Page 6 - Benjamin Loeb News Today

Print Earning an Academy Award nomination is always a big deal. Yet on the morning they were announced in March this year, Amanda Seyfried — who earned her first ever nod for “Mank” — was far from glued to the TV set. “I was absolutely sleeping,” says Seyfried, who adds that she’d agreed to let her mom wake her with any good news when this year’s nominations were announced. And she’s not alone — first-timer Andra Day (“The United States vs. Billie Holiday”) was also zon...

Print It takes a fully embodied performance to earn an Academy Award nomination. But deep inside those heightened performances lies one critical moment that stays with viewers and voters alike — and elevates the actor into being worthy of the industry’s greatest honor: The Oscar. We pinned down the producers and directors from the films that gave us this year’s lead actor and actress nominees to ask them: What was the most key moment for you? Viola Davis, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”...

I Care A Lot This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. Marla Grayson is a bad person. Her nine-to-five consists of convincing the legal system to grant her guardianship over well-off, healthy senior citizens and then depositing them into care homes where they are administered unnecessary, dissociative medication and separated from society. Then she sells off their homes and...

*** Every time I mention my wife and I have had five homebirths, I get the strangest silence. It takes the opposing human brain a few seconds to hear, catalogue, and respond with: “Oh…that’s cool.” Now, the modern brain only has so many “boxes.” When the word “homebirth” is uttered, it is hesitantly put in the box with “horse-drawn carriages,” “bonnets,” and “fetch me some water from the well, Amos, and boil it. I’m fixin’ to take me a warsh.” Believe me, that bo...

This awards season is shaping up as a veritable “Year of the Woman.” But amid the beautiful bounty of films boasting women front-row center — on either side of the camera — could a few similarly titled movies be causing confusion for both viewers and awards voters? Sure, with almost 80 years of branding behind its beloved titular character, “Wonder Woman 1984” — brought to us by writer-director-producer Patty Jenkins and producer-star Gal Gadot — is probably not being confused w...

The Globe and Mail Published January 13, 2021 Benjamin Loeb/The Associated Press Vanessa Kirby is that actress. The one you’ve been wondering about, who plays Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of The Crown and the White Widow in the In Pieces of a Woman, a home birth turns harrowing for Martha and Sean (Kirby and Shia LaBeouf) and their midwife, Eva (Molly Parker). Screenwriter Kata Weber and director Kornel Mundruczo plunge us into the action with a seemingly unbroken 20-minute...

The new Netflix film 'Pieces of a Woman', with its searingly accurate portrayal of neonatal death, starring Vanessa Kirby, will create further talking points for those with a shared – but often silent – trauma, says Pippa Vosper.

Jan. 7, 2021 5:52 pm ET ‘Pieces of a Woman,” streaming on Netflix, poses a startling question with shattering force. What does a woman do after her pregnancy has ended in a death instead of a new life? Vanessa Kirby is Martha, a Boston woman whose home birth goes disastrously wrong. No mainstream production has ever depicted a childbirth like this one, and Ms. Kirby’s performance is remarkable—not only when Martha is in extremis but once she’s back in what used...

Can a film be good if it’s almost unwatchable? In Pieces of a Woman, Vanessa Kirby proves that it can

This is our first newsletter of 2021, and it has already been quite a year. The events of this past week surpass any thoughts on movies at the moment. I feel I have likely said this before, but there is no one better at sorting through the cultural confusion of a moment like Wednesday than Times TV critic Lorraine Ali. As she wrote, “Wednesday’s violent attack cannot be seen as yet another preparatory ‘stress test’ for democracy. It was the real thing. We, as a nation, are not immune to...