From Parks And Recreation to Legion, from indie film queen to The Happiest Season, Aubrey Plaza is not done surprising us. Everybody’s favorite late-night talk-show guest and hilarious awards-show host rarely gets to show off the serious roots of her acting chops. Enter Black Bear. The Sundance hit from Lawrence Michael Levine stars Plaza as a former actress on a writing retreat opposite Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon. Further description is not only pointless, it can be detrimental to your enjoyment of the film. Let’s just say it’s worth your time, in large part because of the emotional territory Plaza […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Dec 1, 2020The Villages—a planned retirement community approximately 130,00 strong in Florida—has, its happiest residents say, “everything”: an orthopedic clinic, karate classes, a bank, etc. There’s overlap here with limited American ideas about what, exactly, the Good Life might look like as cruelly/accurately imagined in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, whose community for the shrunk-down to live out the rest of their lives is a strip mall adjacent to character-less suburban sprawl. Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind of Heaven, which explores The Villages through three subjects, isn’t here to either celebrate or roast a community established, as its founder explains in archival footage, to suggest a kind […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2020