How to Build a Girl (IFC Films)
Johanna has read every book in the school library and sighs, “I can’t find a story about a girl like me.” Sixteen, plump and unpopular, she wants to find Mr. Darcey but romantic heroes seldom visit her dreary suburb in the English Midlands.
Based on Caitlin Moran’s novel, How to Build a Girl (2019) is a hilarious coming-of-age comedy set in the ‘90s with a melancholy undercurrent of times gone by. After enduring many humiliations, Johanna becomes a rock critic for one of Britain’s top weeklies, the only girl in the boy’s club at a time when rock writing had a louche glamor—the jet set in economy class. She’s made it, but will her swollen ego become too heavy to shoulder? Imaginatively visualized, the picture gallery of heroes pinned to her bedroom wall proffer advice. Freud diagnoses anxiety. Sylvia Plath counsels suicide, but, more wisely, Liz Taylor says “Live!”
A White, White Day (Film Movement)
A cop in a remote Icelandic town launches an off-the-books investigation into the man he suspects of having an affair with his recently deceased wife. Surveillance becomes voyeuristic as the cop sinks into unresolved loss, obsession and anger. With its morose psychological and physical terrain, A White, White Day shades into Nordic noir. The second feature film by director H. Palmason shows a genius for movement within stillness as events transpire within frozen visual frames.
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