Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact


What Maisie Knew

What Maisie knew is indeed the question. It’s one Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s movie is devoted to examining. They go about their narrative investigation of their six-year-old titular character’s (Onata Aprile) increasingly complex and fraught experiences with two of the most unsuitable parents in the five boroughs of New York City. These two precariously coupled people have no recourse to such mitigating factors as burdening socio-economic status and straits. This is a high-end, high-maintenance pair, for whom, we can see, parenthood is increasingly an irksome distraction from their self-satisfactions.

Frances Ha

Not everyone pops out of college fully formed for the way they will cope with the world for the rest of their lives. Frances (Greta Gerwig) is one of these. She’s 26 and still calls herself a dancer, hoping that her unpaid apprenticeship with a Manhattan company will turn into a paying gig. She’s still living the life of a college student in the Brooklyn apartment of her BFF Sophie (Mickey Sumner, daughter of Sting and Trudie Styler). But when Sophie moves on to adulthood, the resourceless Frances finds herself increasingly adrift.

Love is All You Need

What is it with the Europeans and Italy? I don’t know when that country became the international symbol of rebirth through sunshine, greenery, and unspoiled seascapes, but it’s been a cinematic cliché at least since A Room with a View. Last year the makers of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel tried to move the cliché to India, but this summer we’re back in sunny Italy with this new film from Danish arthouse favorite Susanne Bier (Brothers, In a Better World).



Back to issue index