Podcast: The Handmaiden and Other Heavenly Creatures

We're back to weekly podcasts! This week Nick and Nathaniel revisit a summer favorite that's now on DVD and have divergent feelings about The Handmaiden despite their mutual Park Chan-wook history.

Index (41 minutes)
00:01 A Heavenly Creatures revisit
05:10 The Handmaiden and that time Nathaniel and Nick watched a Park Chan-wook together
25:00 Almodóvar's Julieta and Farhadi's The Salesman
34:00 Doctor Strangé & Captain Fantastic briefly to wrap-up

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?  

Referenced in this conversation:
Nick's Isabelle Huppert e-mail hack | Nathaniel's photo op with Viggo Mortensen | A recent rewatch of Witness | Alama Drafthouse Night Out | 1994 Oscar Races 

The Handmaiden Fantastic

European Film Award Nominations. Good news for 8 Oscar contenders

The Precursors are coming! The Precursors are coming! Though the European Film Awards hardly have Oscar on their minds when they vote (bless them) it's all part of the grand circus of November-February honors to commemorate each film year. Several European films hoping to score Oscar nods in the Foreign Language Film race have reason to be hopeful given their warm embrace here.

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Box Office: Doctor Strange, A Man Called Ove, and More...

What did you see this weekend?

The bulk of the moviegoing nation went to either Doctor Strange (reviewed) or Trolls as expected. Doctor Strange's nearly 85 million is a major success for Marvel Studios, though weaker than the Guardians of the Galaxy launch it was quite a lot stronger than the Ant-Man launch. It's already earned over $325 million globally. When is Marvel going to have their first flop? It seems a long way off, doesn't it? 

The top 10 wide and limited charts and notes on other pictures after the jump... 

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Morning Truth Tell: Child Actors Give Good Quote

Sometimes it's really fun to listen to child actors talk about their work. They're not yet guarded or practiced about how to talk about working with directors or the constantly-discussed art of acting. Here's "Little" himself from Moonlight (Alex R Hibbert) telling it like it is.

My face just went with what was going on and then BAM!

Review: Doctor Strange

A slightly abridged version of this review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

For a franchise sprung from the fantastic realm of comic books, Marvel movies have not been particularly exciting on a broad visual level.

Sure, they’ve consistently managed iconic little visual beats within setpieces and that's no small thing. But they’re never suffused their films with eye-popping aesthetics as a matter of atmosphere. (The two exceptions to this rule are Guardians of the Galaxy‘s garish cosmic cartooonishness and Thor‘s brassy mythological kitsch). The Marvel film is more likely to stage its action setpieces and earnest conversations in vast empty spaces like sterile corporate buildings, parking garages, airport tarmacs, or mountain ranges. Given this predilection, the second half of Doctor Strange is absolutely jarring in a welcome way, never failing to give you plenty to gawk at...

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