{"id":101399,"date":"2025-10-28T00:11:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T00:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/101399\/"},"modified":"2025-10-28T00:11:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T00:11:07","slug":"diane-lane-and-kyle-chandler-lead-a-sublime-cast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/101399\/","title":{"rendered":"Diane Lane and Kyle Chandler Lead a Sublime Cast"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tDystopia arrives with an alarming lack of specifics in Anniversary, a quiet thriller whose vagueness is precisely the terrifying point. Jan Komasa\u2019s absorbing feature revolves around something called The Change, which used to be a euphemism for menopause and in this case is the brand name of a political crusade, one that aims to \u201cput \u2018united\u2019 back in these States of America\u201d by promulgating a \u201cno-party system.\u201d If you suspect that these descriptions are a form of Newspeak<\/a> for a one-party system and a program of militant conformity, you would be correct.<\/p>\n

\n\tPeppering dashes of humor into its brew of foreboding, the movie views the rise of an authoritarian movement through its effect on a family of unbelievers, covering a five-year period that begins in celebration and ends somewhere very different. The wider societal implications are implicit in Anniversary, if also open to interpretation in a Rorschach-test way.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tAnniversary\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tSly and chilling.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRelease date: Wednesday, Oct. 29
Cast: Diane Lane, Kyle Chandler, Madeline Brewer, Zoey Deutch, Phoebe Dynevor, Mckenna Grace, Daryl McCormack, Dylan O\u2019Brien, Sky Yang
Director: Jan Komasa
Screenwriter: Lori Rosene-Gambino
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRated R,
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 51 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tKomasa, director of Corpus Christi<\/a> and Good Boy<\/a> (the one about a teenage criminal, not the dog-vs.-ghosts horror film), keeps the story tightly focused on the Taylor family, whose members find themselves shockingly close to the seat of newfangled power after the architect of The Change marries into their clan. The terror plays out on an intimate scale among this collection of characters, all of them vividly drawn in sharp strokes by the writing \u2014 this is the first produced screenplay by Lori Rosene-Gambino \u2014 and by the deliciously watchable and sometimes unnerving performances from an uncommonly charismatic cast.<\/p>\n

\n\tEllen and Paul Taylor (Diane Lane<\/a> and Kyle Chandler<\/a>) are the kind of characters that often serve as stand-ins for America in Hollywood\u2019s aspirational vision of the country: good-looking, professionally accomplished, and socially conscious in a basic left-leaning way. Their sprawling waterfront home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., while not quite the picture of Nancy Meyers-ish perfection, has a familiar big-screen patina of upper-middle-class comfort. The family house (a Dublin property portraying an East Coast homestead) is the story\u2019s physical center, and with excellent, subtle work by production designer Lucy Van Lonkhuyzen, it begins as an embodiment of connection and joy and, over several jumps in time, becomes a reflection of disintegration.<\/p>\n

\n\tEllen is a professor at Georgetown \u2014 apparently of political science or a related field \u2014 and Paul\u2019s a chef and restaurateur. As the movie opens, their four children and a couple of dozen friends join them for a 25th wedding anniversary party in the backyard. They\u2019re still very much in love, and they\u2019re so effortlessly cool that at one point in the evening he says to her with a smile, \u201cThe kids found our weed stash.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThose kids consist of three daughters and a son. The youngest, Birdie (Mckenna Grace), a high schooler and the only child still living at home, has a sensitive and quietly rebellious bohemian vibe and a head for science. She shares a strong bond with eldest sibling Anne (Madeline Brewer, who, like Grace, brings her dystopian bona fides from The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/a>). Wine-gulping and queer, Anne is a standup comedian whose career has taken off, and her gift to Birdie of a Putney Swope poster underscores this movie\u2019s regard for what Anne lauds as \u201csubversive satire\u201d (a later throwaway nod to George Carlin emphasizes the point).<\/p>\n

\n\tTheir sister Cynthia has a somewhat more cynical attitude, and the priceless body language that goes with it. She\u2019s played by Zoey Deutch<\/a>, whose gift for wordless communication is in full flower here. Cynthia and her upwardly grasping husband, Rob (Daryl McCormack), are attorneys working together on environmental law, but they\u2019re not on the same page. The disconnect becomes more painfully clear every time they\u2019re onscreen, beginning with a comical interlude involving money talk and a red-light mask, and moving into devastatingly dark terrain.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith judgy interest, the three sisters observe Liz Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor<\/a>), the new girlfriend of their nervous and nebbishy brother, Josh (Dylan O\u2019Brien). Liz, first seen rehearsing her party chitchat before the bathroom mirror, has a strange, flat affect, an icy stare and a not-quite smile, and her every utterance has a predatory undercurrent, especially when she talks to Ellen, who was her professor eight years earlier.<\/p>\n

