Scattered to the winds as The Playlist team can be, it’s the movies that unite us, and one picture that we’ve talked up around the watercooler since early on in the year is Sebastián Lelio‘s “Gloria.” And thankfully, others have taken notice too. It’s been selected by Chile as their official Oscar entry, and Roadside Attractions have had the good taste to snap it up, which means everyone will get to soon see what has captivated more than one of us at the site.
The tells the story of the titular woman, a divorced mother in her late 50s, who seeks out love, life and happiness and really, that’s about as plot driven as this thing gets. Really, this is a movie about a specific character, one that is rarely seen on screen, and it’s the performance of Paulina Garcia—who is in every single frame of the movie—that makes this into what Jessica Kiang called out of Berlin, “a wonderful example of an actress melting into a role… She’s allowed to be as many different things as a person can be (and to range from pretty to haggard and back again) and still be strongly, absolutely herself, which makes it completely impossible not to root for her.”
And EIC Rodrigo Perez was also taken by the picture recently at the New York Film Festival, where he named it one of his five favorites of the fest, calling the picture a “moving, funny, very human film [that] has a terrific shot at making the final five [Oscar] nominees.”
In short, see this when it opens on January 17, 2014. Watch below. [Indiewire]
