Three Female-Centric(ish) Films Opening, Doing Well with Critics

The three films opening right now that everyone should see are It Follows, a highly buzzed horror movie with a woman at the center. The Clouds of Sils Maria, a tense and stirring drama about women and aging and celebrity. And Ex Machina, a sci-fi film depicting a female robot. Check out the reviews on MetaCritic.

Here is some of an Ex Machina review from James Rocchi:

That’s where I saw Kubrick’s Lolita in Ex Machina: Not just in an inappropriate desire, but in the comedy of two men fighting over who gets to have the (literal) object of their inappropriate affections. And for all of the preening and posturing between Nathan and Caleb, there are bigger issues in play, here, too. The sense of the apocalypse — or, more frighteningly, a sense of what could happen to humanity if Eva escaped — is also smartly underplayed, with Caleb idly playing OMD’s “Enola Gay” on the stereo and quoting A-bomb creator Robert J. Oppenheimer to Nathan. Nathan, of course, mis-quotes Oppenheimer back.It is one thing to have a clever idea and the taste to execute it cleanly, of course, and another to have the actors who can sell the tale. Garland has chosen wisely here. Isaac is terrific; Nathan is a man who has not only started reading his own press releases, he has in fact started writing his own press releases. As Caleb, Gleason is note-perfect in a less showy but similarly tough part: Naive but not stupid, intelligent but not cunning. And as Ava, Vikander is perfectly … off, smooth and sculpted and yet as cooly appealing as the aluminum planes and curves of a MacBook. You could reduce Ex Machina to an updated Freud joke — What do robot women want? — but Ava’s both immensely powerful and newly-born; perhaps the best test of her humanity comes in that she can deliberately hurt another being’s feelings, and do so with purpose.It is also necessary to note, in between the manipulations and machinations and evolutionary leaps in consciousness contained inside Ex Machina, it is also a movie that is very funny, not just smart but clever. There’s a dance sequence — and I’m not mis-typing — that’s funny and freaky, silly and scary. Isaac’s version of Nathan’s hearty self-made-jerk schtick is both true and funny, while Gleeson’s pale face is often used to deadpan effect, making him a crumpled straight man.

Amy Nicholson on Ex Machina:

In part, Ex Machina is about today’s concept of power, the kind of men even James Bond and Jason Bourne are grudgingly aware actually rule the world. Those heroes might get rid of one Nathan, but there’s a thousand more tiny titans just like him slurping oysters and plotting their next success. This Nathan’s new project is an intelligent robot named Ava (the symmetrically perfect Swedish actress Alicia Vikander), who has big boobs, a see-through stomach, and a child’s curiosity about the world beyond her locked living quarters. We’re curious, too, about that painful-looking skull-level crack in her Plexiglas, but first, Nathan wants Caleb to chat with Ava to see if she passes the Turing Test — that is, can her mind pass for a human’s? Murmurs Caleb, “If you’ve created a conscious machine, it’s not the history of man. It’s the history of gods.” Naturally, Nathan misremembers his quote as, “You’re not a man, you’re God.”

The Clouds of Sils Maria is probably the only one of the three with “Oscar potential,” and seems a slam dunk for a nod for Kristen Stewart, and hopefully Juliette Binoche.