The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
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Thursday, October 10, 2019 at 1:41PM Tomorrow Murtada and I will be discussing Parasite and another random goodie perhaps but we'll have time for listener questions. So have at it in the comments, won't you?
Thursday, October 10, 2019 at 9:00AM In this new-ish series members of Team Experience share movies they've watched way too often and why...
By Cláudio Alves
I don’t think I was a very ‘normal’ 12-year-old. Whatever that word might mean, I doubt it encompasses nerdy pre-teens obsessed with The French Revolution. Looking back, I’m not even sure why I was so enthralled. Maybe it was the tragedy of it all, how its horrors were as undeniable as the social changes they brought upon were necessary. Maybe it was the moral ambivalence, the complexity of its historical narrative. Maybe it was just the prettiness of the fashions.
One thing’s for sure, I was very excited by the prospect of watching Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette...
Wednesday, October 9, 2019 at 10:03PM 
We're hoping to dream of Michelle Pfeiffer and Angelina Jolie while we sleep tonight. And you?
Wednesday, October 9, 2019 at 2:00PM By Glenn Dunks
Short films, whether they be documentary or fiction, are a curious form. What may work in a feature-length film may not work in a short and vice versa, and this can make critiquing them a sometimes tricky prospect. To sit down and watch one often means to set aside the sort of internal critical devices we may use for a feature-length film, typically eschewing the things we may normally look for in films.
By their very nature, we don’t get to spend enough time in their ephemeral worlds but I do not care for short films that feel like truncated version of larger stories. They don’t necessarily have to tell an entire story, but they have to feel like a completed thought, mood, or idea.
Some of the short documentaries that I have been watching have been just that, others less so.
Wednesday, October 9, 2019 at 1:30PM By Cláudio Alves
An Education tells the story of Jenny Mellor, an English schoolgirl who, in 1961, falls into the trap of an older man’s affections. In the process, she almost squanders away her dreams of Oxford, thinking she’s trading a hopelessly boring life for one of excitement. After all, if the years slaving over books are the best of one’s life, why bother?
One of the loveliest aspects of the film is how it refuses to offer easy answers to its dilemmas. Throughout, we see many women who chose different paths and, thanks to director Lone Scherfig and screenwriter Nick Hornby, all of them are humanized and sympathetic. There are no villains in An Education, no one is wrong or completely right. These are people and not mere plot points or narrative mechanisms. We can imagine all of them living their lives, being the protagonists of their stories.
It’s not surprising that An Education has lived on as an actors’ showcase above all else. Many of its performers would go on to greater fame, though the star has arguably not yet reached these heights again...
