Saturday, July 18, 2015 at 11:12AM Amuse us. Add a caption or dialogue to this image of Emily Blunt and Charlize Theron on the set of The Huntsman. (No Snow White this time. It opens in April 2016)
Friday, July 17, 2015 at 7:30PM I ain't afraid to die anymore. I done it already."
We don't yes no maybe so teasers but if we did this would be a YES with the small NO of "can already tell we won't be able to tell all these bearded sweaty fur clad men apart during action sequences and mayb even some closeups"
Question
As our Oscar charts have suggested all year we expect this one to go over well but this very gripping teaser makes you wonder: Could Inarittu win Best Director back-to-back? It has only happened twice before and that was several decades back (John Ford won for Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley (1940/1941) and Joseph L Mankiewicz for A Letter To Three Wives and All About Eve (1949/1950). No one has ever won Best Picture back-to-back... though David O. Selznick would have in 1939 (Gone With the Wind) and 1940 (Rebecca) if they had awarded Best Picture to producers back then as they do now. Four men have won Best Cinematography twice consecutively including Emmanuel Lubezki(Gravity & Birdman) and since he's lensing this one in what looks like continuous shots with only natural light, he could conceivably break the record and be the sole most consecutive Oscar winning DP.
Friday, July 17, 2015 at 4:38PM Having already honored Omar Sharif's passing through a Hollywood lens, please welcome new contributor Murtada Elfadl with a look at Sharif's relationship to Egyptian cinema and his leading lady there - Editor.
Faten and Omar in 1955The first thought I had when I heard of Omar Sharif’s passing last week was “Oh, he’s joining Faten!”. Faten Hamama was arguably the biggest female movie star in the Arab World and enjoyed a 50+ year career. She was also Sharif’s leading lady in the 1950s and 1960s. It was through the prism of his relationship with Hamama that I came to know and love Sharif. By the time I was growing up in Sudan in the 1980s her output had shrunk to only a movie every few years but at our house we spent many a night watching her old movies on TV. And watching Faten meant watching Omar.
Sharif’s relationship with Hamama defined his early roles. He was plucked from obscurity and chosen to star with her - the biggest Arab movie star and #1 box office draw - in 1954’s Struggle in the Valley. Their chemistry was combustible on and off screen. It was quite a scandal of the time as Hamama was a married woman and it was the 1950s in a conservative Eastern society. They were of different religions, she’s Muslim, he was Christian. Their love affair had all the ingredients of a soap opera. She got divorced! He converted! They were the Taylor / Burton of Egypt or the Angelina / Brad of the 1950s Middle East. It speaks to their popularity that they were not shunned by the public and the industry a la Ingrid Bergman whose own love affair / scandal happened just a few years before theirs. [More...]
Thursday, July 16, 2015 at 9:11PM 
Tim here. We're celebrating 1995 this month at the Film Experience, and I'm ecstatic to bring the conversation around to that year's animated films. 1995 was, y'see, the most transformational year the animation industry had experienced in a generation, the dividing line between a 60-year-old tradition on one hand and the entirely different landscape of animated features in the twenty years since.
We have to begin even farther back. You can't tell a story about a revolution without looking at the ancien régime, and in '95, Walt Disney Feature Animation was as ancien as it gets. After having spent almost twenty straight years wandering around in the wilderness following namesake Walt Disney's death, the studio finally began righting itself through a painful learning process that started with the 1986 release of The Great Mouse Detective. Beginning with that movie, almost every subsequent Disney feature would improve upon the box-office take of its immediate predecessor.
This was the Disney Renaissance, when the studio just couldn't stop itself from cranking out one new classic after another. There was Beauty and the Beast, the only animated film nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in a field of 5; Aladdin, the first animated film to break $200 million at the U.S. box office; and then, the hit of all hits, 1994's The Lion King, a blockbusting monster that is, for many, the defining film of contemporary American animation. The company was at the all-time height of its influence and prestige. There was nowhere to go but down.
And down things went, with Pocahontas in June, 1995...
