Battle Of The Sexes (2017) Review

The Love Witch paints the battle of the sexes with a gaudy Technicolor brush. A- Cast. Samantha Robinson, Gian Keyes, Laura Waddell. Availability. Select theaters November 1. If The Love Witch simply raised the profile of its director, Anna Biller—a true auteur who not only wrote, directed, produced, and edited this film but also designed and hand made its sets and costumes—then it would be a success. Biller’s devout attention to detail in her films means we don’t get a lot of them, and it’s been nearly a decade since her last one, the sexploitation satire Viva.

Watch the first trailer for 'Battle of the Sexes,' starring Steve Carell as Bobby Riggs and Emma Stone as Billie Jean King for director Simon Beaufoy. Download The Pardon (2015) For Free. We've reached the midpoint of the year, which means it's time to dive into Best Documentaries Of 2017 so far. Put these on your list.

Happily, though, Biller’s tribute to the ’6. George Romero’s Season Of The Witch) is not just an impressive visual and technical achievement. It’s also a nuanced statement on gender relations whose morals are as flexible as its formal qualities are rigid. Samantha Robinson—who bears a striking resemblance to the title character in one of Biller’s presumed stylistic touchstones for this film, Stephanie Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire (1.

Gum-chewing frizzy-haired gold-digger Marie Skinner cooks up a scheme with her lover Babe Winsor, a jazz hound, to fleece a portly, middle-aged real estate tycoon. The Clarkson review: 2017 Mercedes E-class coupe Fat and silent, like a biscuit-loving ninja. Hosted by a saccharine Jimmy Fallon, the 74th Annual Golden Globes was sorely lacking in bite & a reminder of how good Ricky Gervais is. Fox, John Barrowman.

Elaine, an enigmatic widow who moves from San Francisco to a small California coastal town after the death of her husband. On the surface, Elaine’s worldview appears pathetically retrograde; she’s obsessed with finding true love through witchcraft and believes that a woman should devote herself to fulfilling her man’s every desire. But there’s a subversive edge to this philosophy, and not just because Elaine kills her lovers if they disappoint her (and they always do). Elaine views men as dumb, easily manipulated creatures, susceptible to the simplest of tricks and most clich. And when she gently strokes one man’s hair, cooing, “Life has been tough, huh?” as he cries about how he can’t find a woman who’s both smart and pretty, the stony look on Robinson’s face exposes the hatred that underlies her passion.

But while it’s tempting to read this film—or at least the first half, before she meets her match in the form of comically square- jawed detective Griff (Gian Keys)—as the feminist revenge fantasy some of us desperately need right now, the narrative is more complicated than that. Even the goddess- worshipping Wiccan group that introduced Elaine to witchcraft has its patriarchal tendencies, and it’s implied that her initiation into the cult of sex magic was not entirely consensual. Plus, her relationship with Trish (Laura Waddell), a local woman whose husband Elaine seduces then tosses aside like a bored child the day after Christmas, reveals Elaine to be just as arrogant and insincere toward other women as she is toward men. At its core, The Love Witch cautions against the dangers of self- delusion, allowing the viewer to place responsibility for our anti- heroine’s narcissism where they like. Is she evil, or did the men in her life make her that way?

Shot (and projected, wherever possible) on lush 3. The Love Witch appears to be set in the early ’7. Whatever the era, its small- town setting is a gaudy wonderland of mid- century kitsch: Instead of Starbucks, the characters gossip at a tea house where ladies in Victorian gowns and giant flowered hats nibble on cakes as harpists play in the background, and the local watering hole doubles as an old- fashioned bump ’n’ grind burlesque house. Elaine’s apartment in a grand, old Victorian house is similarly tacky, its brightly colored walls adorned with crude paintings of unicorns and pagan rituals.

