Our essential movie list to watch this Summer! Saltburn, A Brideshead Revisited meets The Talented Mr Ripley tale. Maestro,A fusion of music, marriage and bisexuality. Poor Things, a Frankenstein-like black-comic horror and our favourite All Of Us Strangers, a mysterious, beautiful and sentimental.
Oscar nominee for her debut feature, Promising Young Woman, actor-turned-director Emerald Fennell (Call the Midwife) announced herself as a filmmaker to watch; her second film, Saltburn, looks to be just as impressive and divisive.
A Brideshead Revisited meets The Talented Mr Ripley tale — described as a perverse, psychosexual thriller — follows Oxford student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) as he becomes infatuated with fellow student Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi, Euphoria), and ingratiates himself into his aristocratic family over the summer.
After the success of A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper returns to the director’s chair for his sophomore effort, a biopic of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), whose marriage was a complex one, not just because of Bernstein’s artistic temperament but his bisexuality.
While the film doesn’t skimp on Bernstein’s relationships with men, the film is very much concerned with the relationship between the composer and his wife; Mulligan is given top billing, and her performance has received raves.
Did you know? Research by Monash University (analysing 4126 films) found that LGBT-inclusive movies earned a staggering 29% more revenue at the box office than movies with no LGBT content.
A hit at film festivals and a favourite for the Oscars, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is a Frankenstein-like tale. Rescued from near-death, Bella (Emma Stone) becomes the scientific plaything of anatomist Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Eager to learn, Bella is literally and figuratively stolen away by the caddish lawyer Duncan Wadderburn (Mark Ruffalo).
Much has been made of the sexual content of Poor Things, but it’s likely to be the demented humour and distinct style of Lanthimos and Stone’s powerhouse performance, that leaves audiences buzzing.>
FUSE movie pick of the month! More than a decade after Weekend, Andrew Haigh returns with a gay romance that is also somewhat of a ghost story. When screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott, Fleabag) begins a relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal, Aftersun), a mysterious neighbour, Adam finds himself drawn back to his hometown and memories of his long-dead parents.
The Guardian calls All Of Us Strangers “mysterious, beautiful and sentimental” and “a fantasy-supernatural romance about loneliness and love”. And by all accounts, tissues will be required by film’s end.
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