Looking back at 1985: The Black Cauldron

Tim here. This month at the Film Experience, we're celebrating the year 1985 in movies, and in the chronicles of animation history, that can mean only one thing.  I refer to the evergreen tale of how Walt Disney Pictures nearly extinguished itself during the hideously protracted, agonized production of the animated feature The Black Cauldron.

This was near the end of almost two straight decades, following Walt Disney's death in 1966, during which time the company with his name on it couldn't put a single foot right. The days of Marvel, Star Wars, and billion-dollar cartoons weren't so much as a glimmer at this time; Disney barely existed as a film studio at all, but was internationally known almost exclusively for its theme parks. Still, live-action films trickled out every so often, and about once every four years, the animation studio would try its hand at a new cartoon. The most ambitious and expensive of these by far was an attempt at adapting the five books of Lloyd Alexander's 1960s series The Chronicles of Prydain into a high fantasy epic like the world of animation had never seen.

There were two main problems with this scheme...

Click to read more ...

YNMS: A Fantastic Woman

by Ilich Mejía

Since screening at Berlinale earlier this year, and now at TIFF and Telluride, A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantástica in Spanish) has been generating very positive talk. It is Sebastián Lelio's follow up to 2013's wonderful and under-appreciated Gloria. The film stars trans actress Daniela Vega as a waitress mourning her lover in what looks like will be another queer classic from this year. 

Let that stunner of a trailer sink in after the jump and let's discuss the Yes No and Maybe So of it all... 

Click to read more ...

TIFF: Haneke & Huppert Return with "Happy End"

by Chris Feil

Michael Haneke is back to satirizing the upper class for Happy End, a bitter comedy on conscious distraction and privilege in the digital age. The film opens with ominous Snapchat footage and is peppered with live time Facebook chat and email screenshots that feel strangely right at home in the auteur’s aesthetic. But this isn’t Haneke’s treatise against internet platforms - in his eye, these are just other ways to reveal our disaffected, sometimes wicked selves...

Click to read more ...

Dee Rees on 'Mudbound'

by Murtada

Mudbound is having a moment this week. On the eve of its TIFF premiere, the trailer drops and Dee Rees, Carey Mulligan and Mary J Blige get the cover at Variety. Rees talks about how difficult it was to find a distributor at Sundance in the year after The Birth of a Nation debacle:

I feel like we were in the shadow of other films. This film is certainly on the level of — if not better than — that. To burden our film with that was unfair. That’s the hard thing about Hollywood; you realize it’s not fair. It’s not a meritocracy. It’s like, Come on.

More from Rees plus the movie's trailer after the jump..

Click to read more ...

TIFF: Foreign Oscar Hopefuls from Hungary & Belgium

by Nathaniel R

On day one of TIFF two official Oscar foreign film submissions, one emphatically weird but kind of irresistible and the other mainstream but lush and erotically charged.

what's that panda doing in her bed?

On Body and Soul (Hungary)
Written and directed by Ildikó Enyedi 

Ildikó Enyedi first came to niche fame in 1989 winning the Camera d'Or at Cannes for My Twentieth Century the story of identical twins separated as children who both board the Orient Express as much different adults unaware of the other. The film had a succesful arthouse run in the US and was submitted but not nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars. 28 years later Enyedi is winning prizes again for another film that concerns doubling...

Click to read more ...