In high school, writer/director/producer Paul Thomas Anderson made a short mockumentary about an adult film star. Less than ten years later, he expanded that project into one of the best films of the 1990s. That film is the 1997 classic Boogie Nights. Combining Anderson’s visionary directing with excellent performances from the entire cast, the result […]
Set in the early 2000s, Freeheld is the story of Laurel Hester (Julianne Moore), a New Jersey police detective and in-the-closet lesbian who has kept her sexual orientation secret from her partner, Dane Wells (Michael Shannon), for all her years on the force. She meets Stacie Andree (Ellen Page), a much younger lesbian and the […]
Still Alice begins before its titular character’s diagnosis, but the signs of her early-onset Alzheimer’s are already noticeable. The film is straightforward and unsentimental from the onset in portraying the unrelenting effects of the disease, and its tragic inevitability makes the film brutally simple and moving. Alice (Julianne Moore) is a linguistic professor and renowned […]