The Barbie movie has been one of the more intriguing events in recent popular culture. The fact that it’s based on a doll designed for pre-tween children but has a trailer with adult humour and ideas, makes this a complex, uncertain and slightly unsettling prospect before the opening titles roll. Is this a cleverly subversive feminist satire of a female
Read moreLittle Women, directed by Greta Gerwig, is the seventh cinema adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s bestselling semi-autobiographical 1868 novel; the first film version having appeared in 1917. Gerwig’s adaptation, like Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version, intelligently combines historical fiction, romance, comedy, tragedy and feminism for a very pleasing, if at times slow-moving film. Little Women tells the story of the March
Read moreAs an actress Great Gerwig has defined screwball quirkiness in a series of wryly amusing, at times poignant roles in films from directors such as partner Noah Baumbach. Now she takes the reins as both writer and director in the yes, very quirky but charming and often touching teen dramedy Ladybird. Like a younger incarnation of the director, Saoirse Ronin
Read moreSomewhere between endearingly quirky and irritatingly pretentious writer director Rebecca Miller’s Maggie’s Plan is the latest in what could be termed the alternative rom-com genre, a filmmaking style typified by the works of Noah Baumbach. It’s also part of that growing cinematic sub-genre, the Greta Gerwig film, in which Gerwig plays the lovably ditzy but still capable and philosophical young
Read moreImagine Bridget Jones’s Diary and Zooey Deschanel’s TV show New Girl filtered through the mind of Woody Allen and you would have ultra-quirky, 20-something comedy Frances Ha. Greta Gerwig plays the ditzy, flaky title character, a 27-year-old woman who floats through her quasi-hipster life in New York City hoping to make it as a professional dancer. With almost no money
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