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She Came to Me has designs on being a grand opera, but it’s definitely more of what the British call a panto. Opening at a swanky cocktail reception as a male tenor offhandedly begins singing the famous “Habanera” from Carmen, we’re introduced to the sketchily imaged beau monde existence of one Steven Lauddem (Peter Dinklage), blocked opera composer extraordinaire. He’s toasting his first commission following a breakdown, through which he met and then wed his psychiatrist Patricia (Anne Hathaway), but artistic inspiration again eludes him. They enjoy a cosseted, Brooklyn townhouse-inhabiting existence, familiar from Woody Allen and earlier Noah Baumbach pictures––a hint at the weirdly dated manner of this film where lead characters are immune from the expected satire, humbling, or cross-examination, and instead indulged for unfunny farce.

Its writer-director is Rebecca Miller, who in the aftermath of New York Magazine’s infamous “nepo baby” mock-exposé,...

Writer, director and actress Rebecca Miller discusses a few of her favorite films with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (2002)

The Ballad Of Jack And Rose (2005)

The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee (2009)

Maggie’s Plan (2015)

Explorers (1985)

The Way We Were (1973)

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953)

Annie Hall (1977)

Repulsion (1965)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Knife In The Water (1962)

The Tenant (1976)

Cries and Whispers (1972)

Persona (1966)

The Magician (1958)

Hour Of The Wolf (1968)

The Virgin Spring (1960)

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

The Exorcist (1973)

The Shining (1980)

La Dolce Vita (1960)

Regarding Henry (1991)

Angela (1995)

Badlands (1973)

Casino (1995)

On The Waterfront (1954)

My Dinner with Andre (1981)

Jules and Jim (1962)

The Bitter Tears Of Petra von Kant (1972)

Wings Of Desire (1987)

The Killer Inside Me (1976)

The Killer Inside Me (2010)

Married To The Mob (1988)

Blue Velvet (1986)

Dune (1984)

Imitation Of Life (1934)

Imitation Of Life (1959)

Written On The Wind (1956)

Magnificent Obsession (1954)

All That Heaven Allows...

The Huntington Theatre Company presents the World Premiere of Fall, which tells the true story of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller's secret son Daniel, his child with third wife Inge Morath. Born with Down syndrome, Daniel was institutionalized and his existence was never acknowledged by his parents. Written by playwright and renowned journalist Bernard Weinraub The Accomplices, Above the Fold, and directed by Huntington Artistic Director Peter DuBois, Fall runs May 18 - June 16, 2018 at the Huntington's Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts.

Josh Stamberg will take on the role of playwright Arthur Miller in Fall, a new play written by Bernard Weinraub, the former film reporter for The New York Times, and produced by Todd Black and Steve Tisch of Escape Artists, the film production company behind such movies as Southpaw and The Pursuit of Happyness.

A co-presentation with Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company, where the play will have its world premiere in a May 18-June 16 engagement, Fall tells the true story of Miller’s “secret” son Daniel, the child the Death of a Salesman playwright had with third wife Inge Morath. Born with Down syndrome, Daniel was institutionalized, his existence never acknowledged by his parents.

The cast also includes Joanne Kelly as Morath, Joanna Glushak as a character named Dr. Wise, and in the role of Daniel, Nolan James Tierce, a local actor with Down syndrome. John Hickok will play Broadway producer Robert Whitehead.

The following essay was produced as part of the 2017 Nyff Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring film critics that took place during the 55th edition of the New York Film Festival.

Documentaries often get personal with their subjects, sometimes in ways that are essential to the powerful filmmaking on display. But what does it look like when family, so often the subject, mingles with the forces behind the camera?

Two new documentary films, “Arthur Miller: Writer” and “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold,” position their eponymous 20th century literary figures beneath their progeny’s gazes. Plenty ambitious, often neutral, and never too critical, these filmmakers seek a delicate, ethical balance between titillating an audience with the private life behind a public persona and executing a squeaky-clean legacy. Writer and director Rebecca Miller is tasked with her father Arthur, the man who used theater to confront the fallacies of the...

