The Filtnib’s Progress

Julianne Moore is one of my favourite actresses. She commits so entirely to her roles, isn’t afraid of acting ugly and seems to inhabit characters from the inside out, right from their beating hearts to the stretch of their skin. She has also starred in some unusually intelligent films. In Magnolia, The Hours and Far From Heaven she plays women in desperate trouble, driven into corners and struggling to keep a lid on rising panic. In all three movies, her character is painfully familiar and yet one of a kind: the taut, glamorous younger woman in Magnolia; the shirt-waisted, obedient housewife drowning in post-natal depression in The Hours; the confused wife of a gay man in Far From Heaven.

Interestingly all explore the confines and cravings of imperfect wife-hood. Her new film, Savage Grace, seems to do the same, and the trailer suggests Moore is on top form, though the film itself has had somewhat mixed reviews.

Savage Grace is based on a true story that does not end at all well, and with my very low-horror (I like to think of it as high empathy) threshold I don’t know if I’d actually want to see the whole film on the big screen. If you like you can watch the trailer here. But I’m going to recommend another, and if you’ve only got time to watch one video today, I’d say choose the trailer for the movie that just opened this years Cannes film festival.

From the visionary Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener), and also starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover and the gorgeous Mark Ruffalo, Blindness tells the story of a city struck by an epidemic of – yep you’ve guessed it – blindness. It’s a cracker of a trailer and I’d bet my hat the genius Meirelles had a hand in putting it together himself.