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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Doc Corner: Feminist History of Revolution in ¡Las Sandinistas!

By Glenn Dunks

A feminist tribute to the female soldiers of Nicaragua’s underground rebellion, Jenny Murray’s debut feature ¡Las Sandinistas! is an appropriately-timed documentary about the capacity of women in times of social upheaval and democratic unrest. It is an often-thrilling account of a revolution that represents in part the keen importance of women creatives behind the camera as a way of hunting stories that have gone previously unexplored and unexamined in film and yet hold worth to contemporary audiences.

Murray, who also produced and edited ¡Las Sandinistas! after a pair of short films (she is also an actress), has struck upon really fascinating subjects and it’s both her luck and ours that many are still alive and able to tell their stories...

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"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" Teases

by Nathaniel R

After two absolutely hideous photoshopped posters (we can't even post them they're so ugly) we were beginning to worry about Quentin Tarantino's Manson-era Hollywood tale starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt (as a famous actor and his stunt double) and Margot Robbie as Roman Polanski's late wife Sharon Tate. But the teaser has restored hope...

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Soundtracking: Spring Breakers

by Chris Feil

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is a masterstroke as definitive for its musical sensibility as any film in recent years. The film is a septic portrait of neon dreams gone sour, its partying coeds representing a state of mind numbed by a need to escape their bland existence. Where Korine finds more than beneath the drunken surface of their ultimately violent misbehavings, he also finds more pathos beneath the acid pop veneer that fuels their waywardness.

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Take Three: Extra-Terrestrial Abduction Day

by Nathaniel R

There's a holiday for everything. Did you know that today, March 20th, is "Extra-Terrestrial Abduction Day"? The more you know. Whoosh. (You're picturing a shooting star which is appropriate in this sci-fi context.) Whenever we think of this topic (thankfully not often) the movie Fire in the Sky (1993) comes to mind. It contains the single most terrifying alien abduction scene ever put to film...

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