Far from a conventional biographical documentary, Arthur Miller: Writer, which had its world premiere in Telluride, offers a highly personal portrait of the American playwright who died in 2005. Rebecca Miller, herself an acclaimed filmmaker (Personal Velocity, Maggie’s Plan), is also Miller’s daughter by his third wife, photographer Inge Morath. Rebecca narrates the film herself and includes her own interviews with her father, which she filmed over the last 25 years of her father’s life. As she says at the start of the film, she has been working on the project “almost my entire adult life.” The result is fascinating,...

Chicago – Quirky Greta Gerwig is at it again (being quirky), and this time she’s looking for solutions in “Maggie’s Plan.” The made-in-New-York-City film has overtures of Woody Allen, combined with “Crossing Delancey.” Director Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) produces a valentine to all her influences and settings.

Maggie (Gerwig) is a single woman with a “plan.” She will use in-vitro fertilization in order to have a child, given that her track record with relationships is not good. Through her academic work, she meets John (Ethan Hawke), a professor whose shaky marriage to Georgette (Julianne Moore, adopting a Meryl Streep-like accent) is distracting his plans to finish his novel. John and Maggie hook up, and John leaves his marriage to be with her, and their newborn daughter. Maggie now has executed her plan, but was it the right one?

Director Rebecca Miller (center) with Greta Gerwig and Bill Hader...

"His maternal grandmother, he says, wrote the libretto for Strauss's Salome. Her anarchist husband was bayoneted by German police. Henry Louis Gates mapped the family history. The Aga Khan took him up the Nile on his yacht. The Nazis chased him out of Berlin at age 7; upon arrival in New York, one of his only English phrases was 'Please do not kiss me.' He married Diane Sawyer. 'I know!' he says, when you look amazed."

Mike Nichols is the subject of an entertaining profile by Jesse Green in this week's New York. At the age of 80, Nichols is reviving Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman on Broadway (the show's currently in previews and officially opens on March 15): "Philip Seymour Hoffman, with whom he'd worked on The Seagull and Charlie Wilson's War, agreed to play Willy; Linda Emond, Andrew Garfield, John Glover, and the rest of the luxury cast signed on instantaneously.

A sympathetic account of Arthur Miller's later life depicts the playwright struggling to accept his creative demise

As F Scott Fitzgerald ruefully noted, there are no second acts in American life: the impatient marketplace decrees that early success leads directly towards oblivion, as newer talents bustle into view. Christopher Bigsby dealt with the productive first half of Arthur Miller's life in the initial instalment of his biography, so why should these last dejected decades be treated to a second outsize volume?

Miller's best plays – preachy democratisations of Ibsen, lumpenly prosaic despite their solemnity – were written between 1947 and 1955. After that he dwindled into an appendage of Marilyn Monroe; when they divorced in 1961 he became officially a has-been. Reviewing his new plays, as a critic remarked in 1971, was "like going to the funeral of a man you wish you could have liked more". Once when he attempted to hire a limo,...

Pedro Almodovar's love affair with his leading lady is legend, as is his romance with movie stars of old. In his new movie, Broken Embraces, the Closing Night feature of the recent New York Film Festival that will open on Friday, he casts Penelope Cruz as a call girl/actress in a movie within the movie; with wigs and wardrobe she morphs into Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monoe, Anna Magnani, Audrey Hepburn. He also plays with the now familiar Almodovar tropes: hidden identity in the case of Mateo Blanco/Harry Caine, his surrogate filmmaker, and the young man Diego who will find out who his father is. Early on in this melodrama of revenge, Mateo/Harry tells the story of Arthur Miller and his Down Syndrome son with the photographer Inge Morath, which essentially becomes a tale of son-to-father forgiveness. Teasing out these strands...