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.)
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Sunday, August 9, 2015 at 10:36PM Manuel here, sharing a hilarious set of pics from historic Villa Pamphili in Rome.
click to embiggen
Add dialogue or caption: What do you think is happening in these behind-the-scenes pics of Paolo Sorrentino’s Jude Law-led HBO show, The Young Pope? Is Diane Keaton auditioning for a Sister Act spinoff?
Is Law just as amused as we are by his casting as a celibate pope?
Sunday, August 9, 2015 at 5:13PM Meryl Streep? Tom Cruise? Pac-Man? Vacation? It's like the 1980s all over again in movie theaters. It was a weak weekend overall with a ton of miniscule new releases and underperforming wide newbies. Meryl Streep had her worst opening weekend in a film sold on mostly on her presence since Prime (2005) before she regained her box office clout with The Devil Wears Prada. The only true success story this weekend was the word of mouth for Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation which held on to #1 for another weak. It is definitely a fun summer picture but the "best in the series!" reviews feel like a bit of an overstatement. It's not quite as ambitiously staged and exciting as Ghost Protocol, but it's better than the other action films around it which makes it seem that much better. That opera scene with at least four simultaneous agendas in play and all the deadly assassins totally confused by each other sure is a kick, though, don't you think?
Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 4:20PM 
All month long we're celebrating Ingrid Bergman's centennial. Here's Jason on Bergman taking charge of her own career...
By 1941 Ingrid Bergman had followed up her first Hollywood foray Intermezzo (which abstew so beautifully introduced this series with on Thursday) with two more movies where she played, and these are her words, "a Hollywood peaches-and-cream girl," meaning the nice nicer nicest girl you ever did see, and she was fed up with it. In Adam Had Four Sons she was "the nice housekeeper" and in Rage in Heaven she was "a nice refugee." She wanted to actually be an actress, and act, and challenge herself. Producer David O. Selznick thought he had the winning formula though, and wanted to keep the ship steady. In her autobiography Bergman said of Selznick:
"David believed the Hollywood legend: the elevator boy always plays the elevator boy, the drunk's a drunk, the nurse always a nurse. In Hollywood you got yourself one role and you played it forever. That's what the audience wants to see, they said, the same old performance, the familiar face."
Selznick loved her already familiar face though and he was lining up projects left and right for her -- next on her plate was a remake of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde...
Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 1:56PM Happy birthday to the Sensates. Netflix renewed Sense8 for a second season today (the actors seem very happy). To celebrate let's all masturbate simultaneously all over the world at 8:08 PM tonight.
[If you missed our coverage, Nathaniel talked about the NSFW radical sexuality and Tim reviewed the whole season.]
Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 11:00AM Have you seen Woman in Gold which has been out on DVD for a bit now? It's about an old Austrian Jew (Helen Mirren) who immigrated to America during the Holocaust and attempts to get her family's original Gustav Klimt paintings back which were stolen by the Nazis and now "belong" to a museum in Austria.
Here are a dozen plus thoughts I had while watching it...
What do you know about art restitution?
• Nothing? It's okay. I didn't either. Helen Mirren will teach us. She speaks most of her lines as if to a small child. In fact, a lot of the characters do. They're constantly explaining the movie's plot and conflicts to us. And after explaining things there's sometimes bits of dialogue like...
