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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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Saturday
Oct302021

Tweetweek: Dune 2 and other social media obsessions

Three tweets that made us giggle...

More after the jump including Derek Cianfrance, Paul Verhoeven, and lots of Dune and Dune Part Two jokes...

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Friday
Oct292021

Now Playing: "Last Night in Soho" and more...

by Nathaniel R

"Do you like scary movies?"
Glamorous mod movies?
Psycho thrillers?
Ghost stories?
Actress twinning movies (a la Persona, Mulholland Drive, Black Swan)?

I wish we could report that Last Night in Soho would satisfy all those disparate urges or even a single one of them. But alas...

I first saw the movie in Venice and though that was just under two months ago, this ghost story haunts as one of the worst of the year. Was I unduly harsh with a "D" from the Venice review? From the review...

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Friday
Oct292021

Winona Ryder @ 50: "Girl Interrupted"

We've been celebrating Winona Ryder all week for her 50th birthday


by Matt St Clair

During this pandemic, I’ve thought a lot about the climactic scene in Girl, Interrupted (1999) where Susanna Kaysen (Winona Ryder) is in the tunnels of Claymoore, confronting Lisa (Angelina Jolie) for pressing her buttons and trying to force her to feel the same amount of misery she does. As Susanna contemplates how the overall world is a cruel, inhuman place, she still proclaims, “I’d rather be in it!” 

At first glance, that proclamation is confusing. For Susanna, Claymoore and its thick walls are initially an escape from the cruel outside world. But between the specialists surrounding her generalizing what she’s feeling, and Lisa who acts as a confidante before proving that misery loves company, Susanna realizes that Claymoore isn’t entirely different from the world. Ultimately, she decides she’d rather be miserable yet out in the open than miserable and locked away...

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Thursday
Oct282021

How Had I Never Seen..."Dune"?

by Cláudio Alves

Audiences are here for Denis Villeneuve's take of Frank Herbert's Dune – its first half, to be specific. Box office numbers already guaranteed the filming of its sequel, and now there are even talks of a third movie, adapting the second book in the series, Dune Messiah. As the world goes mad for spice and space twinks, Goth nuns, and more made-up sci-fi terminology than you can shake a stick at, it feels like a good time to look at the last big-screen adaptation of Herbert's genre-defining novel. While much hated by its maker, David Lynch's Dune has gained quite the cult following over the years. Indeed, researching this piece, I came across plenty of retrospective defenses of the movie's merits, passionate screeds against its maligned critical reputation.

Does the flick earn such reappraisals, or were the initial reactions right all along? Well…

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Thursday
Oct282021

Doc Corner: Andrea Arnold's 'Cow' and more at Hot Spring Documentary Film Festival

By Glenn Dunks

I recently ‘visited’ Arkansas of all places (virtually, of course) to sit on a jury for America’s longest-running documentary film festival. I got to judge on the 2021 Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival’s international jury with Andria Wilson Mirza and Jesse Knight and the three of us awarded the International Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize (phew!) to Andrea Arnold’s Cow with an honourable mention to Ali El Arabi’s Captains of Zataari. The U.S. Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize went to Angelo Madsen Minax's excellent North by Current, which we looked at earlier in the year.

So for this week’s column I wanted to look at a selection of the titles from songstresses in Cuba, professional wrestlers in Mexico and, yup, that damn cow.

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