Along with the heightened psychedelia of the visual effects—the potion Elaine brews for her victims produces a colorful prism effect straight out of 1. The Trip—and musical nods to giallo, the overall effect is one of cheeky feminist camp, delighting in the artifice of both femininity and filmmaking. But you don’t see movies like The Love Witch much anymore, and even in the heyday of occult pulp, they were rarely made with such care. By harkening back to a bygone era of filmmaking, The Love Witch scoops up the zeitgeist in its long, slender fingers, gently turning it over before driving a nail through its chest.

June 2, 2017 March 3, 2017 Battle of the Sexes trailer: Emma Stone and Steve Carell face off on the tennis court. Watch Online Free Hateful 8 (2015) on this page.

The Desperate Battle to Destroy ISISI. Up the Tigris. When the campaign to expel the Islamic State from Mosul began, on October 1. Nineveh Province SWAT team was deployed far from the action, in the village of Kharbardan.

For weeks, the . The men, needing a headquarters, had commandeered an abandoned mud- mortar house whose primary charm was its location: the building next door had been obliterated by an air strike, and the remains of half a dozen Islamic State fighters—charred torsos, limbs, and heads—still littered the rubble. The SWAT- team members huddled around a lieutenant with a radio, listening to news of the offensive.

The Kurdish Army, or peshmerga, was advancing toward Mosul from the north; various divisions of the Iraqi military were preparing a push from the south. More than a hundred thousand soldiers, policemen, and government- sanctioned- militia members were expected to participate in the fight to liberate Mosul, the second- largest city in Iraq. It had been occupied since June, 2. Islamic State, or ISIS. The SWAT- team members were desperate to join the battle. They called relatives in Mosul, chain- smoked cigarettes, and excoriated the war planners, from Baghdad, who seemed to have forgotten them. Major Mezher Sadoon, the deputy commander, urged patience: the campaign would unfold in stages.

At forty- six, he had a flattop and a paintbrush mustache that were equal parts black and gray. He had been shot in the face in Mosul, in 2. The deformed bone caused his speech to slur—subtly when he spoke at a normal pace and volume (rare), and severely when he was angry or excited (often).

Many villages surrounding Mosul had to be cleared before forces could retake the city, Mezher told his men. Holding out his hands, he added, “When you kill a chicken, first you have to boil it. Then you have to pluck it. Only after that do you get to butcher it.”Few of the policemen seemed reassured by the analogy. They were hungry, and they’d been waiting to butcher this chicken for a long time.

The SWAT team was created in 2. U. S. Special Forces, conducted raids in Mosul to arrest high- value terrorism suspects. After the American withdrawal from the country, in 2. In early 2. 01. 4, ISIS attacked the Iraqi cities of Ramadi and Falluja. Then, riding out of Syria in pickup trucks mounted with machine guns, the militants stormed Mosul. They had aspired merely to secure a couple of the city’s western neighborhoods, but they quickly reached the Tigris River, which snakes south through the middle of Mosul.

Along the way, they overran several military bases, seizing the heavy weapons, armored vehicles, and ammunition depots inside them. The SWAT team, which at the time was based at a compound near the Mosul airport, consisted of roughly eighty men, only half of whom were on duty. As ISIS surged through the city, the commander of the SWAT team, Lieutenant Colonel Rayyan Abdelrazzak, consolidated his troops in the Mosul Hotel, a ten- story terraced building on the western bank of the Tigris. The SWAT team held the position for four days, while the thirty thousand Army soldiers stationed in Mosul—nearly all of whom came from elsewhere in Iraq—ditched their weapons and fled. On the fifth day, a water tanker loaded with explosives detonated outside the hotel, killing three SWAT- team members and wounding twenty- five.

Rayyan and the survivors retreated to the airport compound. A detention facility next to the compound contained approximately nine hundred convicted terrorists, many of whom had been apprehended by the SWAT team.

