New International Contenders: "The Hand of God" and an extremely hot Instagram star

by Nathaniel R

Time to check in again with Oscar submissions as five more countries join the fray. The highest profile new entry is Italy's The Hand of God by Paolo Sorrentino. He triumphed in this category eight years back with The Great Beauty (2013) which ended the longest drought -- seven years -- that Italy has ever had in this particular competition. If The Hand of God snags the nomination, Sorrentino will have performed this feat twice since Italy hasn't been nominated since. Sorrentino joins Iran's Asghar Farhadi (A Hero) as the only International contender this season who has already led a film to victory in this category.  The Hand of God is a memoir about Sorrentino's teenage years and a family tragedy. He's been campaigning enthusiastically since Cannes, recently attending the Middleburg Film Festival to receive an International Spotlight prize.

Other new contenders are after the jump...

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Buzz Linkyear

• Interview here's a dream pairing Interview has Ben Whishaw and Andrew Scott in conversation on sexuality, chemistry and imagination
• Letterboxd Edgar Wright is programming a series at Alamo Drafthouse for next week. Wild thrilling Technicolor masterpiece Black Narcisssus is among the movies so you can see it on the big screen where it belongs!
• Variety How's this for a strange story? That Joan Rivers miniseries which was to have starred Kathryn Hahn has already been cancelled because they hadn't secured the life rights from Melissa Rivers (D'oh!)

More after the jump including Ryan Gosling's next project, Trainspotting, Last Night in Soho, Eternals, and a movie about Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear...

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Winona Ryder @50: the definitive "Reality Bites"

Team Experience is celebrating Winona Ryder this week for her 50th birthday

by Timothy Lyons

1994 was a watershed year for a young Winona Ryder. It started with her first Oscar nomination (and a Golden Globe win) for her performance in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and would come to a close with the Christmas release of Gillian Armstrong’s superior adaptation of Little Women with Ryder’s performance as Jo leading to her second Oscar nomination in as many years (more on that tomorrow). Sandwiched between this diptych of heavily-costumed prestige pics was the release of Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites. Here was a film that would come to define a generation (Generation X) and featured the best, most natural, and luminescent performance of Ryder’s career.

I am a huge Winona Ryder fan - let me get that out of the way before we go further. She does however have a tendency towards the fidgety, the strangely mannered and vaguely uneasy in her performances. Sometimes this can lead to her work feeling slightly blank or disengaged, but more often than not (especially when called upon to play one of many outsiders) it is just right...

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Winona Ryder @ 50: "The Age of Innocence"

by Cláudio Alves

It didn't take long for Winona Ryder to capture the Academy's attention. In 1990, Mermaids marked the young actress' first brush with awards buzz, and, three years later, The Age of Innocence cashed in on that promise. For playing May Welland, the fiancée, then wife, of Daniel Day-Lewis' Newland Archer, Winona Ryder was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar and probably came quite close to winning. She won the Golden Globe and Anna Paquin's win at the Oscars for The Piano was considered a surprise at the time. And yet, reading reviews from the time and even modern considerations, it's clear that Ryder's performance isn't as universally beloved as her victories might imply. Indeed, it's divisive work…

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"Dune Part Two" will open October 20th, 2023

by Nathaniel R

Dune Part One landed big at the box office this past weekend with a $41 million bow, a solid gross even in pre-pandemic times for a non-sequel (with the caveat that it's still a very familiar IP). That plus the overseas gross was apparently strong enough to get a greenlight on Dune Part Two quickly though it still feels insane that they poured money into the first half without a deal on the second. Good luck coordinating everyone's schedules; The cast is hardly B list and now they'll be even more in demand though we're betting they all had Part Two firmly in their contracts even without a start date so perhaps they'll be locked into whatever dates the production decides and other movies or tv shows will have to make do without them or wait until they're free of the desert again. Beginning in 2022 Warner Brothers films will no longer be immediately streaming on HBOMax as they have been all this year so, barring another pandemic, expect Dune Part Two to have a significantly bigger opening weekend in October of 2023.

Let the speculation begin: Will the Academy stump for Dune this season or wait until 2023 and, if it sticks the landing, shower it with statues a la Return of the King twenty years earlier.