splendor becomes repetitive as the film reaches new levels of stupidity. Even the cast, which also includes Morgan Freeman as a sage research scientist, Cillian Murphy as an FBI agent, and Cole Hauser as a military officer, seems more and more disoriented as Pfister and Paglen deliver a frustrating mess that, for good and, mostly, bad, evokes such genre classics and cult favorites as Demon Seed, Colossus: The Forbin Project, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Her, Donovan’s Brain, Night of the Living Dead, and, yes, They Saved Hitler’s Brain. Transcendence is an ever-more-absurd Orwellian nightmare headed by a power-mad twenty-first-century HAL 9000, another attempt at portraying man as God for the umpteenth time since the original Frankenstein, and a stupefying failure at that.

MACHINAL

A young stenographer (Rebecca Hall) imagines a bleak future ahead in Sophie Treadwell’s MACHINAL (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 2, $52-$127
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

Inspired by the true story of Ruth Snyder, journalist and playwright Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal is back on Broadway for the first time since it bowed at the Plymouth Theatre in 1928. The highly mannered, expressionist work sets the tense tone from the very start, as a young woman (Rebecca Hall) feels trapped on a crowded subway train, pushing her way through the mass of mostly male straphangers to get out and catch her breath. Es Devlin’s sensational four-sided set then rotates to an office, where a quartet of workers (Ashley Bell, Ryan Dinning, Edward James Hyland, and Henny Russell, who all play multiple roles) are performing their menial tasks and gossiping about the young woman, Miss A, and the boss, George H. Jones (Michael Cumpsty), in rhythmic, staccato language. Mr. J, a boring blowhard who speaks in clichés and tells the same stories over and over again, has proposed to Miss A, and after arriving at work late, she soon lets loose a machine-gun soliloquy of inner turmoil that begins, “Marry me – wants to marry me – George H Jones – George H Jones and Company – Mrs George H Jones – Mrs George H Jones. Dear Madame – marry – do you take this man to be your wedded husband – I do – to love honor and to love – kisses – no – I can’t – George H Jones – How would you like to marry me – What do you say – Why Mr Jones I – let me look at your little hands – you have such pretty little hands – let em hold your pretty little hands – George H Jones – Fat hands – flabby hands – don’t touch me – please – fat hands are never weary – please don’t – married – all girls – most girls – married – babies – a baby – curls – little curls all.” Upon returning home, she discusses the marriage proposal with her mother (Suzanne Bertish). While the young woman admits she doesn’t love Mr. J, her mother blurts out, “Love! — what does that amount to? Will it clothe you? Will it feed you? Will it pay the bills?” Their debate occasionally fades into the background as a series of brief interludes play out to their right and left in which neighborhood couples are immersed in their own issues of love, romance, and fidelity. Ultimately, Miss A decides to go ahead with the marriage, and it isn’t long before she feels trapped yet again, now with a child to raise as well, and she considers cavorting with a hunky adventurer (Morgan Spector), a decision that ultimately leads to tragedy.

Miss A considers straying from her expected, straightforward path in Roundabout Revival (photo by Joan Marcus)

Machinal is told in nine episodes, which have such titles as “To Business,” “Home,” “Honeymoon,” “Prohibited,” and “Intimate,” essentially following the expected path of women in the 1920s, one that handcuffs Miss A. The play tries to contemporize the plight of women but, under the direction of Lindsey Turner (Chimera, Posh), it can’t break out of the overall feeling of being too dated and old-fashioned. In her long-awaited Broadway debut, Hall (The Town, As You Like It at BAM) plays the young woman with an elegiac tone, as if her life is already a lost cause simply because of her sex; born at the wrong time, she is likely to have thrived in the modern era. Cumpsty (The Winslow Boy, End of the Rainbow) gives the stuffed-shirt husband a sympathetic sadness, while Spector (Harvey, A View from the Bridge) is the polar opposite, bold and sexy as the potential lover, a role originated by Clark Gable. But the real star of the Roundabout revival is Devlin’s rotating set, which, as it turns, includes momentary interstitial scenes that immerse the audience in 1920s New York, along with costumes (by Michael Krass) and lighting (by Jane Cox) that bathe the production in black, white, and gray, illuminating Miss A’s drab, colorless life.

