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Sydney Morning Herald
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
A bad thing happened to Eva Victor. What followed was very good indeed
At the dark centre of Agnes' life in Sorry, Baby is The Bad Thing. It is never named, but it involves her academic supervisor, an essay to be discussed after hours, a day that turns into evening. We see the curtains being pulled shut behind the windows of a pleasantly bohemian house – his house – with her inside it, but we don't get past the doorstep. What happens inside remains behind that closed door. Afterwards, we move forward with Agnes – by days, months, years – during which she is promoted to a junior professorship, keeps her panic attacks mostly private, gets a cat, is sometimes very funny, and hurts all the time. Eva Victor's muted, witty debut film was an immediate standout at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where it was picked up by the arthouse disruptor A24 for an estimated $US8million, and where Victor won the prestigious Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Victor, hitherto an actor best known for playing a supporting role in Billions, plays Agnes as well as directing. Their presence on screen underlines the personal urgency of the story. How much is autobiographical remains part of the blurry hinterland of the creative process. Victor has never worked in academia, certainly, but has still captured with sharp accuracy the bitter competition for tenure and a corner office. What feels most emotionally immediate, however, with the full force of personal testimony, is whatever happened behind that closed door. Eva Victor is 31, was born in Paris, grew up in San Francisco and went to a French-language school, where they had a classic adolescent engagement with existentialism. 'I remember reading Camus' The Stranger and thinking, 'Yeah, everything sucks',' they told Variety. 'And I just felt seen.' There was a gradual queer coming-out during university and Victor now identifies as non-binary, using both 'she' and 'they' pronouns. 'Non-binary for me has always been the space in-between,' they told Vogue. 'And that's the thing that people are really uncomfortable with. The idea of, 'I can't totally figure you out.' But it's a huge gift to give to yourself: to think you could be more than one thing, that you could be limitless.' Victor was a writer and editor on the satirical feminist website Reductress before being lured into filmmaking; their comic vignettes on YouTube acquired an enthusiastic following that included director Barry Jenkins, whose exquisite gay romance Moonlight won the Best Picture Oscar in 2017. The pair found each other on Twitter; he watched Victor's short films, he said later, and thought 'this person is clearly a filmmaker'. Meanwhile, Victor was writing. Sorry, Baby was not their first script, by any means. 'As a writer, you write and write,' they say. 'And when someone wants to make something, that's your first thing.' Sorry, Baby was written during COVID, while Victor holed up in a cabin with a rescue kitten (on Victor's Instagram feed, they vouch for the healing power of cats and declare they would never make a film in which anything 'remotely sad' happened to one). Victor was working through depression during this period. 'One time I heard someone say they didn't have anxiety or depression, and I was like, 'I don't believe you',' they told Vogue. 'And if it's true, that must be very lonely.' When the script was completed, Jenkins urged Victor to take it to Pastel, the production company he runs with Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak. There followed a long apprenticeship during which Victor was able to shadow trans filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun as they made I Saw the TV Glow. Loading 'Having made the film, I have a different kind of respect for just how hard it is to make a film and how much heart has to be behind it in order for it to make sense in your life, because it's so intense an experience,' Victor says now. 'So it feels good that as my first film it very much came from inside of me. It's also intense because it has me all over it.' Agnes is not Victor, however; if anything, the difference between them establishes the distance between real events, whatever they are, and the fable of suffering and healing woven within the film. 'I got to create this character who is definitely, yes, partly me but is also this aspirational figure, because she is very blunt and she is really comfortable with silence. I wanted to write someone who felt like in my family but not me. The fictionalising was very joyful too.' Many directors say how hard it is to direct themselves, but that wasn't Victor's experience. 'I really didn't think of her as myself. I always spoke about 'Agnes'. Everyone did that. It was very cool directing myself, like I was giving myself notes, but I didn't have to have a conversation with myself.' Victor's real-life rejection of gender definition finds playful expression in Sorry, Baby when Agnes has to identify her gender on a registration form for jury duty. She ticks female, then doodles a little two-way arrow to the 'male' box, allowing herself a naughty snicker. 'We're told there's boys and girls, but that doesn't feel totally right. So she makes her own little bubble on where she lands on some kind of spectrum,' Victor says. Agnes' best friend and roommate, Lydia – played by English actor Naomi Ackie – is gay and, over the course of the story, falls in love and has a baby. The friends find themselves at very different stages in life. 