My First Film

Devon Ross and Odessa Young

My First Film is not Zia Anger’s first film, and it isn’t a documentary either, which is what it sounds and looks like it’s going to be. Nor is it formidable, which its meta-sounding title suggests it might be. In fact it’s a surprisingly easy and enjoyable watch. Though it does start off in an esoteric direction – “assoteric”, Anger calls it – with a rough collage of staged recollection, old home movie footage and words typewritten on the screen designed to recall meetings Anger had with a production company to direct a film about, more or less, how tough it is being a woman. Something, she eventually realised, she just didn’t want to … Read more

Shirley

Shirley and Rose talking

Shirley is your madwoman’s breakfast, a seething mass of dramatic tropes held together by a distinctly 1940s Freudian thriller atmosphere and populated by characters from a hall of mirrors. Elisabeth Moss plays real-life novelist Shirley Jackson (even Moss is cagey about how close her Shirley is to the original), the febrile, blunt-speaking, possibly clairvoyant novelist living on campus with her bumptious professor husband Stanley, played at full dervish by the ever-superb Michael Stuhlbarg. Into their lives come young lecturer Fred (Logan Lerman in another vanilla male role) and his wide-eyed newly pregnant wife Rose (Odessa Young, the actual focus of the film), just for a day or so while the new arrivals get … Read more