\n\tThings did not end well between teacher and student after Ellen condemned Liz\u2019s thesis for its \u201cantidemocratic\u201d philosophy \u2014 but she did so all in the spirit of intellectual exchange, she assures Paul. Ellen\u2019s hackles are up at the unwelcome turn of events that places Liz back in her life, and she\u2019s not happy to learn that Josh has abandoned his fiction writing and is instead focusing on providing editing support to Liz on what she calls, with ominous nebulousness, a \u201cself-organizing guide.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat guide, titled The Change: The New Social Contract, turns out to be a doorstop published by a mysterious enterprise with a deceptive downhome name, Cumberland Company. Soon it\u2019s not just a best-seller but the catalyst of a movement. The movie might strategically skimp on details about the newly ascendant policies that result, but the size of the tome suggests that Liz has put a few of the particulars in writing.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat Komasa gives us are samples of slick videos produced by the Cumberland Company that extol the values of freedom, dignity, destiny and, perhaps most ambiguous, solidarity. To symbolize this united centrist front, adherents of The Change fly American flags that have been reconfigured to place the field of stars smack in the middle of the stripes.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen the story leaps ahead two years from the opening celebration to a Thanksgiving gathering at Paul and Ellen\u2019s, Josh and Liz are married and expecting twins, she\u2019s a celebrated \u201cvisionary,\u201d and they\u2019re ultrawealthy, not merely from book sales but because they\u2019re well taken care of by Cumberland. Their conspicuous consumption catches Rob\u2019s admiring attention, but the three sisters are not impressed. After Liz oh-so-casually mentions their personal chef, there are barely veiled snickers and eye-rolls around the table. Every time this family gets together, the sibling dynamics are charged and brought to full-blooded life by the actors.<\/p>\n

\n\tLane is fantastic at expressing Ellen\u2019s seething, unbound disdain for Liz and everything she represents. In comparison to her reactiveness and condescension, Paul, beautifully underplayed by Chandler, is the food-is-love peacemaker, insisting \u201cthere are no sides\u201d even as his family\u2019s Thanksgiving table descends into open hostility.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs leaders go, Dynevor (Bridgerton) is recessive and inscrutable, at least in the family get-togethers that form the narrative. But she\u2019s still scary, prompting an unconscious self-protective gesture from Birdie when she enters the teen\u2019s room. Ever alert to danger and vulnerability, Birdie and her shy, anxious friend Moses (Sky Yang) quietly sneak off to take part in protests against the regime.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut it\u2019s Josh\u2019s transformation from scraggly uncertainty to overlord arrogance that most directly expresses the intensifying reign of terror. With Josh\u2019s evolving hairstyle and a flair for scorn that he might have learned from his mother, O\u2019Brien delivers a blood-chilling metamorphosis. He holds the screen with a tightly bound menace, whether Josh is ordering around the au pair (Selda Kaya) or, in a bristling father-son conversation late in the proceedings, trying to make Paul an offer he can\u2019t refuse.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe years advance, and society devolves into watchlists and the rooting out of dissenters, as evidenced by drone surveillance and intrusive \u201ccensus\u201d takers (Rebecca O\u2019Mara, Kaja Chan) who act like three-dimensional AI figures. In tune with Rosene-Gambino\u2019s screenplay, Komasa and his creative collaborators keep the characters, and the story\u2019s intimacy, front and center every step of the way, from the expressive but never overpowering costumes by Lorna Marie Mugan to Piotr Sobo\u0144ciski Jr.\u2019s camerawork, which never calls attention to itself and is finely attuned to the shifting atmosphere.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe director makes smart, diegetic use of a song that has shown up on many soundtracks, Crowded House\u2019s haunting earworm \u201cDon\u2019t Dream It\u2019s Over.\u201d Here, in two very different settings, its mix of exultation, defiance and acknowledgment of the very real possibility of defeat could not be more apt. With its sly, unsettling mix of politics and psychology, Anniversary is both over-the-edge and utterly recognizable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dystopia arrives with an alarming lack of specifics in Anniversary, a quiet thriller whose vagueness is precisely the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[66933,146,85,46,66934,397,66935,6408],"class_list":{"0":"post-101399","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-diane-lane","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-kyle-chandler","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-phoebe-dynevor","15":"tag-zoey-deutch"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}