Atlanta Film Festival turns 50
March 27 — Happy Friday! And what a beautiful Friday it is – the Atlanta Film Festival has released the lineup for its landmark 50th anniversary, including the new film from Gregg Araki. Cinephiles, rejoice!
One of the more celebratory things about this announcement is that throughout the fest this year, ATLFF will be celebrating 50 years with special screenings of films that have helped shape Georgia’s cinematic landscape. We’ll have the opportunity to see movies like “The Spectacular Now” and “Daughters of the Dust” up on the big screen again, plus alongside some pretty special guests. Check out the full lineup here.
Without further ado … Action!
💻 For Georgia Voice, Jim Farmer recently interviewed the creator of and some actors from the web series “The Disappointments.”
😹 The Women’s Comedy Film Festival is this weekend at 7 Stages Theatre. Check out some great movies and look out for an appearance from yours truly on Sunday at 11:30 a.m. at the Women in Media industry panel.
🏳️🌈 Two years after becoming Out on Film’s first-ever executive director, Justice Obiaya is stepping down.
🏆 Craig Miller, the founder of Craig Miller Productions who passed away in October of last year, was honored at the Georgia State Capitol this week for his contributions to the state’s film industry.
⏺️ The Coca-Cola Film Series, which takes place each summer at the Fox Theatre, has announced it will host a screening of the 2000 film “High Fidelity” on June 26 with a special appearance from star John Cusack.
🎥 SCAD students at this year’s Southeast Emmy Student Production Awards won 11 out of the 23 awards presented.
⏰ Warner Bros. Discovery has set a date (April 23) for shareholders to vote on the $111 billion Paramount Skydance deal, with the WBD board recommending the shareholders give that merger a big, fat yes.
🔌 OpenAI announced this week that it’s pulling the plug on its TikTok-style generated video app Sora just months after it launched. OpenAI will also be canceling its $1 billion deal with Disney.
✍️ The team behind the juggernaut “KPop Demon Hunters” have signed major deals with Netflix. For a “KPop” sequel, Sony Pictures Animation, the production studio behind the film, has doubled their take from the first film to roughly $40 million. Filmmakers Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans signed deals exclusive to Netflix for five years at a combined $10 million per year. Seems like Netflix really wants to keep those demon hunters in house.
💔 Actress Valerie Perrine, known for her roles in films like “Superman” and Bob Fosse’s “Lenny,” died Monday at the age of 82.
This week’s newsletter features a closer look at UGA’s Backlight Student Film Festival, and three (count ’em!) movie reviews – the new documentary “Marc by Sofia,” the horror/comedy “Forbidden Fruits,” and the animated biopic “A Magnificent Life.” Plus, what’s playing at theaters this week, a new edition of Spotlight, and some reading and listening recommendations for your lunch break.
Thanks for reading!
Sammie
🥂 Taste of Atlanta is celebrating its 25th Anniversary with an epic night of two dozen chef-driven tastings, craft cocktails, wine and beer tastes, live music, and electric energy! April 16 from 6 to 10 p.m. at The Works. Tickets are on sale here. SPONSOR MESSAGE
Student Filmmakers bring short films to Backlight Student Film Festival
📽️ The University of Georgia’s Backlight Student Film Festival is returning, screening work from student filmmakers from all over the state March 28-29.
Twelve films will screen at this year’s festival, which will be held at the Morton Theatre and the event venue Live Wire Athens. Students from the likes of UGA, the Savannah College of Art and Design, Kennesaw State University, and more will gather to enjoy other filmmakers’ work and share their own.
Ahead of the film festival, I spoke with three filmmakers – Taylor Shults, Brianna Barros, and Juan Sebastian di Lima – about their films and the production process.
🏫 Check out my piece on Backlight here. Rachel Spooner also wrote a wonderful piece about Oglethorpe University’s student film festival this week, and you can read that here.
EXPERIENCE THE BEAUTY OF GOLDEN HOUR
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Step into a radiant celebration of light, movement, and emotion with Atlanta Ballet’s Golden Hour. This breathtaking program features captivating works by world-renowned choreographers, blending artistry, music, and motion into an unforgettable experience.
