Consumer Stories

One of the more intricate and exciting films released this year was Justine Triet’s French-English crime drama Anatomy of a Fall, starring Sandra Huller and nominated for five Academy Awards. With a mistrustful protagonist, an anxious setting, and an open ending, fans of murder mysteries, character studies, or psychological dramas will eat this flick up with a side salad. The film centers around the mysterious death of writer, Samuel Maleski, who falls from the second story of his chalet in Grenoble after sabotaging an interview of his wife, author, Sandra

One of the freshest stories to come from Hollywood last year (that didn’t involve a labor strike) was Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, Leslie Uggams, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Issa Rae. The film, released in December and nominated for five Oscars, is an old-fashioned intelligent comedy with a mix of social satire, telling of a frustrated writer reckoning with a shifting, ever-trivial industry, and family responsibilities. Wright plays Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an aging author and college professor in L.A. who can’t sell a new book.