A VIEW FROM THE VAULTS — WARNER BROS. TODAY: THE TOWN

Claire (Rebecca Hall) and Doug (Ben Affleck) have a complicated relationship in THE TOWN

THE TOWN (Ben Affleck, 2010)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, July 19, 7:30, and Monday, August 5, 6:30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.thetownmovie.warnerbros.com

Ben Affleck, who displayed great skill as a director in his debut feature, 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, did it again with his follow-up, the romantic thriller The Town. Affleck, who also cowrote the script, stars as Doug MacRay, the leader of a small group of bank robbers in tough Charlestown, Massachusetts, the bank robbery capital of America. As the film opens, the thieves are just hitting a bank and are forced to take a hostage, manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall). After later letting her go unharmed, they soon realize that she lives in their neighborhood and might be able to recognize one of them, so Doug starts hanging around her, pretending to be interested in her so he can tap her for information. Meanwhile, Boston cop Dino (Titus Welliver) and FBI Special Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm) are getting closer to the gang, who continue to pull off daring heists regardless of the heat on them. Although there are a handful of plot holes you could drive an armored truck through, The Town ends up being a compelling action film and love story, with car chases, massive shootouts, and a tender relationship as Doug begins to fall for Claire, and vice versa, even though the truth threatens to blow everything apart. Also threatening to blow everything apart is Doug’s right-hand man, Jem (Jeremy Renner, channeling James Cagney in White Heat), who likes hurting and killing way too much. Affleck, who as a director allows his actors a large amount of freedom, has gotten fine performances across the board; the cast also includes Pete Postlethwaite as an underworld florist, Chris Cooper as Doug’s long-incarcerated father, Blake Lively as a drug-dealing tramp, and Boston rapper Slaine, who contributed songs to the soundtrack as well. The film, based on the Chuck Hogan novel Prince of Thieves, also benefits from Affleck’s genuine affection for the place where he grew up, shooting on location and setting the finale in a world-famous landmark. It’s been fascinating watching Affleck come of age in public, from his early days acting in such films as School Ties, Mall Rats, and Dazed and Confused to his wildly successful directing career, with his third film, Argo, being named Best Picture at this year’s Oscars. The Town is screening July 19 and August 5 as part of the MoMA series “A View from the Vaults: Warner Bros. Today,” consisting of thirty-one films from the last twenty years of movies coming out of the famed studio, including the Harry Potter, Dark Knight, and Lord of the Ring series as well as such wide-ranging fare as Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, Ted Braun’s Darfur Now, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, Todd Phillips’s The Hangover, and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen.

RIVERFLICKS FOR GROWN-UPS: THE TOWN

Claire (Rebecca Hall) and Doug (Ben Affleck) have a complicated relationship in THE TOWN

THE TOWN (Ben Affleck, 2010)
Pier 63 Lawn, Hudson River Park
Cross at West 22nd or 24th St.
Wednesday, August 17, free, 8:30
www.hudsonriverpark.org
www.thetownmovie.warnerbros.com

Ben Affleck, who displayed great skill as a director in his debut feature, 2007’s Gone, Baby, Gone, has done it again with his follow-up, the romantic thriller The Town. Affleck, who also cowrote the script, stars as Doug MacRay, the leader of a small group of bank robbers in tough Charlestown, Massachusetts, the bank robbery capital of America. As the film opens, the thieves are just hitting a bank and are forced to take a hostage, manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall). After later letting her go unharmed, they soon realize that she lives in their neighborhood and might be able to recognize one of them, so Doug starts hanging around her, pretending to be interested in her so he can tap her for information. Meanwhile, Boston cop Dino (Titus Welliver) and FBI Special Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm) are getting closer to the gang, who continue to pull off daring heists regardless of the heat on them. Although there are a handful of plot holes you could drive an armored truck through, The Town ends up being a compelling action film and love story, with car chases, massive shootouts, and a tender relationship as Doug begins to fall for Claire, and vice versa, even though the truth threatens to blow everything apart. Also threatening to blow everything apart is Doug’s right-hand man, Jem (Jeremy Renner, channeling James Cagney in White Heat), who likes hurting and killing way too much. Affleck, who as a director allows his actors a large amount of freedom, has gotten fine performances across the board; the cast also includes Pete Postlethwaite as an underworld florist, Chris Cooper as Doug’s long-incarcerated father, Blake Lively as a drug-dealing tramp, and Boston rapper Slaine, who contributed songs to the soundtrack as well. The film, based on the Chuck Hogan novel Prince of Thieves, also benefits from Affleck’s genuine affection for the place where he grew up, shooting on location and setting the finale in a world-famous landmark. The Town is screening August 17 in Hudson River Park as the last entry in the free Wednesday night RiverFlicks for Grown-ups series, with free popcorn. For a complete list of free outdoor summer films throughout the city, click here.