Juneteenth is finally an official US holiday. Will we get more movies about it?

Following recent voting in Congress, Juneteenth is finally a federal holiday. It's been too long in coming. And speaking of since this is a film site ... Have you caught up with last year's Miss Juneteenth yet? It's so good and Nicole Beharie is just perfect in the leading role, as a former beauty queen who has to learn to let go of trying to strictly mold her daughter into a new version of herself. She won the Gotham Award and was a medalist here at TFE as well. For our money she was better than the bulk of Oscar's acting nominees last season...

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Tweetweek Tussauds

In an effort to love Twitter again, despite its toxicity, we must savor Tweets that are enjoyable and share them. After the jump Mandy Patinkin, Liza Minnelli, In the Heights, Mare of Easttown, and more... 

jean smart played her own wax replica in hacks? emmy NOW pic.twitter.com/C6bpg35ca3

— character actress georgie rae (@georgie_rae_) June 15, 2021

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Why I love Bo Burnham's "Inside"

by Cláudio Alves

In 2016, Bo Burnham announced he was quitting live comedy. The artist, whose career started on Youtube, attributed the decision to a series of panic attacks he'd had while on stage during the tour of his latest show. When transforming said show, Make Happy, into a Netflix special, Burnham built the ending to resonate with a sense of finality that went beyond the end of the stand-up act. The smirking meta-performance reaches its zenith with a parody of a Kanye West rant, interrupted midway through by unexpected sincerity, a confession of the comedian's anxieties. After saying he hopes the audience is happy, he leaves, and the camera follows. Not backstage, but into Burnham's home, a nondescript white room with a lonely keyboard. The special ends with the instrument left behind after one last song, the funny man exiting through the door on the corner. He goes out of the shot, out of the show, out of his life as a comedian.

Five years later, after redirecting his attention to cinema both as a writer, director, and actor, Bo Burnham is back in that room. He's alone, performing once more. Like most of us, for the better part of 2020, he's Inside…

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Tribeca 2021: "Werewolves Within" is a Full Moon of Fun

by Jason Adams

The alchemy of the Horror-Comedy is a notoriously tricky mix -- add too many snips and snails and nobody's laughing; too much sugar and spice and you can make a person's face being torn off smell like a bouquet of roses. Neither of those extremes are necessarily bad -- I like roses! -- but you want to somehow straddle both extremes at once, goosing the gore-hounds while tickling the easily-terrified. Basically you're asking a damn lot of yourself and your audience, but when the routine really lands it'll be 10s from every judge, and Werewolves Within, Josh Ruben's new horror-comedy (based on the VR game) that just premiered at Tribeca this week, lands... well 9s. Let's say 9s.

Werewolves stars Veep's Sam Richardson (who somehow mixes cheerfulness with a deadpan dullness that always delights) as Forest Ranger Finn...

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Blue @ 50: Joni Mitchell's Music in Film

by Brent Calderwood

The Kids Are All Right (2010)

“Songs are like tattoos.” That’s according to “Blue,” the title track on Joni Mitchell’s fourth album, which turns 50 this month. A half century after Mitchell wrote and recorded those words, it’s clear that Blue has made an indelible mark on the culture. Songwriters from Bob Dylan (“Tangled Up in Blue”) to Prince (“So Blue”) to Taylor Swift (Red) have acknowledged the influence of Blue’s achingly autobiographical lyrics on their own work. Just last year, Rolling Stone declared Blue the third greatest album of all time. And thanks to scores of cover versions over five decades, two of Blue’s torchiest tracks—“A Case of You” and “River”—have become American Songbook standards. 

No wonder, then, that filmmakers have frequently tapped into Blue, especially for their characters’ most vulnerable moments. While plenty of ink has been spilled over who the songs on Blue are about (James Taylor, Graham Nash, Leonard Cohen), screenwriters and directors often look deeper, mining the songs for what they are about: love, desire, loss, travel, California, Christmas, and much more. 

In honor of the classic album's 50th anniversary, here’s a look at the Top 5 times that songs from Blue appeared in movies… 

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