With the fall of Mosul imminent, Rayyan’s men loaded two hundred and fifty- six of the inmates into vans and spirited them out of the city. The captives they had to leave behind were freed by ISIS the next day. A week later, so were the two hundred and fifty- six, when the town to which Rayyan had transferred them also fell to ISIS. In the areas it controls, ISIS typically offers Iraqi security forces a kind of amnesty by means of an Islamic procedure called towba, in which one repents and pledges allegiance to the Caliphate. But the SWAT team was not eligible for towba.

Some members of the force who had not been at the Mosul Hotel escaped to Kurdistan, but, among those who failed to make it out of the city, twenty- six were rounded up and executed. Eventually, the chief of police for Nineveh Province, whose capital is Mosul, reconstituted his forces at a spartan base north of the city. Rayyan brought the remnants of the SWAT team there, and began enlisting new volunteers. Aside from martial aptitude, there were two principal requirements for recruits: they had to have been wounded by ISIS or its Islamist precursors—either physically, by bullets and blasts, or psychically, by the death of a loved one—and they had to crave revenge. If the implication was that other units’ commitment to the destruction of ISIS was less than sincere, Rayyan’s understanding of the distinction was personal. In 2. 00. 5, his older brother Safwan had been gunned down by terrorists, and two of his fianc.

His father’s house had been blown up. He’d been shot in the leg and the chest and the hip. At his engagement party, gunmen had tried to shoot him a fourth time, and wounded his sister instead. More recently, ISIS suicide bombers had killed his brother Neshwan, a police officer, and abducted his brother Salwan, who had remained in Mosul. Rayyan didn’t know if Salwan was alive or dead. For two years after Mosul fell, the front lines around the city remained relatively static, as the Iraqi military regrouped and clawed back ISIS- held territory closer to Baghdad. This past summer, Iraqi forces began reclaiming the mostly rural lands to the east and south of Mosul, laying the groundwork for an invasion.

The SWAT team helped clear five villages. Then, to the unit’s frustration, it was sent out to Kharbardan, in a dust- bowl district of minimal strategic consequence.

A few days after the campaign to liberate Mosul began, one officer, Lieutenant Thamer Najem, deserted his post when he learned that the Army was attempting to clear ISIS from the village where his mother and cousins lived. Thamer returned two days later with a story that confirmed each man’s worst anxiety. Four of his cousins had killed an ISIS fighter when they saw Iraqi infantry and tanks approaching. But the Army had stopped short of entering the village, and Thamer’s relatives were slaughtered. In Kharbardan, policeman after policeman explained to my interpreter and me why he had joined the SWAT team and why he wanted revenge.

Hadi Nabil, a low- key corporal, said that his wife, Abeer, died in 2. Al Qaeda assassins came looking for him at his home. Their daughter, Khalida, was ten days old. The gunmen shot Abeer dead and wounded Hadi in the shoulder. After the funeral, Hadi, in keeping with Iraqi custom, married Abeer’s sister, Iman, who agreed to raise Khalida. When ISIS invaded Mosul, Hadi, then a regular policeman, holed up with the SWAT members in the hotel, where he was wounded in the water- tanker blast. He fled the city with Rayyan’s men, and hadn’t seen his wife or his daughter since.

In 2. 01. 5, an ISIS court forced Iman to divorce Hadi. Militants subsequently tracked down Hadi’s brother, who belonged to a resistance cell, and abducted him. One day in Kharbardan, a young man with a black scarf wrapped around his head approached me bashfully and proposed that we talk someplace where no one else could hear. His name was Bashar Hamood; until now, he’d deliberately seemed to avoid me. We climbed onto the roof. A guard was posted there, and when he saw us he asked Bashar, “Did you show him the video?”“Not yet.”Bashar told me that his older brother, Salem, had been an intelligence officer in Mosul and had fled to Kurdistan when the city fell.

A few months later, a Kurdish intelligence agency publicly accused Salem of being an ISIS sympathizer, and deported him from Kurdish territory. Bashar was shocked, and on March 1. Salem on Facebook, insisting that he explain himself.