Dead Souls review – Alex Cox rides into sunset with anti-Trump spaghetti western

Rotterdam film festival The Repo Man director relocates Gogol’s surreal novella to the old west in what he says will be his final film English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star – an elegant, dapper presence – and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko. The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear. But it is also inspired by the classic novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, a mysterious parable of greed and vanity about a man who travels around offering to buy the souls of dead serfs on various estates in pre-revolutionary Russia so landowners can lower their tax bills, but plans to claim that they are still alive and therefore pass himself off as a wealthy man. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://i...

Mikey Madison: from Tarantino bit part to hot tip for an Oscar playing a sex worker

The actor, who stars in Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner Anora, talks about the reaction of the strip club community to the film, how she managed to learn Russian, and her lucky break in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

You know what it’s like: you’ve ordered an important package, but you can’t be at home when it’s delivered so you ask a friend to take it in for you. So it was for Mikey Madison, except the item was a professional-grade dancer’s pole and the person she co-opted to help out was her father. “I was filming a different project,” says the 25-year-old American actor, “and I said, ‘Dad, can you please install this thing in my house?’ He was like, ‘Of course, sweetie.’ And I think it was good I asked him. He had kind of an idea what the film might be, so he was able to watch it and not be completely surprised.”

That film is Anora, in which Madison stars as an exotic dancer called Ani, a performance that’s already generating lots of talk of a best actress Oscar nomination. Ani is working in a Manhattan strip club one night when she is assigned to entertain the playboy son of an oligarch, Ivan, played by Mark Eidelstein (an actor sometimes described, enticingly, as “Russia’s Timothée Chalamet”). They hit it off and Ivan hires Ani for a week, drastically upending her life: she goes from living in a shared apartment, bickering about why there’s no milk in the fridge, to padding around a mansion with a lift, daily maid service and a cryotherapy chamber. In a fever dream of expensive booze and drugs, the new couple descend on Las Vegas where, almost inevitably, they get married in a chintzy chapel: “Fuck yeah, I do,” Ani tells the registrar.

Continue reading...

from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/veomiE6
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Miracle Club review – Maggie Smith can’t save this rocky road trip to Lourdes

BREAKING: Interstellar back in cinemas due to public demand; Dune: Part Two to also re-release on March 14 in IMAX

‘I lost a friend of almost 40 years’: Nancy Meyers pays tribute to Diane Keaton