Monday, October 9, 2017 at 10:09AM Time to catch up on recent trailers that slipped pass us in a difficult week. Ready set - go for discussions on the latest star vehicles for Kate Winslet and Keanu Reeves and a new Agatha Christie movie Crooked House.
The trailers with quickie YNMS breakdown are after the jump...
Sunday, October 8, 2017 at 10:00PM Nathaniel, Nick, Joe and Chris (who all attended TIFF together) discuss highlights from this past month of festivals, some of which are just opening in theaters.
Index (42 minutes)
00:01 Florida Project, Professor Marston...
07:00 Mudbound, First They Killed... and BPM
14:50 Under the radar beauties like Disappearance and A Fantastic Woman (and the joy of festivalling with Nick Davis)
27:00 Hoping to see again: Lady Bird, On Body and Soul, Three Billboards
34:00 We JUST saw: Mr Gay Syria, Spoor, and Wonderstruck
41:00 Byeeee
You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you?
Related Reading
Three Billboards (Chris's review)
Downsizing (Nathaniel's first impression)
First They Killed My Father (Joe's review)
Sunday, October 8, 2017 at 5:30PM 
There’s niche-marketing, and then there’s micro-targeting, and then there’s saying to your friend Nathaniel, “I hope you’ll still keep an eye out for Shahrbanoo Sadat’s Wolf and Sheep, even though Afghanistan didn’t select it as their Oscar submission.” We really do live in a weird bubble, but that is why one is grateful for The Film Experience, where folks are all the same kind of different as you. And as we all know, this site has been a longtime devotee of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in all stages of curation and competition. So, seizing the opportunity of a sympathetic audience, and amidst a season where many of the 84 movies put forward by their home countries as Academy Award contenders are floating around at festivals—big and small, rural and urban, American and elsewhere—I thought I’d weigh in on the titles I’ve caught.
Argentina, Zama
It’s an amazing vote of artistic confidence for Argentina to choose Lucrecia Martel’s deeply demanding, deeply rewarding colonialist-bughouse period drama as their contender. They passed over all three of her previous features as their submission, and as always, they had plenty of viable possibilities this year, including Santiago Mitre’s The Summit, an absorbing drama of North and South American political machinations. That movie’s somewhat televisual style might have made it palatable to some voters. Zama, by contrast, is as cinematic as they come. In fact, “they” don’t really come like this: a movie almost without establishing shots or hand-holding narrative cues, aggressive with its weird ambient sounds and literally eccentric frames. The movie telegraphs the protagonist’s escalating madness but without letting him go Full Aguirre and without entering the kind of outsized, Lynchian vortex that unmistakably makes the point: it’s easy to watch and think that you, not Zama, are failing to keep up. This seems like a Shortlist prospect with Oscar at the very best, but it’s also guaranteed to be among the year’s most extraordinary movies. Talk about a summit!
My grade: A
Austria's Happy End, Cambodia's First They Killed My Father, and Egypt's Sheikh Jackson are after the jump...
Sunday, October 8, 2017 at 3:08PM by Nathaniel R
| Weekend Box Office (October 6th-8th) |
|
 BLADE RUNNER 2049 |
 BATTLE OF THE SEXES |
| 1.🔺 BLADE RUNNER 2049 $31.5 on 4000+ screens new BEST OF | SHORT FILMS | 6. AMERICAN MADE $8 on 3000+ screens (cum. $30.4) |
| 2.🔺 THE MOUNTAIN BETWEEN US $10.1 on 3000+ screens new | 7. LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE $6.7 on 3600+ screens (cum. $43.8) |
| 3. IT $9.6 on 3600+ screens (cum. $304.9) REVIEW | 5 TAKEAWAYS | 8.🔺 VICTORIA & ABDUL $4.1 on 732 screens (cum. $5.9) BEST ACTRESS |
| 4. 🔺 MY LITTLE PONY $8.8 on 2500+ new | 9. FLATLINERS $3.8 on 2500+ screens (cum. $12.3) TRAILER |
| 5. KINGSMAN: GOLDEN CIRCLE $8.1 on 3400+ screens (cum. $79.9) REVIEW OF THE ORIGINAL | 10. 🔺 BATTLE OF THE SEXES $2.4 on 1800+ screens (cum.$7.6) BEST OF... | TRAILER |
🔺 = new or significant expansion numbers (in millions unless otherwise noted) from box office mojo |
|
T'was a quieter weekend than forecasters predicted at the box office with the Blade Runner sequel having more trouble than expected (which wouldn't be trouble but for that $150 million budget -- hey, at least it's all on the screen!) The Mountain Between Us didn't turn into a towering counter-programming option but with a much much lower budget $35, it should be fine in the long run.
The week's most crowded theaters (albeit only 4 of them) belonged to A24's The Florida Project, which Chris reviewed and Jason shared a personal essay about here already. We highly recommend it. The film is off to a very solid platform start of $153,000. For context that's about 2½ times the first weekend of Sean Baker's previous awards worthy critical darling Tangerine , which also happened to be a supremely empathetic, wickedly funny, moving look at a marginalized community. We love Baker for his consistent great skill with first time actors and that singular but versatile niche. Much less popular but far more of a specialty audience only item was the debut of Agnes Varda's delightful new documentary Faces Places which Murtada reviewed.
What did you see this weekend? Apart from Blade Runner 2049 (which, more soon) I had a theater weekend taking in "The Play That Goes Wrong" on Broadway and a very wacky very naked modern dance performance inspired by the films of Almodovar. No, really!
Sunday, October 8, 2017 at 12:00PM by Chris Feil
E4 - "Cool Guy"
Maura wasted no time in discovering her father still alive in Israel to actually meet him, even if Allie led most of the confrontation. Upon meeting Moshe, it’s doubly infuriating that Maura has to do the labored explanation of her gender before Moshe even begins to explain himself for abandoning her. It’s two kinds of very personal injustice intertwining for something almost unspeakably painful - the kind of moment that Jeffrey Tambor has aced from the very beginning of Transparent.
