Cast This: The Next Indiana Jones

We’d have to change the name from Jones to Joan. And there would be nothing wrong with that. - Steven Spielberg.

We already knew the next Indiana Jones would not be Shia Labeouf, Crystal Skull notwithstanding. Now Steven Spielberg has indicated it might be a woman. Harrison Ford will be back, one last time, for the 5th film in the hugely popular series. But after that we might get Joan Jones? Indiana Joan? Spielberg also seems not to know the difference between first and last names.

The 5th Indiana Jones, as yet untitled,  has been announced as Spielberg’s next directorial project. It will be shooting in the UK next year. Which means we have a lot of time to fantasy cast the female Indiana. Who would be your choice?

Review: Joaquin Phoenix in "You Were Never Really Here"

by Seán McGovern

As the credits begin to roll on Lynne Ramsey's visceral and intense film, I felt an odd feeling of relief that Joaquin Phoenix did not win an Oscar for playing Johnny Cash. In the years since, Phoenix has eschewed the mainstream and become a full-blown movie-star weirdo. His raw performance in You Were Never Really Here isn't just told his line-readings but also his back muscles, feet, scars and posture. A role for the classical leading man, this is not.

Ramsey's first film since 2011 is a singular assault. It's quite possible that you hated We Need to Talk About Kevin, which took the parental horrors of Lionel Shriver's novel and intellectualised them at a remove. But Ramsey has a knack for distance, creating a particular style of alienation that works perfectly for the story of a traumatized hired-gun...

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Mother Meryl in Big Little Lies 2

by Chris Feil.

The family that watches together stays together. Or maybe not in Monterey.

Tidbits of the second season of Big Little Lies are steadily arriving now that filming is underway. Now we have what we've really been craving: a glimpse of Meryl as Perry's mother. This docile family moment doesn't look like the fireworks we'd been promised by her arrival, but maybe this is just a decoy of sorts dropped by Nicole Kidman on her Instagram (a gift that keeps on giving). But what is the family watching? Are they rewatching season one like the rest of us surely will? Observing good parenting and indoctrinately these kids to The Hours as soon as possible? Reading our Months of Meryl as a bedtime story? Hmmm....

Blueprints: "Psycho"

The April Showers series is back at The Film Experience, here's Jorge on how the most famous shower scene in cinema histor was written on the page.

One thing about iconic cinema sequences is that back when the script is written, before the movie is shot, released and gains critical acclaim (sometimes before it is even developed), they are not conceived to be iconic. They are simply a piece in a puzzle; one more segment in a longer story. 

But sometimes sequences transcend. Sometimes they become essential pieces of the cinema mosaic. And few scenes have stood the test of time better than the shower scene in Psycho. It has been recreated countless times, spun hundreds of homages and parodies, and changed the way horror scenes are shot, and what audiences should expect of the genre. Let’s take a look at how it looked in the page, before it acquired icon status, when it was merely three pages of a script…

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Months of Meryl: Ironweed (1987)

John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep. 

 #14 — Helen Archer, a dying homeless alcoholic.

JOHN: Behold, the most devastating sequel to Heartburn imaginable. Directed by Hector Babenco and adapted by William Kennedy from his own Pulitzer-winning novel, Ironweed follows Francis (Jack Nicholson) and Helen (Streep), two homeless drifters biding their time and eking out their lives in Depression-era Albany. At nearly two and a half hours long, Ironweed is a bleak, wrenching study of poverty with nary a promise of redemption in sight. We’re talking about a movie whose most uplifting and musical scene is chased with a crushing dose of hopeless reality, a movie in which dogs assail a woman’s frozen corpse outside a church, digging graves is considered a good day’s work, and ramshackle vagrants pray they drink enough liquor to die in their sleep. It’s a tough sell and an even tougher sit, but Ironweed features one of Streep’s most spellbinding transformations.

Helen Archer does not make her entrance for a good twenty minutes. First we watch Nicholson’s Francis dig graves, slug whiskey, and fecklessly address the headstone of his deceased infant son, who he dropped and killed in a drunken daze. In the basement of a church serving free hot meals for the homeless, Helen slips through the door, a regular who, after some time away, returns to more of the same, reuniting with her moribund companion Francis. Streep’s Helen is shrewd enough to get herself warm and fed, but something about Helen suggests that she isn’t entirely there; it’s almost as if she is suspended halfway between life and death, past and present.

Helen, who we will come to learn is a former singer and concert pianist, constantly recollects the glory of her dashed dreams with utmost clarity, as again Streep is able to conjure a memory so expressively that one believes it to be as true as fact...

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