'Lydia is in this whole place of thinking about bringing life into the world and Agnes is just trying to survive,' Victor says. As much as Sorry, Baby is about trauma, it is also about different kinds of identity. The source of trauma is never described as rape. When Agnes comes home and tells Lydia what happened to her, it is an account of loss of agency and will rather than being physically overpowered, of hitherto certain lines crossed and defences breached. Agnes is her professor Preston Decker's favourite. Louis Cancelmi – another Billions alumnus – makes Decker professorially genial. She admires him; they bond over the writers they love best; he encourages her literary criticism. They banter in tutorials. 'It was important to us that he was charismatic and warm, like this creative partner for Agnes,' Victor says. When Agnes describes Decker pushing his hand down her pants, we share her sheer shock, which is followed by confusion. Rather than unleashing fury, she withdraws into her hurt self. 'I think the film is reckoning with the idea that revenge doesn't always feel like the most honest reaction,' Victor says. 'Because I don't think the reaction to this kind of experience is an eye for an eye. So much of the response is trying to wrap your head around the fact that someone can do such a cruel thing, but also be a person. Later in the film, she says, 'I don't want him to die'. I think in some ways she's a bit disappointed that it's not as simple as that.' Agnes gives up on reporting Decker's crime to anybody after a (very funny) encounter with the university's HR department. The police are not involved; she doesn't want him to go to jail because, as Victor also believes, he would still be a person who was capable of doing The Bad Thing, just banged up in a different place. 'That won't change a thing. Probably her dream would be to know he's thought about it enough and understood it enough that he would never do anything like this again. But there's no path for justice that we know in our society that works that way,' Victor says. Victor made the decision early not to show what happened. 'I think I never wanted to put my audience through a scene like that because we see it so often. But when people ask about it, something I think about is, 'Who's the camera? Who is the one watching?' It's hard for me to imagine where the camera would go.' There are works that focus on the experience of violence that are powerful; they cite I May Destroy You, where the pivotal rape is shot from the victim's point of view – but that wasn't their approach. 'Also, we often hear stories about horrible things that happen to people and we never get to witness them. We have to reckon with the fact we can't witness everything. I wanted the film to have this belief that Agnes' words are enough.' Agnes isn't the kind to wallow in pain; it creeps up on her. She tries for sexual intimacy with her amiable neighbour Gavin (Lucas Hedges) but the moment escapes her. 'It's not violent, but it's going through the motions of something that it feels like she's not really there for,' Victor says. 'One of the things this kind of trauma does is divorce the body from the spirit. I think it's a very surreal thing to understand that the rule we're told, that your body is your own, can be broken by someone. That is a very sad, daunting thing to come to terms with. In this case, it makes Agnes start from scratch with her body again.' That certainly speaks of Eva Victor's experience. 'I spent years floating, just trying to accept that I went through something bad,' they have said. ' Sorry, Baby honours those years lost. The quiet years where you still have to go to work surrounded by constant reminders, reminders that are invisible to others, that you're not like everyone else. The years where your friend's support can save your life, and where strangers can often make you feel safer than the people you're told to trust.' Lydia, Agnes' roommate, is a direct portrait of a friend Victor made in theatre camp as a teenager. They still call each other every day. John Carroll Lynch plays that invaluable stranger, who sees Agnes having a panic attack near his roadside sandwich bar, talks her through it, makes her a sandwich and sits on the kerb with her, munching companionably. Despite its dark background, Sorry, Baby is full of these moments of whimsy and lightheartedness. Hedges, speaking to Variety, compared Victor to Kenneth Lonergan, the master of downbeat realism who directed him in Manchester by the Sea, before saying they are not really like anyone. There is just as much in Victor of the spirit of Miranda July: in their chapter headings, off-kilter jokes and intimacy, something like reading a journal with cartoons in the margin. Victor cites Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women as a touchstone for this film, but is just as enthused by the raunchy Mexican sex comedy Y tu mama tambien, Alfonso Cuaron's breakthrough hit. Loading Eva Victor refuses to be limited by genre or gender. It will be fascinating to see what they do next. Sorry, Baby is at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which runs August 7-24, and in cinemas from September 4;
The Age
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
A bad thing happened to Eva Victor. What followed was very good indeed
