NYFF: The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

Team Experience is at the New York Film Festival. Here's Manuel Betancourt on Noah Baumbach's new film, coming to Netflix on October 13th.

If the title hadn't clued you in just yet, Noah Baumbach's latest frames itself as a collection of short stories. Explaining this structure at a press screening during the New York Film Festival, the Frances Ha and The Squid and the Whale director said it had helped him create these discrete "stories" that together would tell a larger narrative about this (you guessed it) dysfunctional family.

We first meet Danny (Adam Sandler in full Punch Drunk Love mode), a middle-aged man who can't help but get needlessly irritated at the parking situation in New York as he heads to visit his father with his college-bound daughter in tow (Grace Van Patten, a revelation). Harold (Dustin Hoffman), who now lives with Maureen (Emma Thompson, having a ball in a much broader comedy than the melancholy film around her), is a sculptor who's made a modest name for himself. Jaded by the world, full of himself, self-assured of his scathing opinions about other people's work, Harold is an oppressive force, the kind of man whose ego all but fills the room...

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This is Link

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The Guardian talks to Armie Hammer about the peach scene in Call Me By Your Name and more - Hammer also recently got in a good dig at conservative asshole James Woods who is upset by the age difference in the film
Awards Daily Joey ranks the 101 greatest Will & Grace guest stars. Yes, 101.
Decider the 24 best episodes of Will & Grace prior to the revival
THR Netflix is losing some very major TV series on Oct 1st so if you always wanted to complete 30 Rock or Friday Night Lights, you'd best be bingeing...

More after the jump including Cher, Jane Fonda, This is Us, and Hugh Hefner's death...

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YNMS: "Annihilation"

Chris here. It's not too early to start getting excited for what's coming next year, right? Call it optimism to get 2017 over and done with (even if it's providing us with great films). And one of our most anticipated of next year is one that comes early: February's Annihilation.

The film is writer/director Alex Garland's follow-up to the beloved Ex Machina and is another stoic sci-fi endeavor. Based on the first book in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Natalie Portman stars as a biologist exploring the mysterious Area X after her husband's expedition of the land ended in disaster. Area X is a geographical anomaly of sorts, and the government may or may not know the full extent of its power. VanderMeer's series is a tricky bit of first-person genre work, so I have long been curious how it could translate to film, particularly with his creepy but evasive details of Area X. Let's take a look at the first trailer and run down the Yes No Maybe So of the results:

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Dance Party! It's Mira's Birthday.

Happy 50th to Oscar winner Mira Sorvino! 

 What's your favorite performance of hers?

• Romy White in Romy & Michele's High School Reunion?
• Dr Susan Tyler in Mimic?
• Diane on "Wil & Grace"?
• Sharon Cassidy in Beautiful Girls?
• Linda Ash in Mighty Aphrodite?
• Sara in "Falling Skies"?
• Betsy Branigan on "Psych"?
  Dionna in Summer of Sam?
  or _____?

NYFF: Norway's Oscar Submission "Thelma"

by Jason Adams

Sometimes a critic can't help but interject him or herself into a review, and Joaquim Trier's Thelma is one of those times for me. Thelma tells the story of a young woman from a cripplingly religious family who goes off to college and starts having epileptic seizures that coincide with an awakening of same-sex longings. Meanwhile I'm the homosexual son of an epileptic and was raised in a speak-in-tongues Pentecostal church. Needless to say I felt Thelma, you guys.

So much that it's hard to divorce myself critically to see the forest for the dead birds dropping down among the trees. Trier gets so many precise details so right that I know from my own specific, particular life experience - the warm waves of excitement and guilt at discovering drink and swear-words when you first leave home; the way an epileptic seizure can be a sudden horrific tearing open of reality itself's seams -  that I'm more than willing to go along with anything he does, even when it is sometimes a hint too austere for its own good.

It's hard to say something that features a woman deep-throating a python - but you know, in a sexy way - remains austere, but Trier manages. He is Norwegian, after all. Thelma is an ice pond of a film floating over fiery little volcanic eruptions - like its protagonist (an exquisitely conflicted Eili Harboe) Thelma is Fire & Ice, Passion & Repression, a Freudian phantasmagoria strapped into a cool silk blouse.