If only voodoo dolls were real...

Michelle Pfeiffer as the sorceress "Lamia" in Stardust... think of all the practical applications during this particular precipice in human history. 

Moulin Rouge!'s Stage Life Begins

by Chris Feil

We've long been awaiting Baz Luhrman's masterpiece Moulin Rouge! to fulfill the seemingly ancient prophecy to make its way onto the stage. Well, that day has finally arrived as the musical's pre-Broadway tryout begins tonight at Boston's Emerson Colonial Theatre.

We have already been teased by Aaron Tveit singing the epic love song "Come What May" in a foggy theatre, but now we have the real goods we've been dying to see: Karen Olivo stepping into the large shoes of Nicole Kidman as the sparkling diamond Satine and a theatre completely transformed to Luhrman excess. While Olivo's costume (designed by this year's My Fair Lady Tony winner Catherine Zuber) might be somewhat understated from what we might have been hoping to see, we're confident there is further opulence coming once we see what the rest of the show has in store. As for the set, hold on to your hats...

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Doc Corner: Kimberly Reed Returns with 'Dark Money'

by Glenn Dunks

Talk about a sharp turn. Director Kimberly Reed is best known for her 2008 feature Prodigal Sons, an autobiographical documentary about Reed’s journey as a transgender woman returning home to her small town high school reunion where she not only must confront the people who knew her as a football quarterback when living as a male, but also the strange story of her adopted brother’s newly discovered heritage to Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth and his declining mental health. It was an astonishing film and one that The Film Experience loved and covered at the time.

In the time since, Reed brought her story to audiences once more in the opera As One (which I also covered in 2014) as well as produced Paul Goodman Changed My Life and last year’s The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson for Netflix. It was a great surprise to me then to discover Reed’s latest film – her first as director for a decade – was a swerve away from themes of identity, gender, sexuality and family, but was instead a piece of investigative political journalism imbued with the narrative thrust of a court-room thriller.

Dark Money examines the various threads that make up the confusing and alarming world of American election campaign financing...

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‘The English Patient’ Wins Best of Man Booker Prize

by Murtada

The English Patient, the novel by Michael Ondaatje, has won the Golden Booker prize. The one-off award, voted for by the public, commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Man Booker prize. The shortlist of five novels was selected by a panel of judges from the 51 previous winners of the Man Booker, which honors the best novels written in English and published in Britain or Ireland. The book, which I read after the film won 9 Oscars in 1996, has always been a favorite. Not only for its beautifully written lyrical romantic love story but for its exploration of the fallacy of nationalism.

The characters in The English Patient - Hungarian, Indian, Canadian and English - form artistic allegiances rather than arbitrary ones based along geographical lines. Those themes resonate even more today, as we are in the midst of a of a volatile debate about immigration...

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Bergman Centennial: Winter Light (1963) and the echo of First Reformed (2018)

Team Experience will be celebrating one of the world's most acclaimed auteurs for the next week for the 100th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman's birth. Here's Sean Donovan...

Perhaps none of Ingmar Bergman’s films do more to conjure clichés of what a ‘Bergman film’ is than 1963’s Winter Light. While Persona is undoubtedly the cinephile consensus choice for his best film, and The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries are his most widely-seen, frequently adorning college syllabi about the history of European cinema, the morose sadness for which his work became known feels most exemplarily expressed in Winter Light. The second part of a trilogy about “the silence of God” (starting out grim already), Winter Light’s infinite quiet, stark black-and-white cinematography, freezing cold exteriors, and tear-soaked monologues scream BERGMAN in capital letters. It’s strange viewing with which to start a hot summer weekday morning, but here we are. Though the severity of film that threatens to overwhelm you, it is my personal favorite of the Bergman canon, superbly acted and filmed with a brisk lightness that befits an auteur frequently in danger of getting weighed down in heavy-handedness. A freezing shot of aquavit on the rocks can knock you over and have you questioning the purpose of your life. 

Winter Light may be reaching new audiences this year as it has received a renewed relevancy from Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, an unofficial remake blatantly taking the premise and applying it to the contemporary United States...

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