At the dark centre of Agnes' life in Sorry, Baby is The Bad Thing. It is never named, but it involves her academic supervisor, an essay to be discussed after hours, a day that turns into evening. We see the curtains being pulled shut behind the windows of a pleasantly bohemian house – his house – with her inside it, but we don't get past the doorstep. What happens inside remains behind that closed door. Afterwards, we move forward with Agnes – by days, months, years – during which she is promoted to a junior professorship, keeps her panic attacks mostly private, gets a cat, is sometimes very funny, and hurts all the time. Eva Victor's muted, witty debut film was an immediate standout at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where it was picked up by the arthouse disruptor A24 for an estimated $US8million, and where Victor won the prestigious Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Victor, hitherto an actor best known for playing a supporting role in Billions, plays Agnes as well as directing. Their presence on screen underlines the personal urgency of the story. How much is autobiographical remains part of the blurry hinterland of the creative process. Victor has never worked in academia, certainly, but has still captured with sharp accuracy the bitter competition for tenure and a corner office. What feels most emotionally immediate, however, with the full force of personal testimony, is whatever happened behind that closed door. Eva Victor is 31, was born in Paris, grew up in San Francisco and went to a French-language school, where they had a classic adolescent engagement with existentialism. 'I remember reading Camus' The Stranger and thinking, 'Yeah, everything sucks',' they told Variety. 'And I just felt seen.' There was a gradual queer coming-out during university and Victor now identifies as non-binary, using both 'she' and 'they' pronouns. 'Non-binary for me has always been the space in-between,' they told Vogue. 'And that's the thing that people are really uncomfortable with. The idea of, 'I can't totally figure you out.' But it's a huge gift to give to yourself: to think you could be more than one thing, that you could be limitless.' Victor was a writer and editor on the satirical feminist website Reductress before being lured into filmmaking; their comic vignettes on YouTube acquired an enthusiastic following that included director Barry Jenkins, whose exquisite gay romance Moonlight won the Best Picture Oscar in 2017. The pair found each other on Twitter; he watched Victor's short films, he said later, and thought 'this person is clearly a filmmaker'. Meanwhile, Victor was writing. Sorry, Baby was not their first script, by any means. 'As a writer, you write and write,' they say. 'And when someone wants to make something, that's your first thing.' Sorry, Baby was written during COVID, while Victor holed up in a cabin with a rescue kitten (on Victor's Instagram feed, they vouch for the healing power of cats and declare they would never make a film in which anything 'remotely sad' happened to one). Victor was working through depression during this period. 'One time I heard someone say they didn't have anxiety or depression, and I was like, 'I don't believe you',' they told Vogue. 'And if it's true, that must be very lonely.' When the script was completed, Jenkins urged Victor to take it to Pastel, the production company he runs with Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak. There followed a long apprenticeship during which Victor was able to shadow trans filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun as they made I Saw the TV Glow. Loading 'Having made the film, I have a different kind of respect for just how hard it is to make a film and how much heart has to be behind it in order for it to make sense in your life, because it's so intense an experience,' Victor says now. 'So it feels good that as my first film it very much came from inside of me. It's also intense because it has me all over it.' Agnes is not Victor, however; if anything, the difference between them establishes the distance between real events, whatever they are, and the fable of suffering and healing woven within the film. 'I got to create this character who is definitely, yes, partly me but is also this aspirational figure, because she is very blunt and she is really comfortable with silence. I wanted to write someone who felt like in my family but not me. The fictionalising was very joyful too.' Many directors say how hard it is to direct themselves, but that wasn't Victor's experience. 'I really didn't think of her as myself. I always spoke about 'Agnes'. Everyone did that. It was very cool directing myself, like I was giving myself notes, but I didn't have to have a conversation with myself.' Victor's real-life rejection of gender definition finds playful expression in Sorry, Baby when Agnes has to identify her gender on a registration form for jury duty. She ticks female, then doodles a little two-way arrow to the 'male' box, allowing herself a naughty snicker. 'We're told there's boys and girls, but that doesn't feel totally right. So she makes her own little bubble on where she lands on some kind of spectrum,' Victor says. Agnes' best friend and roommate, Lydia – played by English actor Naomi Ackie – is gay and, over the course of the story, falls in love and has a baby. The friends find themselves at very different stages in life. 