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senseabove wrote: Tue Sep 30, 2025 6:48 pm A theater (part of a small local chain) that hasn't done 35mm in years—at least since a change of ownership in 2018, and I'm pretty sure not since ~2011—sent out a splashy email that 35mm is returning to the theater, and it's for a block run of three overlapping Netflix releases: two weeks of Frankenstein, two weeks of Nouvelle Vague, and a week of Train Dreams. It's such a bizarre turn of events that I'm suspicious of something, but I don't quite know what...

I have noticed that theaters have been installing film projectors recently as a way to get more people to come back to the cinemas. For example, a small rep theater in Toronto just announced that they installed a 70mm projector and will be screening Sinners in November.

The Narrator Returns wrote: Tue Sep 30, 2025 8:34 pm Very fortuitous timing for this discussion, it just sold to Searchlight.

Seems like the best thing that could have happened because they don’t really have a strong slate of Oscar contenders right now so they’ll push it hard

senseabove wrote: Tue Sep 30, 2025 6:48 pm A theater (part of a small local chain) that hasn't done 35mm in years—at least since a change of ownership in 2018, and I'm pretty sure not since ~2011—sent out a splashy email that 35mm is returning to the theater, and it's for a block run of three overlapping Netflix releases: two weeks of Frankenstein, two weeks of Nouvelle Vague, and a week of Train Dreams. It's such a bizarre turn of events that I'm suspicious of something, but I don't quite know what...

At the risk of turning this into a Netflix thread, of the
five films showing on film at the Chicago International Film Festival
(originally six until Jay Kelly dropped out), two (originally three) are Netflix films and one directly related to a Netflix film. Whether this signals a new strategy in theatrical distribution on their part remains to be seen.

Will be seeing this next week at the Chicago International Film Festival, aided by the screening being so early in the weekday afternoon that tix hadn’t sold out yet

This was okay. The film makes a serious and nearly fatal error when it comes to the musical numbers by refusing, even once, to allow any of the hymns to rely solely on the unaccompanied voice. Instead, the music numbers (many of which look influenced by Jungle music videos, not hymnals) are scored non-diagetically with thundering, bombastic fervor that betrays a certain insecurity and lack of courage in the material here. I give this film a lot of latitude for making a Hard R musical about a religious sect best known for their furniture, but I think there’s a degree of fervency to the treatment that prioritizes immediacy over curiosity into the fundamental questions Ann Lee raises. Seyfried is good and spirited while being called upon to do the typical grueling indignities in graphic fashion (including the somewhat distasteful shock image of her squirting breast milk onscreen), but it’s hard to imagine the film being much of an Oscar player apart from her. The director noted during the Q&A that she rushed to make the film after discovering Lee because she didn’t want someone to beat her to the punch. The moderator asked if there was any danger of someone else making another film on the subject and she laughed no. Perhaps this needed a little more time spent in the early stages of creation to gestate into something grander.

domino harvey wrote: Fri Oct 17, 2025 12:25 am The director noted during the Q&A that she rushed to make the film after discovering Lee because she didn’t want someone to beat her to the punch. The moderator asked if there was any danger of someone else making another film on the subject and she laughed no.

Funny, Sid & Nancy got off the ground so quickly because of a proposed Rupert Everett/Madonna project. There was a lot of bitterness over what happened with Dangerous Liaisons/Valmont

domino harvey wrote: Fri Oct 17, 2025 12:25 am The director noted during the Q&A that she rushed to make the film after discovering Lee because she didn’t want someone to beat her to the punch.

Did Fastvold say anything else about the circumstances surrounding the making of the film? I was under the impression that she was able to do it in part using money left over/relationships established during the making of The Brutalist, but maybe I was wrong

I don’t believe your specific question was addressed, but she mentioned that the film had a tight 34 day shooting schedule which didn’t allow for wiggle room for improvisation (amusingly, she revealed the only thing in the film which wasn’t scripted was David Cale’s comic prayer, which perhaps tellingly was one of the best moments of the film— she said he was the only one allowed to go off script because he was a playwright… though so is another more well-known cast member [whose appearance in this may be a secret, I didn’t see them listed beforehand]) and that the first person she and Corbet showed their script to was Blumberg.

