Tags archives: Rent-A-Pal
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4 years ago
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There will undoubtedly be many movies coming out in the near future about life during the pandemic, but I’m not sure any of them will top the beautiful, resonant short Sincerely, Erik, by filmmaker Naz Riahi. This charming work about a bookseller navigating isolation in NYC during Covid-19 (played by actual bookseller Erik DuRon) was shot on location in June. Check it out: https://vimeo.com/434705621
Now that we’ve hopefully weathered the worst of it (at least in New York) and we’re feeling somewhat less traumatized by the pandemic — if not by other current events — it might feel OK to watch dark films again?
Sibyl, courtesy of Music Box Films
Two new movies that fit that description, albeit in very different ways, are Justine Triet’s mostly French-language psychodrama Sibyl and Jon Stevenson’s horror-thriller Rent-a-Pal, out on Friday. Both films are darkly comic and they both build to pretty extreme endings, but the similarities end there.
Sibyl is Triet’s third feature, all of which center on complicated women trying to keep it together amid tricky relationships and difficult situations. As in 2016's In Bed with Victoria, the protagonist is played by the luminous Virginie Efira as the title character. Sibyl is a psychotherapist who is leaving the profession to write a novel — until she is pulled back in by a young woman desperate for her help.
That is Margot (a beguiling Adèle Exarchopoulos), an actress who is anxious about shooting her first major f[...]
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