Immerse yourself in a fleeting moment of brilliance, illuminated by the warm glow of the golden hour. Join Atlanta Ballet at the Cobb Energy Centre from April 3-5, 2026, and witness a performance that will shine both on stage and in your heart.
Learn more and buy tickets here.
‘Marc by Sofia’ finds creative synergy between artist and subject
WEEKLY FILM REVIEW
👒 A few years ago, Sofia Coppola released the “Sofia Coppola Archive” – a coffee-table-sized pink book filled with behind-the-scenes photos, notes, and script excerpts from all of her films from 1999 to 2023. It’s a lookbook, of sorts – a window into Coppola’s personal aesthetic. As a Sofia Coppola obsessive, it is displayed proudly in my den.
The archive is full of behind-the-scenes moments, but also stuffed to the brim with reference material for each film. There are collages of Y2K fashion that Coppola used as inspiration for Anna Faris’ character in “Lost In Translation.” Bill Owens’ photography book “Suburbia” played a large role in the aesthetic of “The Virgin Suicides.” And, for the costumes and color palette in “Marie Antoinette,” Coppola lifted from a Marc Jacobs spring collection based on the colors of Ladurée Macarons.
Watching “Marc by Sofia,” Coppola’s new documentary about her friend and fashion designer Marc Jacobs and the lead-up to his spring 2024 show, I couldn’t help but continuously think about the Archive, and about how much Jacobs’ artistic process seems to mirror Coppola’s. The film does not offer an intimate look at the inner life of its subject, but rather serves as a record of one particular artist’s process – observed by an artist with a similar mindset and taste.
👗 Read my full review here.
‘Forbidden Fruits’ has trouble melding the old with the new
WEEKLY FILM REVIEW
🍒 If there’s one thing you should know about the Fruits, it’s that they worship Marilyn Monroe like she was God herself.
This is one of the running gags in Meredith Alloway’s new film, “Forbidden Fruits,” written by Alloway and Lily Houghton and based on Houghton’s 2019 play. The Fruits – a witchy sisterhood of mall workers (think “The Craft” meets “Mean Girls”) – put Monroe on a pedestal above all else. But Marilyn, as she so often does, stands in as little more than a symbol to these girls. They have no interest in her as a person, only as a figure representing their own power – and maybe, that’s where their downfall starts.
“Forbidden Fruits” lives and dies by its aesthetic, a bubble of fantastical color and camp surrounded by the dry, boiling heat of suburban Texas – the mall an oasis for mischief amidst the washed-out drabness of the rest of these girls’ lives. It’s a throwback trying to both capitalize on nostalgia and pave its own way, riffing on 1990s and 2000s female-driven teen films about the performativity of female friendships and the obsessive, violent bonds that form between young women. It works best when it allows you to get lost in its witchy sauce, mesmerized by the soundtrack, the costumes, and its sapphic allure. But, the film has trouble merging its old school vibes with a newer, flatter performance style – one that doesn’t quite gel with the horror-comedy camp highs it’s trying to reach.
💄 Read my full review here.
However hard it tries, ‘A Magnificent Life’ is still just a standard biopic
WEEKLY FILM REVIEW
🇫🇷 The challenge for any biopic is to figure out how to tell its particular subject’s story in a way that fits them. How do you match cinematic form to that person’s eccentricities? It’s what makes a movie like Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan biopic “I’m Not There” work so well – it’s a little strange, a little opaque, and zigs when you think it will zag. Much like Dylan himself.
“A Magnificent Life,” the new animated biographical film about the life of French playwright, novelist, and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, gets about halfway to that ideal. Written and directed by Sylvain Chomet, the two-dimensional animation style is beautiful, with a type of texture and roughness that so rarely is captured in 3D animation, and the film evolves artistically at the same time as Pagnol, creating a nice symmetry between film and subject.
However, a lackluster dub and a poorly devised structure keep this biopic firmly in the realm of the typical, no matter how hard it tries not to be.
🎭 Read my full review here.
At the Movies!
If you’re looking for a movie to see in theaters this week, here’s what you’ve got to look forward to!
