TIFF Galas & Special Presentations Announced

by Nathaniel R

TIFF is around the corner y'all. Excited we are since it means the prestige film season and another round of Oscar madness is about to begin. For the first time TIFF has allowed The Film Experience two press passes so Chris Feil and Nathaniel R (that's me) will both be covering in real time for the whole fest from September 6th through the 16th. Today TIFF has announced the 47 films that will be featured in their Galas and Special Presentations sections. These are the two sections wherein you'll usually find the mainstream awards hopefuls shoulder-to-shoulder with more traditional festival fare and world cinema premieres. TIFF usually has hundreds of films so this is just the first announcement. 

The full list containing masterpieces and duds and everything inbetween (though we won't know which-is-which-is-which until we see them) is after the jump!

Click to read more ...

50 Kristins for Kristin's 50th

by Jorge Molina

Today, Tony, Emmy and Grammy-winner (that’s right, she only needs an Oscar to EGOT; get on it, Hollywood) and human ray of sunshine Kristin Chenoweth turns 50 years old. To honor her career, her legacy, and that impossibly high pitch matched only by her charisma, let’s take a look at 50 roles and appearances that she has gifted the world in almost three decades of work, in no particular order:

1) Her Broadway debut in an adaptation of Moliére’s Scapin as Hyacinth in 1996. 

2 & 3) Her two most iconic Broadway roles: A featured Tony-winning turn as Sally in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in 1999, and the Best Actress Tony-nominated performance as Glinda, the Good Witch in the world phenomenon that was Wicked in 2003.

Click to read more ...

We Got the Link

8 quick stories for you this morning

• Towleroad Yes, it's true Golden Girls action figures are coming!
• The Guardian Janeane Garofalo and Ethan Hawke share memories of Reality Bites (1994)
• The Brag I like this piece on BPM, Queer as Folk and politics on dance floors
• Playbill after four seasons Sutton Foster finally sings on Younger. On tonight's episode she's doing The Sound of Music's "Lonely Goatherd"
• The Wrap Frances Conroy and Robert DeNiro are joining Joaquin Phoenix in that ill-advised Joker origin story movie
• Filmmaker Magazine talks to Steven Soderbergh about his amazing debut sex lies and videotape (1989)
• Awards Daily a tribute to Donald Sutherland, one of the greatest actors of Hollywood 

Exit Video
The Go-Gos appeared on CBS Sunday Morning to discuss their career for the launch of the Broadway musical "Head Over Heels". ♥️ this band so much. 

Sharp Objects: Episode 3 "Fix"

Previously: Episode 2 "Dirt"

by Ilich Mejía

In this week's installment of Let's Obscure Patricia Clarkson's Face To Visually Storytell, we barely get to make out Patty's moneymaker. In all fairness, while obscured, Patricia's unreasonable Adora still gets to crush common sense with pastels and Southern charm in front of characters outside her own family this week. Out of a familial context, her obsession with perception is amplified to a chilling perversity as she willfully obstructs her daughter Camille's attempts at finding the murderer of two young girls because *gasp* what will people say! We see how even at home, protected from the scrutiny of people outside of her circle, she prioritizes presentation: heels with nightgowns before bed, suede sandals while gardening, a maid never seen without her uniform. She’s no different with less familiar acquaintances, winning over the local police chief and the grieving father with her facetious attention and sweetened coffee...

Click to read more ...

Beauty vs Beast: Live Without Masters

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" for you people to vote yourselves silly with -- did you know that today would have been the 51st birthday of the great Philip Seymour Hoffman? He's been gone over four years now and I ache to think of all the performances we've missed out on. No I wouldn't have given him that Oscar over Heath Ledger either, but he wasn't even nominated for the greatest film of the past two decades (that would be Synecdoche New York) so the injustices, they pile up.

But we're here to talk about another film, one I have come hard around on since its release - I was cool to Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master in 2012 but my affection for it has grown with time; I'm pretty keen on it now, with its medicinal greens and hard elbows. It's only right, it taking some time - it's not the sort of film that hugs you, at least not without wanting something back, making it much like its leading men...

surveys

PREVIOUSLY Naturally the actress prevailed and then some with last week's Double Indemnity poll - crossing Barabra Stanwyck was never a good idea, not when she's got that silver pistol in her pocketbook. Said cal roth:

"That was so easy... I love Stanwyck and MacMurray reunion in There's Always Tomorrow. I love Stanwyck, the most versatile movie goddess of all time. She could go from a Hawks screwball to two masterful perfomances in Sirk melodramas to westerns by Samuel Fuller and Anthony Mann (the director who got her best best performance ever, in The Furies)."