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A trio of docs and a wider-than-usual run for a Vertical thriller populate a specialty weekend with fewer new openings as theaters stick with Asteroid City and devote screens to Indiana Jones and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken. Call it jittery Friday as the indie community like the rest of Hollywood awaits news from SAG-AFTRA as the guild’s contract is set to expire tonight.
Opening: Julie Cohen’s documentary Every Body from Focus Features arrives on 250+ screens. Produced in partnership with NBC Studios, the exploration of the intersex experience through personal stories premiered at Tribeca last month. (Focus and NBC, both part of Comcast’s NBCUniversal, previously collaborated on the 2020 documentary The Way I See It.) This film follows three individuals who have moved from childhoods marked by shame, secrecy and non-consensual surgeries to thriving adulthood after each decided to set aside medical advice to keep their bodies a secret and, instead, came out as their authentic selves. Actor and screenwriter River Gallo, political consultant Alicia Roth Weigel, and Ph.D. student Sean Saifa Wall are now leaders in a fast-growing global movement advocating greater understanding of the intersex community and an end to unnecessary surgeries. Woven into the story is a stranger-than-fiction case of medical abuse.
Vertical presents family drama Prisoner’s Daughter by Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, Thirteen) written by Mark Bacci, on 100 screens. Starring Kate Beckinsale, Brian Cox, Tyson Ritter, Christopher Convery, Ernie Hudson and Jon Huertas. Max (Cox) has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and granted a compassionate release after 12 years in prison on the condition he resides with his estranged daughter, Maxine (Beckinsale). As a single mom desperate for income to raise her only son, Ezra (Convery), she reluctantly agrees but has no interest in reconciliation. As Max seeks one last chance to redeem himself in her eyes, they must contend with his dark, violent past.
Greenwich Entertainment presents James Lapine-directed In The Company of Rose at theaters in NY (Quad) and LA (Laemmle Royal) and on demand. Limited expansion to follow. Premiered at Doc NYC last fall. Tony-winning playwright, librettist, director and filmmaker James Lapine (musicals: Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George; HBO’s documentary Six by Sondheim; feature film Impromptu) befriends poet Rose Styron, the widow of the great American novelist William Styron (Sophie’s Choice, The Confessions of Nat Turner). Rose shares the fascinating story of her complex life as a writer and human rights activist, life partner to William, friend of the Kennedys and Clintons and life on Martha’s Vineyard.
Cinema Guild presents Davide Ferrario’s Umberto Eco — A Library Of The World. The documentary about the best-selling novelist, journalist, critic, philosopher, professor of semiotics, medievalist and bibliophile word premieres at the Film Forum in NYC with a handful of other engagements planned into August. Eco (1932-2016) takes us on a journey through his Milanese library of 50,000 volumes, and, more impressively, the library of his mind. Best known for his novel, The Name of the Rose, Eco is a prolific, witty and original thinker and talker who holds forth on topics as wildly diverse as the value of reading low-brow books, the origins of fascism, the psychology of conspiracy theorists, reading on paper versus digitally, the importance of discarding useless memories, truth versus lies, great fakes, and brilliant mistakes in history. “To be intellectually curious is to be alive. And believe me, a lot of people are not alive,” Eco said.
The film is the second in a literary trilogy by Ferrario starting with Primo Levi’s Journey (2006), also from Cinema Guild. He’s at work on an Italo Calvino doc now.