The new films that need to be added to your spring watchlist ASAP
April 15, 2021 7:11 pm
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Still trying to get a booking at the best rooftop bars for a post-lockdown pint? Worry not, because we’ve rounded up the best new films to watch this spring to keep you entertained in the meantime.
From Kate Winslet’s incredible portrayal of groundbreaking palaeontologist Mary Anning in Ammonite, to Carey Mulligan’s turn as a revenge-seeking college dropout in the much-anticipated Promising Young Woman (directed by none other than The Crown’s very own Camilla Parker-Bowles), here are the best films spring 2021 has to offer.
French Exit
With the adjective “French” in the title French Exit, much more can be expected than someone just leaving a country. With existential echoes and philosophical attitude the French can have over a croissant, an audience can see where writer Patrick DeWitt and director Azazel Jacobs are going in this low-key drawing-room comedy.
The glamorous Michell Pfeiffer plays sixty-year-old former Manhattan socialite Frances, who encourages thoughts that go from the losses aging brings to the mortality ultimately reserved for all. She has lost her wealthy businessman husband, Franklin (voice of Tracy Letts), who returns with the help of randy seer Madeleine the Medium (Danielle Macdonald) in the form of a black cat (yes, the occult element is one of the lighter elements of a film, described as a comedy but really a darkly and quietly humorous melodrama). Call it a farce because it’s French, but don’t expect to laugh much.
A haughty Michelle Pfeiffer can t quite save eccentric French Exit Lucas Hedges in Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges in
French Exit.
Photo by Tobias Datum / courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics Movies directed by Woody Allen have fallen out of favor in recent years as the man himself has been increasingly shunned in the #MeToo era. But the style that the writer/director perfected in movies like
Annie Hall,
Hannah and Her Sisters, and
Bullets Over Broadway has remained a draw for filmmakers, who often view his dry humor and witty repartee as something to be admired and emulated. That spirit, if not success, is alive in
Movie review: Michelle Pfeiffer leads a fine cast in French Exit
Moira Macdonald, The Seattle Times
Patrick deWitt s delightful novel French Exit, about an eccentric Manhattan widow and her grown son who cope with impending bankruptcy by fleeing to Paris, screamed to be made into a movie. When I reviewed the book in 2018, I imagined Meryl Streep and Paul Dano in the starring roles, and wrote that the film s tone surely would be funny, quirky, unpredictable; its style would have a certain faded glamour, a winking je ne sais quoi. Three years later, here s the movie, and well, I was wrong.
Review: Michelle Pfeiffer has a feast with ‘French Exit’
Michelle Pfeiffer, left, and Susan Coyne in a scene from French Exit. (Jerome Prebois/Sony Pictures Classics via AP)
Published April 08. 2021 11:07AM
By LINDSEY BAHR, Associated Press Get the weekly rundown Email Submit
Is there any living actor better at the disdainful eye roll than Michelle Pfeiffer? Her latest turn in “ French Exit ” should end all debate on the matter. The film itself is a bit of an odd duckling. It’s arch, cold and self-consciously contrived, works more often than it doesn’t. Pfeiffer is flawless in her most delicious performance in years as a New York society woman who has, much to her aloof annoyance, run out of money.