Review: Hotel Mumbai

by Jason Adams

What scares us -- the communal us -- shifts through time. The 70s gave us Vietnam allegories like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, while in the 80s Slasher Movies were all the rage as divorce numbers went up and women asserted their rights. Then there was so-called Torture Porn, which was all the rage while Bush & Cheney were throwing their waterboarding parties. So what now? It's hard not to see Grief as the theme of our current moment -- the great horror films of our age, films like The Babadook and Hereditary, are profound ruminations on a world that's already slipped through our fingers -- a madness so close its breath is hot on your throat, and a knowledge that its our own failures, our own shortcomings, that brought this all down upon us.

Hotel Mumbai is technically not a horror movie (look to Jordan Peele's Us, which Chris just reviewed, for this weekend's official entry in that genre) but it sure operates like one...

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Review: "Us"

by Chris Feil

With his Academy Award winning debut feature Get Out, Jordan Peele distilled an expansive theme into one formidable package. His follow-up Us - a film as giddy to scare us as the kind of carnival house of horrors that its young Adelaide wanders into in the film’s opening moments - does the exact opposite. Here Peele builds upon a single idea, one that doesn’t come into its clearest view until the final moments. Whether Peele is asking us to look inward or look outward, he has shown to be one of the sharpest modern storytellers when it comes to exploring an expanse of intertwined psychosocial ideas.

After her brief ominous prologue, we are reintroduced to the adult Adelaide Wilson, played by the immediately knighted scream queen Lupita Nyong’o. Adelaide is beginning a summer vacation with her husband Gabe and two children, Zora and Jason, but she is seemingly ever at ease. After returning to the beach of her unspoken trauma brings her lingering paranoia to the surface, her family is visited upon by a doppelgänger one. And each of these uninvited guests has brought a very large pair of scissors.

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It's a beautiful day...

Well, not really. It's raining at the moment. But here's an official image from A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) to grace your screen. 

The film is inspired by this article and involves a journalist having their perspective on life changed when they meet Fred Rogers (aka Mr Rogers). The film opens on November 22nd, 2019 (Thanksgiving is on the 28th). Tom Hanks is of course playing the iconic TV host...

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Linkin' what comes naturally

• MNPP Corey Stoll has joined the cast of Spielberg's West Side Story remake as Office Krupke and a bunch of other new movies too. Yay.
• Polygon all the things Disney owns now with the Fox deal completed. Cultural hegemony be frightening, people! (So over the past 20 years or so Disney, 20th Century Fox, Lucasfilm, Pixar, ABC, and Marvel have become one company essentially)
• Variety ...has an analysis of what this new Media Giant movement might mean for the future

More after the jump including Fiddler on the Roof, Missing Link, a reaction to all the memes about Bohemian Rhapsody's terrible Oscar-winning editing and famous movie characters you didn't know were on the down low. Lol...

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Streaming: "Tea with the Dames"

The Film Experience is thrilled to welcome back Anne-Marie of "A Year with Kate" and "Judy by the Numbers" fame!

by Anne-Marie

For those actressexuals who feel caught in the doldrums of a late March movie lull, I am pleased to report that Hulu has a brief cure for what ails you. Tea with the Dames (aka There Is Nothing Like A Dame), a delightful bit of fluff that got lost in the midst of last year’s awards season kerfuffle, is a short documentary uniting four of Britain’s living legends--Dame Maggie Smith, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Eileen Atkins, and Dame Joan Plowright--to do what they do best, and apparently do fairly frequently anyway: sit around Dame Plowright’s table, reminisce about their careers and trade bon mots over tea spiked with champagne.

The documentary plays out like a Hollywood Reporter roundtable for octogenarian OBE’s...

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