'Lydia is in this whole place of thinking about bringing life into the world and Agnes is just trying to survive,' Victor says. As much as Sorry, Baby is about trauma, it is also about different kinds of identity. The source of trauma is never described as rape. When Agnes comes home and tells Lydia what happened to her, it is an account of loss of agency and will rather than being physically overpowered, of hitherto certain lines crossed and defences breached. Agnes is her professor Preston Decker's favourite. Louis Cancelmi – another Billions alumnus – makes Decker professorially genial. She admires him; they bond over the writers they love best; he encourages her literary criticism. They banter in tutorials. 'It was important to us that he was charismatic and warm, like this creative partner for Agnes,' Victor says. When Agnes describes Decker pushing his hand down her pants, we share her sheer shock, which is followed by confusion. Rather than unleashing fury, she withdraws into her hurt self. 'I think the film is reckoning with the idea that revenge doesn't always feel like the most honest reaction,' Victor says. 'Because I don't think the reaction to this kind of experience is an eye for an eye. So much of the response is trying to wrap your head around the fact that someone can do such a cruel thing, but also be a person. Later in the film, she says, 'I don't want him to die'. I think in some ways she's a bit disappointed that it's not as simple as that.' Agnes gives up on reporting Decker's crime to anybody after a (very funny) encounter with the university's HR department. The police are not involved; she doesn't want him to go to jail because, as Victor also believes, he would still be a person who was capable of doing The Bad Thing, just banged up in a different place. 'That won't change a thing. Probably her dream would be to know he's thought about it enough and understood it enough that he would never do anything like this again. But there's no path for justice that we know in our society that works that way,' Victor says. Victor made the decision early not to show what happened. 'I think I never wanted to put my audience through a scene like that because we see it so often. But when people ask about it, something I think about is, 'Who's the camera? Who is the one watching?' It's hard for me to imagine where the camera would go.' There are works that focus on the experience of violence that are powerful; they cite I May Destroy You, where the pivotal rape is shot from the victim's point of view – but that wasn't their approach. 'Also, we often hear stories about horrible things that happen to people and we never get to witness them. We have to reckon with the fact we can't witness everything. I wanted the film to have this belief that Agnes' words are enough.' Agnes isn't the kind to wallow in pain; it creeps up on her. She tries for sexual intimacy with her amiable neighbour Gavin (Lucas Hedges) but the moment escapes her. 'It's not violent, but it's going through the motions of something that it feels like she's not really there for,' Victor says. 'One of the things this kind of trauma does is divorce the body from the spirit. I think it's a very surreal thing to understand that the rule we're told, that your body is your own, can be broken by someone. That is a very sad, daunting thing to come to terms with. In this case, it makes Agnes start from scratch with her body again.' That certainly speaks of Eva Victor's experience. 'I spent years floating, just trying to accept that I went through something bad,' they have said. ' Sorry, Baby honours those years lost. The quiet years where you still have to go to work surrounded by constant reminders, reminders that are invisible to others, that you're not like everyone else. The years where your friend's support can save your life, and where strangers can often make you feel safer than the people you're told to trust.' Lydia, Agnes' roommate, is a direct portrait of a friend Victor made in theatre camp as a teenager. They still call each other every day. John Carroll Lynch plays that invaluable stranger, who sees Agnes having a panic attack near his roadside sandwich bar, talks her through it, makes her a sandwich and sits on the kerb with her, munching companionably. Despite its dark background, Sorry, Baby is full of these moments of whimsy and lightheartedness. Hedges, speaking to Variety, compared Victor to Kenneth Lonergan, the master of downbeat realism who directed him in Manchester by the Sea, before saying they are not really like anyone. There is just as much in Victor of the spirit of Miranda July: in their chapter headings, off-kilter jokes and intimacy, something like reading a journal with cartoons in the margin. Victor cites Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women as a touchstone for this film, but is just as enthused by the raunchy Mexican sex comedy Y tu mama tambien, Alfonso Cuaron's breakthrough hit. Loading Eva Victor refuses to be limited by genre or gender. It will be fascinating to see what they do next. Sorry, Baby is at the Melbourne International Film Festival, which runs August 7-24, and in cinemas from September 4;
Elle
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Elle
A24's New Under-the-Radar Gem 'Sorry Baby' Tackles Trauma With Humor