One thing I found peculiar from both the moderator and director, particularly in light of how the film is primarily being discussed, is that Seyfried was barely mentioned (even though I later learned that Fastvold has directed episodes of two different limited series starring Seyfried, so there’s clearly a strong working relationship there)

Also, re: the 35mm discussion upthread, the print didn’t make its connecting flight and they screened a DCP

domino harvey wrote: Fri Oct 17, 2025 2:57 amshe said he was the only one allowed to go off script because he was a playwright… though so is another more well-known cast member [whose appearance in this may be a secret, I didn’t see them listed beforehand])

If you're referring to

Spoiler

Tim Blake Nelson,

he was announced when the film was announced. If you're not, though, that's kinda funny (and intriguing)

Yeah, that’s the one

Teaser.

I too wrestled with this for a large part of its runtime, and had a few of the problems mentioned above by domino (the treatment of music within the film and the filming of some of the numbers themselves - in the post-showing Q and A, Fastvold mentioned that her staging was inspired by Gaspar Noé, which is…not what I wanted to hear), but I ultimately came away pleased because, for all her discomfort with the material and even with the genre label, Fastvold has made the first good, Rick-Altman-rule-following American film musical in a number of years. But how can it be possible to make a film where the romance is the plot and sexual consummation lurks under every action when recounting the fabled history of a celibacy cult? It is possible if you accept, as Ann Lee does, the idea that her male counterpart is not her husband (who is ineffectual, constrained by the mores of his time, and fails to live up to his wife’s ideals) but her spiritual husband in Jesus himself. For all its musical and emotional anachronism, the most important distancing technique in the film is its presentation of a musical narrative, with all the incumbent tropes and beats, with that logic extended to a separation between the tangible, human, female Mother Ann and the intangible, eternal, male Heavenly Father. The scenes of ecstatic musical group worship are not just postmodern flourishes in a visceral and timely biopic, but the equivalent of God’s solo songs (expressed through the group) positioned as a counterpoint to Ann’s solo sequences of desperation and rebirth. The American shaker village, too, is a brilliant reconfiguration of Altman’s “valley,” a space where the two halves of the couple are equally represented and can be together. I call it brilliant because it foregrounds the settler-colonial origin of this trope in a way that has really been absent from musicals since their heyday. (Recall that Altman uses The Harvey Girls, another film explicitly about settler-colonialism through the “taming of the west,” as the archetypal illustration of the “valley” where Harvey Girl and cowboy can be together in spite of their differences, the implied promise of their union being the conquest of this valley).

I feel reservations about the above as praise of the film because I’m pretty certain that Fastvold and Corbet had no intentions of operating in this mode. (Corbet spoke for long, probably too long, about how Ann Lee was “the first feminist” and “the first punk,” which sort of reveals his presentist assumptions about what Ann Lee’s life meant and his feelings that she was most useful as a story to extrapolate a moral from than a tale worth telling for his own sake). If anything, the film they made is a demonstration of how powerful the genre form remains, even after decades of neglect and with few filmmakers who consciously understand how to make musicals. That said, they’ve still made something powerful and worth seeing, even if it works both with and against its own intentions.

Count me among those who found a lot of this unfortunately frustrating, because there’s so much it does right. I disagree with domino in that I loved many of the numbers themselves in isolation, but I found the logic of them and their cohesion (or lack thereof) in the script basically nonexistent.

