To those who follow film, the beginning of November can feel like reaching the top of a roller coaster. Fall marks the beginning of Oscar season, the time of year studios tend to release their most prestigious films in hopes of capturing the hearts (and occasionally short-term memory) of awards voters. With so many films released in such a short span, it’s easy for a casual moviegoer (or even a professional critic!) to feel overwhelmed by the sheer embarrassment of choices. Thankfully, the Independent Film Festival Boston has curated another entry in its annual Fall Focus series. Through Sunday at The Brattle Theatre (plus a closing-night selection Monday at the Somerville Theatre), Fall Focus features preview screenings of more than a dozen of the most enticing upcoming releases. To help you plan your itinerary for the weekend, here are some of the titles we’re most excited about.
‘Nightbitch’ (7 p.m. Thursday, Brattle)
Appropriately enough for a festival beginning on Halloween, the opening-night selection is this much-buzzed-about horror comedy. Based on the cult novel by Rachel Yoder and directed by Marielle Heller (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” in 2018), “Nightbitch” stars Amy Adams as a frustrated suburban mother who begins to suspect she may or may not be turning into a dog. Adams has, of course, developed a reputation as one of the great never-a-brides of the Oscars circuit (she’s been nominated six times without a win), so much of the attention here will be on her feral, tragicomic performance. But if the film is successful in capturing the tone of Yoder’s book – a thorny, magical-realist look at the pain and inequities of motherhood – it may well strike a chord in a moment when issues of feminism and women’s agency within the family are at the forefront of political debate.
‘Devo’ (9 p.m. Friday, Brattle)
If all you know about Devo is “Whip It” and silly hats, this new rockumentary from filmmaker Chris Smith (“American Movie,” 1999) should be an eye-opener. Though often dismissed as a new-wave novelty band, Devo was (and is) a decades-spanning multimedia art project, and its members take their central concept seriously. Founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale met as students at Kent State University, where the massacre of five student protesters (at which both were present) galvanized a worldview that humankind was devolving at an alarming rate. Featuring interviews, rare performance footage and clips from the band’s still-revelatory videos and short films, “Devo” should provide evidence that, now more than ever, we’re all Devo.
‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ (noon Saturday, Brattle)
The story behind Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” is as thrilling as any thriller to come out of Hollywood this year: The director, who had been sentenced to eight years in prison by the Iranian government for his outspokenly political art, shot the entire film in secrecy during his lengthy appeals process, then fled the country on foot with the footage and completed it in exile in Germany. The film, which won the Special Jury Award at this year’s Cannes Festival, is by all accounts just as riveting, mixing documentary and narrative footage in its story of a state investigator (Missagh Zareh) torn between his government and his family. There’s no shortage of daring films coming out this year, but in few cases can it be said that the filmmakers literally risked their life to bring their vision to the screen.
‘Nickel Boys’ (1:45 p.m. Sunday, Brattle)
Documentary filmmaker RaMell Ross (“Hale County This Morning, This Evening”) adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel about centurylong abuses at a segregated reform school in Florida during the 1960s. As with “The Underground Railroad,” Whitehead’s slow twist of the social injustice knife is a mix of true events (the Nickel Academy is a stand-in for the real Dozier School) with some historical reframing to bring home its points. The film centers on Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a Black teen sent to the school for a crime he did not commit. The school in question has two sets of rules, those for white kids (good food, plenty of breaks and recess) and those for Blacks, who are routinely put in the “box,” and many of whom disappear. Ross’ lens is an intoxicating shifting of POVs that look at the hostile and Draconian world through the eyes of Elwood and his bunkmate, Turner (Brandon Wilson). Ross tells the tale with oblique gamesmanship (think “The Zone of Interest” or signature Terrence Malick) and the heavy melancholy tonality of Barry Jenkins’ “If Beale Street Could Talk” (2018). (Tom Meek)
‘The Brutalist’ (6:45 p.m. Monday, Somerville)
Improbably, this is the second sprawling must-see epic about a fictional architect to come out this year, following Francis Ford Coppola’s galaxy-brained magnum opus “Megalopolis.” Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a Hungarian Jew who flees the Holocaust and embarks on a wildly ambitious project in America. “The Brutalist,” from director Brady Corbet, is a wildly ambitious project itself, a VistaVision spectacle so big it requires the 70 mm facilities at the Somerville to do it justice. This is a charged moment for a towering meditation on the American Dream – but then, so was 1972, which draws comparisons to a different Coppola masterpiece. In any event, I’m dying of curiosity to see what Corbet has in store for us. Thanks to the good folks at IFFBoston, I don’t have to wait too much longer.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.