Movies releasing this weekend:
🤖 “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist” (pictured)
👠 “Marc by Sofia”
🍎 “Forbidden Fruits”
🇫🇷 “A Magnificent Life”
🏨 “They Will Kill You”
💉 “Alpha”
🎙️ “You’re Dating a Narcissist”
Special Events:
🦄 “The Last Unicorn” @ The Plaza (Saturday-Thursday)
🕶️ “The Red Spectacles” @ The Tara (Friday-Wednesday)
🇪🇬 “The Mummy Returns” 25th Anniversary @ The Tara (Saturday-Tuesday)
🎼 “Waiting for Guffman” @ The Tara (Saturday-Thursday)
🐎 “Ben-Hur” @ The Tara (Sunday-Thursday)
🕺 “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” @ Springs Cinema & Taphouse (Sunday-Monday)
🥂 Taste of Atlanta is celebrating its 25th Anniversary with an epic night of two dozen chef-driven tastings, craft cocktails, wine and beer tastes, live music, and electric energy! April 16 from 6 to 10 p.m. at The Works. Tickets are on sale here. SPONSOR MESSAGE
Spotlight: Suzie Davies, ‘Wuthering Heights’
🍓 I mentioned this in my review of the film, but it merits repeating – the biggest success of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” adaptation is not how closely it adheres to the source material (because it doesn’t), but how accurately it captures the feeling of being a teenager and reading a tragic romance for the first time.
It feels larger than life – lush, grand, a little out of time. The kind of thing that makes you feel out of control and more than a little nuts. And production designer Suzie Davies captures the extremity of that feeling beautifully.
Reading interviews with Davies, she talks a lot about the ways in which she built these rooms to feel alive – Wuthering Heights is constantly wet, as if the home itself is trying to sweat out its sickness, and Cathy’s (Margot Robbie) bedroom with walls designed to look like her own skin needs no explanation. But I’m far more interested in the things she did to make each set feel like a trap.
The room you see in the photo above is in Thrushcross Grange, the house Cathy moves into after her childhood love Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) mysteriously disappears and she marries Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). It is opulent, almost painting-like, larger and more beautiful than Cathy’s home, but limiting all the same. There’s a gilded cage-quality to Thrushcross Grange, each room isolated from the next, the space a little too large for the tiny people inside (similarly, Davies designed the ceilings of Wuthering Heights to be too small for Elordi’s tall frame, emphasizing the fact that he doesn’t belong).
Everything about “Wuthering Heights” is as much of a fairytale as it is a prison. For every too-large juicy strawberry that Cathy pops into her mouth, there’s a mountain of empty gin bottles waiting to swallow a corpse. Fennell wasn’t interested in period accuracy for her design, and it’s fascinating to read about how that opened Davies up to be able to consider how to design something more magical, more terrifying, and more emotive. One of my favorite designs in the film is the room that seems plucked from the depths of hell itself – pure white on the top half and cherry red on the bottom. The fireplace is made up of what seems like thousands of grasping stone hands, desperately trying to reach for any kind of salvation – much like the characters themselves.
Lights, Camera, Action!
👾 At SXSW, “The Big Picture” host Sean Fennessey interviewed the great Steven Spielberg about his upcoming film “Disclosure Day.” Sidebars include how Daniel Day-Lewis made Spielberg cry during “Lincoln” and many discussions about whether or not aliens are among us. Take a listen here.
🎹 I’ve been catching up on my Team Deakins podcast episodes, and I had such joy listening to Roger and James interview composer Nicholas Britell. Britell is one of my favorite working film composers (his work on “If Beale Street Could Talk” is absolutely masterful – I could cry just typing about it), and it was fascinating to hear him in conversation about his process.
🎤 I haven’t read Liza Minnelli’s memoir yet, but I loved Matt Weinstock’s review of it in The New Yorker. I think he captures the undeniable tension of hearing that someone like Liza – someone so larger than life and a known, ahem, exaggerator, shall we say – has finally decided to tell the truth. What the truth means to her, and to us as her audience, is a different story. Read the review here.
🖊️ Today’s Scene was edited by Julie E. Bloemeke.