Eva Victor began their career in the comedy scene, going viral on TikTok and writing for satirical sites like Reductress. Subjects would range from how (not) to make small talk in an elevator to paying the check at a restaurant when you're not sure if you're on a date. But when it comes to their debut feature, Sorry, Baby, Victor isn't even sure there's a single joke in it. 'Humor is always there, but it's a very different feeling,' the writer, director, and star says. Sorry, Baby follows Agnes (Victor), an English lit professor in a small New England town, before and after 'the bad thing' that happens to her. She was sexually assaulted, though the film avoids saying or depicting it outright, forgoing stereotypical, on-the-nose portrayals. But it doesn't minimize Agnes's pain or trauma either. In Victor's hands, we don't fall into a well of despair around the incident. Instead, we spend more time in the crevices of everyday moments that make up Agnes's complicated and beautiful life. Sorry, Baby received the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, where A24 immediately scooped up the film for distribution for around $8 million. Even without jokes, Victor thinks there might be three reasons why viewers laugh during Sorry, Baby. 'One of them is witnessing the joy of a friendship and feeling like you're a part of it,' they say. Victor is talking about the actual core of Sorry, Baby: the relationship between Agnes and her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who went to college with Agnes in this small town and has since moved away. 'I wanted the beginning of the film to have a lot of joy and laughter in it and to feel like it's just these two people in this big world,' Victor says, 'so that after we go through really hard things later on, we can return to a place of joy and laughter because it's been established.' There's also humor in the way Agnes navigates the world; how she sneaks a cat into the grocery store or how she interacts with her kind neighbor, Gavin (Lucas Hedges). And then there's the way the movie holds people in power accountable. 'It's kind of cathartic to laugh at them,' Victor says. At various points, the film highlights the failures of the medical system, a college's HR department, and a courtroom during jury duty. Victor's approach to movies comes from a place of joy. They grew up watching the likes of A Hard Day's Night, Top Hat, and Swing Time. They still rewatch Singin' in the Rain, moved each time by Gene Kelly's extended dance sequence in the middle of it. 'It's joyful and for the sake of beauty. We sometimes are told everything has to exist for a reason, and I don't think that's totally true,' they say. Since then, Victor has gravitated more toward movies like 45 Years, the Three Colors trilogy, and The Double Life of Veronique. During the pandemic, Victor embarked on this self-led film education to get an idea of the kind of movie they could one day make. It then took years of preparation and confidence-building to step into the director's chair. 'I don't think anyone's ever going to let you make a movie,' Victor says. 'You have to continue knocking on the door to make a movie. And then finally, you get to, maybe, if you're lucky.' After Victor cracked the film's non-linear structure and finished the script, they sent it to Barry Jenkins, Adele Romanski, and Mark Ceryak's Pastel Productions, who signed on as producers. 'I never brought it anywhere else,' Victor says. The producers set Victor up to shoot two scenes from the movie so they could get comfortable directing. Victor made storyboards and reverse-shotlisted movies they loved. By the time they got to set, Victor had compiled a massive binder (which is now used as a doorstop) of acting notes, directing notes, and storyboards for every scene. Jenkins, aside from being a visionary artist—and one of Victor's early post-college inspirations—proved to be an invaluable mentor. 'He gifted me with this idea that what I was doing, before I ever made a film, was working out how to make a film. And that was very affirming,' Victor says. Victor took their online videos seriously, even if the tone was comical; like when they shared the many ways ladies love to brag ('I go to bed at 4:45 A.M. and I wake up at 5 A.M.'), or when they serenaded their cat after two hours apart. Jenkins saw the value in them too. 'He had so much confidence in me,' Victor says. Jenkins gave them script notes, helped cast Lydie, and offered advice on set, all 'intent on helping me make the film I wanted to make.' Sorry, Baby couches Agnes's experience in humor, tenderness, and warmth. Life can be dark and yet, in unexpected moments, we have to laugh. As a culture, Victor considers, we tend to mark people who've been through traumatic incidents as tragic figures. Victor, on the other hand, created a story that was primarily about friendship in order to give Agnes 'this fighting chance of being a whole person that goes through this thing, but isn't defined by it.' Victor has said that the film comes from a personal place. And while no experience can be completely healing, directing gave Victor a unique power over their own story. 'The act of directing myself as an actor, deciding where my body went, and then everyone in the crew and cast supporting that decision was very powerful. That part was very meaningful to me.' After years of working out feelings of anxiety and awkwardness on Twitter, Victor found fertile ground in feature-length storytelling. They approached it differently from the beginning—with research, homework, and Oscar-winning producers—and the product became something intensely personal and, much like Victor's video of opening a seltzer during a meeting, deeply relatable. 'I really wanted the feature to breathe,' they say. 'I wanted people to feel like they had to lean in to meet it.'
