The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
The Film Experience is celebrating Valentine's Day! Here's Dancin' Dan on an Oscar-winning romance.
Have you ever fallen in love at first sight? Not its more common sister, lust at first sight, but real, true, struck-by-cupid's-arrow L-O-V-E at first sight?
It is a rush. A breathless rush when everything around you seems to slow down and disappear until the only thing you can see, or even care about, is this other person. It will cloud your judgment, and perhaps impair your ability to speak, but all your senses become laser-focused on the object of your affections, this perfect being for whom you have fallen head over heels. More...
Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival for The Film Experience this year, our first time at Berlinale!. Tonight Jeff Nichol's follow up to Mud.
With Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter and Mud, Jeff Nichols has become one of the most intriguing, and divisive, American directors working today. His latest film, the unclassifiable Midnight Special, will no doubt continue the same trajectory. Starring his favourite actor Michael Shannon, along with Joel Edgerton and Kirsten Dunst, this religious fable in the mold of science fiction is a crowd-pleaser that, despite a crucial directorial misstep, delivers a thoroughly riveting experience.
Nathaniel, Nick, Katey, and Joe discuss their individual top ten lists. (There was a lot to cram in so your host apologizes for some ungraceful edits.)
43 minutes We discuss a lot of different titles including but not limited to: The Martian, Creed, Mistress America, Room, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Son of Saul, Spotlight, The Look of Silence and In Jackson Heights.
Related Reading: • 15 Best of '15 -Nathaniel's Writeup • Carol Podcast 1 & Carol Podcast 2 ICYMI. it's high on our lists but we don't discuss it much this time due to time constraints
Team Experience are sharing their favourite love scenes for Valentine's. Here's David from THE city of love...
Murtada was first to share a musical movie moment to celebrate Valentine’s, but, as the famous Shakespeare quote goes, “if music be the food of love, play on…”, and so it is that I bring you an actual Love Song - one of the gentle acoustic numbers of Christophe Honoré’s Les chansons d’amour...
Team Experience is sharing favorite love scenes for Valentine's. Here's Josh...
It's a familiar and tested recipe to throw a beautiful period frock on an actress worth their weight in Oscars, and set her literary romantic troubles against a luscious location. Actressexuals and their mums will be clutching their pearls in the cinema on the first night it opens, and rewatching on DVD instead of reading the book for years to come. But let this not detract from The Painted Veil, the underrated and oscarless (not even nominations!) gem from 2006.
That divine poster image of Edward Norton and Naomi Watts drifting along the river is plucked from the films most beautiful scene. The scenes beauty is due in no small part to Alexander Desplat's score that rides the romance of the film perfectly. His 'River Waltz' which accompanies the scene echoes the films romantic arc, its gentle chords and progressive structure mirrors the very real struggle of Kitty and Walter as they have 'waltzed' around one another in a tricky marriage, peppered with early acts of deliberate cruelty. As they ease into the relationship, and let the rhythms of their new life together guide them, they become entwined and supportive partners. The score also playfully references Gnossienne No 1 by Erik Satie, a piece used in the film first diegetically playing in the party that Walter first swoons over Kitty passing him in the hallway, and then again as Kitty plays the tune on a rickety piano in the orphanage as he watches on. A moment of projected love, and a moment of genuine discovery of love.
And the scene is lusciously visual. Much credit to the location scouts for finding this location in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in China. Wide blue eyed Naomi and her gorgeous lace parasol, and swoon worthy Ed Norton in a crisp linen shirt, set against those towering rock faces and sprawling bamboo. It's a smorgasbord of romanticism and a perfect antithesis from their first gruelling journey, one that Walter made them make on foot, to punish Kitty. This is a rare romance that let's us fall in love the same time the characters do.
Sunday, February 14, 2016 at 10:45AM 
