Monday, August 11, 2025 at 8:00AM Three more countries are nearing their decisions: Netherlands, Switzerland, and Israel. The first two have won the category before but Israel remains the most-nominated country that's never taken this Oscar. Let's look at the posisble contenders from each after the jump...
Tuesday, August 5, 2025 at 4:30PM by Nathaniel R
THE UGLY... one of 19 films competing to become the Oscar submission
Since we've just starting hearing about Oscar submission decisions from the 100+ countries that Oscar invites to participate each year, let's talk about a country that wisely invested in their own arts, with both deregulation and regulation tactics (reducing government censorship whilst protecting home-grown cinema from Hollywood dominance via screen quotas) for the past couple of decades. The results have been impressive and South Korean entertainment is big in multiple countries now, including the US. While their cinema has been popular and lauded for some time, the American Oscars haven’t quite come around, with the sole exception of Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite (2019). It helped that Parasite had a) absolutely exquisite timing of festivals-to-theater-to-awards pipeline and b) was easy to spot as an instant classic / masterpiece. The former is hard (though not impossible) to manage and the latter is exceedingly rare!
We suspect that Oscar’s resistance to South Korean cinema has to do with the Academy's general genre-aversion...
Monday, August 4, 2025 at 9:51AM by Nathaniel R
We wondered which country would be the early bird this year and that distinction goes to Turkey. Since the submissions are due by October 1, the process in many countries is already well under way and the announcements typically come fast and furious from mid-August through September.
TURKEY
Turkey has selected last year's Venice Horizons Jury prize winner One of Those Days When Hemme Dies to represent them at the Oscars. The film is the directorial debut of Murat Firatoglu who wrote, produced and stars in the film as a laborer on a tomato farm who decides to kill his boss (the titular character, Hemme) due to unpaid wages...
Saturday, July 19, 2025 at 1:00PM 
THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME starts streaming on Peacock next Friday, July 25.
Have you seen The Phoenician Scheme already? Wes Anderson's 12th feature film went straight from its Cannes Competition premiere to a worldwide theatrical release, before making its way to digital. The film arrives ready to delight those who've kept faithful to the director's vision and enrage the many who already loathe his style. It's the kind of project that's unlikely to change anyone's mind about the auteur, perpetuating the same strategies he's been developing from the very start. But it's also the sort of thing that inspires a retrospective look at the Texan's filmography, tracing how one goes from Bottle Rocket to these latter confections. There's nobody like him working today. Not on such a scale, at least. Not in Hollywood, where such formalism is a common sacrificial lamb at the altar of conventional appeal.
But, because we love list-making at The Film Experience, this retrospective shall take the form of a personal ranking, divided into three parts (similar to the Hayao Miyazaki one, though less extensive). Hopefully, you'll be on board as I try to explain what each of these pictures means to me and how I've come to fall in love with the cinema of Wes Anderson…
Thursday, July 17, 2025 at 10:44PM by Nathaniel R
Olivia Colman in PADDINGTON IN PERU
CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POSTS
In part one we looked at favourite films and favourite craft achievements from January through June-ish releases. In part two we moved to the beautiful people to list 25 performances we adored in one way or another. The first dozen plus included Dakota Johnson as a conflicted matchmaker, Jack O'Connell as an Irish vampire, and Brad Pitt as a race-car driver.
Let's wrap things up now with another dozen actors including two film-stealing Oscar winners, two leading men still waiting on their first Oscar nod, and a former superhero playing against type.We'll rejoin that 'favs of the year' (thus far) list in progress with three fast-rising stars...
