actress Sienna Miller took a decidedly
backwards-plotted course to the limelight, and has had to suffer the effects of
that path ever since. Director George Hickenlooper’s Factory Girl, then, represents both the
perfect career elixir for a young starlet looking for respect — a
based-on-a-scandalous-true-story filmic vehicle almost doggedly formulaic in its
tonic properties — as well as Miller’s most fully realized performance to date.
It’s a movie that establishes her as a legitimate actress, in other words, even
as it somewhat pigeonholes her as insouciant, flippant and spunky.
Eminently watchable throughout, Miller plays Edie with a blend of thumb-chewing
impishness and quietly wounded, flamboyant bravado, but the film is one of sexy surfaces whose true revelation may actually be Guy Pearce, who goes beyond the
other skilled mimicries we’ve seen on the big screen to locate the vanity and insecurity in Andy Warhol’s pettiness and cruelty. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.
Anna Nicole Smith has died at the age of 39, after being found unresponsive in her hotel room today at the Seminole Hard Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla. She was rushed to a nearby hospital, but efforts to revive her were unsuccessful.
Hannibal Rising, a tony revenge prequel which charts the adolescent trauma Lecter suffered at the end of World War II, the sexually-tinged awakening of his first violent impulses and a campaign of meticulously plotted retribution against the swarthy no-good Nazis who killed his family. It’s a somewhat awkward mash-up of formula that would feel like the pat playing out of a string if not for the leonine menace a watchable Gaspard Ulliel (above) brings to the role of young Lecter.