Eric Branco/Summer 2001 LLC
Josephine Decker’s “Chasing Summer” announces itself as an outlier. For a filmmaker whose work has often been marked by fragmentation, sensory abrasion, and a willful resistance to narrative comfort, this new film feels almost disarmingly straightforward. It unfolds as a recognizable homecoming story, complete with old grudges, unresolved romances, and the uneasy realization that the self one fled is still waiting patiently back where the odyssey began. That air of convention is no accident. It has a great deal to do with the film’s writer and star, Iliza Shlesinger, whose comic instincts pull Ms. Decker toward something cleaner, calmer, and — by her standards — positively classical.
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Thatcher Keats/Neon
MOVIE REVIEW
Shirley (2020)
Where are the children? In real life, Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and her husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) had four: Laurie, Jannie, Sally and Barry. Your reviewer did not need to look up their names because, in addition to being a pre-eminent horror writer of the last century, Jackson also invented the parenting memoir. Her “Life Among the Savages” paved the way for “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies,” “With Six You Get Eggroll,” “Cheaper by the Dozen” and every mommy blog and family YouTube channel that has followed. And yet, in this movie writer Sarah Gubbins and director Josephine Decker have vanished them completely. What is the point?
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