Los Angeles Times
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
A ‘Tombstone' tribute to Val Kilmer, plus the week's best movies in L.A.
Hello! I'm Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies. Opening this weekend and winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, 'Sorry, Baby' is the feature film debut for writer, director and actor Eva Victor. Personally, it's among my favorite films of the year for its complex mix of comedy and drama, offbeat whimsy and deep vulnerability. (I'd previously called it 'fresh, inventive and invigorating' and that still feels right to me.) The story tells some five years in the life of Agnes (Victor), a teacher at a small East Coast college attempting to move forward following a traumatic event. In her review for the paper, Katie Walsh called the film 'a movie that lingers,' attributing that to 'the profound and nuanced honesty Victor extracts from each moment.' I spoke to Victor about the process of making the film. The story is rooted in Victor's own experiences, so every stage, from writing to production to bringing it to audiences, has had its own nuances and contours. 'It's a very personal film for a lot of people and there's a sadness to that because it's a community of people who have experienced things that they shouldn't have had to,' says Victor. 'It's life-affirming for me to know that I wrote the film in a leap-of-faith way to be like: 'Is anyone else feeling like this?' And it's nice to know that there are people who are understanding what that is.' On Saturday, the Academy Museum will screen the world premiere of a 4K restoration of 1993's 'Tombstone' as a tribute to actor Val Kilmer. Directed by George P. Cosmatos, the film tells the legendary story of the shootout at the O.K. Corral, which has become one of the foundational myths of the American western. Kilmer stars as Doc Holliday, who comes to the aid of his friend, retired lawman Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell). The cast also includes Bill Paxton, Sam Elliott, Powers Boothe, Michael Biehn, Charlton Heston, Jason Priestley and Dana Delany. The role was a special one for Kilmer, who titled his memoir 'I'm Your Huckleberry' after a line in the movie. In his original review of the film, Peter Rainer declared the film the latest of the then-in-vogue 'designer Westerns' and highlighted Kilmer's turn, writing, 'Val Kilmer's Holliday is classic camp performance, although it may not have started out that way. His Southern drawl sounds like a languorous cross between early Brando and Mr. Blackwell. Stricken with tuberculosis, his eyes red-rimmed, Doc coughs delicately and matches Ringo line for line in Latin. He also shoots straighter than anyone else in the movie — his powers of recuperation make Rasputin seem like a pushover.' The film will also be playing on July 26 at Vidiots. Winner of three prizes at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, 'Familiar Touch' is the narrative feature debut of writer-director Sarah Friedland. The sensitive and compassionate story follows Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant), an 80-something retired cook, as she settles into an assisted-living facility while grappling with memory loss. Friedland and Chalfant will be at select showings throughout the weekend for Q&As. In his review of the movie, Robert Abele wrote, 'The mystery of Ruth's mindfulness — which ebbs and flows — is at the core of Chalfant's brilliant, award-worthy performance. Hers is a virtuosity that doesn't ask for pity or applause or even link arms with the stricken-but-defiant disease-playing headliners who have gone before her. Chalfant's Ruth is merely, momentously human: an older woman in need, but no less expressive of life's fullness because of it.' Esther Zuckerman spoke to Friedland about shooting the film at Pasadena's Villa Gardens retirement community in collaboration with staff and residents. The production held a five-week filmmaking workshop, involving the residents as background actors and production assistants. 'It came a lot from the anti-ageist ideas of the project,' Friedland says. 