Much of this fault I pin on the narration, which is wholly unnecessary. The film could do a lot with its numbers - and it’s at its best when it tries to use them for narrative or character purposes, - but it relies so heavily on the crutch of voiceover that the momentum’s all over the place. As a result, the music takes an odd role, creating beautiful setpieces (and I mean this - I found a lot of the individual scenes incredibly moving) but also becoming a distancing, rather than inviting narrative device. (And apart from how it impacts the music, the narration is just the worst sort of writing, both allowing the filmmakers to elide what could be interesting sequences like Ann’s two-year journey across New England and telling us things we already know, sometimes literally overlapping with the dialogue as it happens.) I found the whole script kinda weak and distant, with too little of Ann as a character (this is a problem for most of the actors) and too little development. Pacing’s weird, too, particularly towards the end.

Like Never Cursed and dh, I feel it avoids a lot of the interesting questions about or approaches to Shakerism, to its detriment. There’s much of the physicality of ecstasy, but very little actual theology or religion. Maybe that’s me looking for something that I shouldn’t be expecting, or treating unorthodox choices as bad ones, but I found it frustrating nonetheless.

It feels odd given its subject matter to say “this will do well with the TikTok crowd,” but I walked out of it feeling like it’s that kind of film. My girlfriend loved it way more than I did, but she’s all about costume design and set design and choreography, and it does a lot in that area. When it works, it really works; but yeah, sure gets in its own way a lot.

Side note: I was able to catch a 70mm showing, and it was $42 for two tickets????? Have I not been to the theater recently enough to catch these wild price increases, or has this been the standard for film print screenings for a while?

soundchaser wrote: Sun Jan 18, 2026 4:18 am Side note: I was able to catch a 70mm showing, and it was $42 for two tickets????? Have I not been to the theater recently enough to catch these wild price increases, or has this been the standard for film print screenings for a while?

Depends where you are. In NYC $21 is not at all a surprising price for a single ticket to a new movie at a chain or upscale independent theater, to say nothing of the premium format.

Also: did you think the print looked particularly soft? I saw it on 35mm (I assume?) and was kind of astonished at how soft the image was to the point that I thought the focus might be off.

We don’t get a lot of 70mm showings in my area (New Orleans) to begin with, so I’m sure that’s part of it. And adult tickets are $13 plus tax at the multiplexes, so I guess this wasn’t that far off - just the shock of that “4” at the beginning threw me

There were definitely parts I felt were a little soft (the confrontation with Ann and Abraham in particular), and not a ton of grain, although it was nice to catch bits of it here and there in the brighter scenes. I don’t know a ton about the production, so I’m not sure what their output process was.

On that note: I’m beginning to think I have a problem with the way most films are graded now. I’ve always attributed the seemingly omnipresent blue-gray cast to poor DCP bulb maintenance at the chains, but nope, here it was in all its ugly glory.

This will finally go wide...on January 23 (the day after Oscar nominations). Either Searchlight are completely convinced they have Seyfried's nomination in the bag, or they are idiots.

EDIT: They are idiots.

Apparently they never bothered to send screeners for most of the awards. I know they came in late but maybe they should have sat on it for a year?

Great discussion in here btw

No, 2026 is gonna be Tony Gilroy's year...it's gotta be Tony Gilroy's year.......

This film we be released digitally only with no Blu-ray release

domino harvey wrote: Sun Mar 01, 2026 2:52 am This film we be released digitally only with no Blu-ray release

First WWIII with Israel and Iran, now this. Fucking life.

This is a late add to Hulu's March schedule, will start streaming there on the 31st.

soundchaser wrote: Sun Jan 18, 2026 4:18 am
Much of this fault I pin on the narration, which is wholly unnecessary. The film could do a lot with its numbers - and it’s at its best when it tries to use them for narrative or character purposes, - but it relies so heavily on the crutch of voiceover that the momentum’s all over the place.

As much as I love many great voice over narration of the past (Diary of a country priest being my favorite) I think nowadays voice over is a device used to conceil the inability to tell a story. Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet are really impressive visual artist without a clue about how to tell a story.