Oscar Volley: Best Actress. You can sit with us.

Team Experience is discussing the various Oscar categories. Here's Nathaniel, Ben Miller, Mark Brinkerhoff and special guest Nick Davis to discuss Best Actress.

NATHANIEL: I've been thinking a lot about what the characters and not the nominated actresses would make of all the competitive hoopla around the Best Actress Oscar this year. Photographer Janis (soulfully embodied by Penélope Cruz) wouldn't quite want all the eyes on her but she'd keep busy and turn her lens on her fellow nominees. She'd stick around for all the events.  Professor Leda (Oliva Colman in all her complexity) and Princess Diana (anxiously inhabited by Kristen Stewart), who I'd never otherwise pair in thought, would both surely acknowledge the honors while eyeing the nearest exit and counting the minutes until they could escape. They would skip anything non-mandatory.  Lucille Ball (surprisingly portrayed by Nicole Kidman) would be the consummate star and pull all the focus... but what would she actually be thinking about in the glow of all the lights? Only Tammy Faye (enthusiastically reincarnated by Jessica Chastain) might truly enjoy it. She would be very extra about campaigning and thoroughly enjoy the circus of it all.

Am I stalling due to utter suspense about who might win? Sure...

Click to read more ...

Top Five Reasons to see "Mothering Sunday"

by Cláudio Alves

Adapted by Alice Birch from Graham Swift's novel, Mothering Sunday depicts a day in the life of a young maid in 1920s England. She's been having an affair with a rich boy before he leaves to be married off, plans are made for an afternoon of farewell sex. Throughout, the trauma of World War I haunts the nation, ghosts looming over the living who try to conceal their brokenness through social pageantry. It's all told as remembrance, a writer looking back at her youth, trying to articulate a momentous episode on the page. Cut to non-linear smithereens, the film's prone to disrupt stately historical drama with wet carnality. Flashes of lustful memory often barge their way into unrelated scenes, like rainwater flooding a basement's every nook and cranny...

Click to read more ...

The Honoraries: Samuel L. Jackson in "Eve's Bayou"

We're celebrating each of the upcoming Honorary Oscar winners with a few pieces on their careers.

by Cláudio Alves 

Previously in the "Honoraries" miniseries, Ben Miller and Lynn Lee looked at Samuel L. Jackson's work in two provocative indies, exploring the actor's innate intensity. Craig Brewer's Black Snake Moan reveals Jackson as a bluesman inflamed by spiritual purpose, while Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction saw him play a hitman and resulted in the actor's only Oscar nomination. It should have also resulted in a victory, but that's a matter for another day, another article. This time, I shall investigate the complexities of his turn in Kasi Lemmons's Eve's Bayou. The director's debut feature was a passion project for many people involved, including Jackson, who also produced.

Such investment, such devotion, may be at the heart of his achievement. Not only is Eve's Bayou a masterpiece of 1990s American cinema, it also features one of Jackson's best performances…

Click to read more ...

Final Oscar Predictions: Will win? Could win? Should win?

by Nathaniel R

CODA and Power of the Dog face off on Oscar night this Sunday.

Y'all, I'm tired here at TFE HQ. It's been a bear of a couple of years with the pandemic and we pray never again to have Oscar seasons this long. Late April in 2021 and late March in 2022 were ROUGH and by the end of it everyone was exhausted and angry and combative about movies they previously loved. Early February when people are still really obsessed with their favourites (the Parasite year) was perfect! In the final weeks via BAFTA, CCA, SAG, DGA, PGA, and the others guilds we saw top prizes for CODA and for Power of the Dog but lots of mixed messaging. Will Best Actress (the only acting prize with any wiggle room) really go to Chastain? What the hell is going to win Best Editing since there's been absolutely no consensus there?!

Only four things are certain on Oscar night... 

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: A comeback for 1992's 'Rock Hudson's Home Movies'

By Glenn Dunks

Subtext is a funny thing. The very idea of it revolves around the idea that some people just don’t get what’s being shown on screen. That for some, there’s nothing there at all. For others, there is a whole other world bubbling away told through code, gestures, innuendo, and subtlety. In today’s very connected world, this isn’t a good thing. Where once artists and scholars may have been revered for being the smartest person in the room—when did you last see anybody credited as an “intellectual” on television news anymore? —nobody today likes to be told “you just don’t get it”. How else could we have multiple online discourses at once about the artistic merits of Spider-Man: No Way Home versus (of all things) Drive My Car? Curiosity with art by the masses seems more or less gone completely.

Perhaps that is why Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog has frustrated so many viewers. That film, like many Rock Hudson films, plays with the ideas of masculinity and femininity in ways that don’t immediately leap out. But once they do...

Click to read more ...