'If we're going to make this film the character study of an older woman that sees older adults as valuable and talented and capacious, let's engage their capaciousness and their creativity on all sides of production.' Tsui Hark's 'Shanghai Blues' in 4K Though he is best known to American audiences for his action movies, Hong Kong director Tsui Hark has been versatile in many other genres. Now getting a new 4K restoration from the original negative for its 40th anniversary is Tsui's 1984 screwball romantic comedy 'Shanghai Blues.' Opening in 1937 Shanghai, the story concerns an aspiring musician, Do-Re-Mi (Kenny Bee), and a woman, Shu-Shu (Sylvia Chang), who, after a chance encounter, vow to meet again in the same spot after the war. Leaping forward to peacetime a decade later, the two find themselves living in the same building without realizing it, as he becomes involved with her roommate (Sally Yeh). The film will be playing at the American Cinematheque at the Los Feliz 3 on Fri., Tues. and Sat., July 5. It will also play multiple Laemmle locations on Weds. And expect more on Hong Kong cinema later this summer when Beyond Fest launches a series of new restorations of such classics as 'Hard Boiled,' 'The Killer' and Hark's 1986 'Peking Opera Blues.' 'Much Ado About Nothing' On Monday, Vidiots will screen Kenneth Branagh's 1993 adaptation of Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing.' About a bunch of incredibly good-looking people having a great time in the Italian countryside, the film stars Branagh, Emma Thompson, Kate Beckinsale, Michael Keaton, Robert Sean Leonard, Keanu Reeves and Denzel Washington. Branagh and Thompson were married in real life at the time, and in his original review of the film, Kenneth Turan wrote, 'Actors as well as athletes have a prime of life, a time when everything they touch seems a miracle. And the crowning pleasure of watching Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh in this rollicking version of 'Much Ado About Nothing' is the way it allows us to share in that state of special grace, to watch the English-speaking world's reigning acting couple perform at the top of their game. … Seeing them beautifully play off each other is an enormous pleasure for lovers of the romance of language as well as fanciers of romantic love.' 'The Spirit of '76' live commentary On Thursday, July 3, as part of the 7th House screening series at the Philosophical Research Society, there will be a screening of 1990's 'The Spirit of '76' featuring a live commentary by stars Jeff and Steven McDonald of the band Redd Kross. The film is something of a singular object: a loving satire of the 1970s made from the perspective of the burgeoning '90s, written and directed by Lucas Reiner, with a co-story credit to Roman Coppola, costumes designed by Sofia Coppola and a cast that includes David Cassidy, Leif Garrett, Olivia d'Abo, Don Novello, Rob Reiner, Carl Reiner and Devo. From the extremely drab future of 2176, three adventurers are sent back in time to July 4, 1776 but mistakenly land in the year 1976. They meet two teenagers (the McDonald brothers) who help them navigate the present and find their way back to their own time. In his original review of the film, Kevin Thomas did not catch the vibes, as he wrote, 'Movies do not get more inane than 'The Spirit of '76' … You have to wonder how this film ever got made, let alone released.' Jerry Bruckheimer is still revved up Among the big releases this weekend is Joseph Kosinski's racing drama 'F1,' starring Brad Pitt and Damson Idris. The film reunited Kosinski with screenwriter Ehren Kruger and producer Jerry Bruckheimer following their huge success with 'Top Gun: Maverick.' Josh Rottenberg spoke to the 81-year-old Bruckheimer about his legendary career working on movies such as 'Beverly Hills Cop,' 'Bad Boys,' 'Armageddon' and countless more, making sleek commercial pictures that have been defining the Hollywood blockbuster for decades. 'It's changed a lot,' Bruckheimer says of the movie business. 'Streaming hit a lot of places hard. They spent too much money and now they've got problems with that. Some of the studios aren't healthy. But the business, if you do it right, is healthy.' Bruckheimer is not one of the doomsayers foretelling the end of movies. 'I've been doing this over 50 years and that doom has been there every time a new technology shows up,' he says. 'And yet, look at what's happened. Look at 'Minecraft.' Look at 'Sinners.' Look at 'Lilo & Stitch.' If you do it right, people show up.'
Los Angeles Times
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘Sorry, Baby,' a young professor harbors private pain and a new voice emerges
Agnes (Eva Victor) has the face of a classical Hollywood movie star but she dresses like an old fisherman. Her expressions are inscrutable; you never know what's going to come out of her mouth or how. When asked on a written questionnaire how her friends would describe her, she puts down 'smart,' crosses it out, then replaces it with 'tall.' She is all of those things: tall, smart, striking, endearingly awkward, hard to read. And she is an utterly captivating, entirely unique cinematic presence, the planet around which orbits 'Sorry, Baby,' the debut feature of Victor, who not only stars but writes and directs. Agnes' backstory, revealed in time, is a distressingly common one of sexual assault, recounted with bursts of wild honesty, searing insight and unexpected humor. Victor's screenplay earned her the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the Sundance Film Festival this year, where the film had its premiere. As a writer and performer, Victor allows Agnes to relay what happened in her own way while keeping the most intimate horrors protected. Set in the frigid environs of the English department at a rural Massachusetts university, 'Sorry, Baby' carries a literary quality, emphasized by nonchronological titled chapters (e.g., 'The Year With the Baby,' 'The Year With the Bad Thing,') carefully establishing our protagonist, the world she inhabits and a few nagging questions. Agnes is a professor of English at the university where she completed her graduate studies, but we first meet her as the best friend of Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who arrives for a winter weekend visit. Two codependent besties reunited, they snuggle on the couch and laugh about sex. Lydie delights at the mystery man who turns up on her friend's doorstep — a friendly, familiar neighbor named Gavin (Lucas Hedges). But Lydie's quiet concern for her friend is also palpable. When she reveals her pregnancy to Agnes, she says, 'There's something I need to tell you about my body,' as if Agnes is a child who needs gentle explanation. And in a strange way, Agnes seems to take to this childlike role with her friend. Lydie carefully probes her about her office and its previous occupant. She presses her about remaining in this town. Isn't it 'a lot'? 'It's a lot to be wherever,' Agnes replies. Lydie requests of her, 'Don't die' and Agnes reassures her she would have already killed herself if she was going to. It's cold comfort, a phrase that could capably describe the entire vibe of 'Sorry, Baby.' Victor then flips back to an earlier chapter, before their graduation, to a time when Agnes seems less calcified in her idiosyncrasies. Their thesis advisor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), handsome and harried, tells Agnes her work is 'extraordinary' and reschedules a meeting due to a child-care emergency. They both end up at his home, where dusk turns to night. What ensues is what you expect and dread, though we only hear about it when Agnes recounts the excruciating details of the incident to Lydie later that night. The fallout renders Agnes emotionally stunted, running alternately on autopilot and impulse. Lydie fiercely protects (and enables) her friend until she has to move on with her life, leaving Agnes frozen in amber in that house, that office, that town, that night. There's an architectural quality to Victor's style in the film's structure and thoughtful editing, and in the lingering shots of buildings standing starkly against an icy sky, glowing windows beckoning or concealing from within: a representation of a singular kind of brittle, poignant New England stoicism. Victor captures Agnes the same way. Thanks to the profound and nuanced honesty Victor extracts from each moment, 'Sorry, Baby' is a movie that lingers. Even when Agnes does something outlandish or implausible — turning up on foot at Gavin's door in a tizzy is one of her curious quirks — it feels true to the character. But Agnes is a mystery even to herself, it seems, tamping down her feelings until they come tumbling out in strange ways. She goes about her daily life in a never-ending cycle of repression and explosion, cracking until she shatters completely. Her most important journey is to find a place to be soft again. The only catharsis or healing to be found in the film comes from the titular apology, more a rueful word of caution than anything else. We can never be fully protected from what life has in store for us, nor from the acts of selfishness or cruelty that cause us to harden and retreat into the protective cocoon of a huge jacket, a small town, an empty house. Life — and the people in it — will break us sometimes. But there are still kittens and warm baths and best friends and really good sandwiches. There are still artists like Victor who share stories like this with such detailed emotion. Sometimes that's enough to glue us back together, at least for a little while.
