"Crouching Tiger" and the Foreign Language Films of 2000

In preparation for the next Smackdown Team Experience is traveling back to 2000. 

Juliette Binoche and Jack Valenti announcing Best Foreign Language Film.

by Juan Carlos Ojano

Coming into the 73rd Academy Awards, the results of the Foreign Language Film category must have felt like the biggest lock of the night (this writer can only assume based on hindsight since he was only a five-year old bébé at the time). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the perfect storm when it hit American audiences. The film came from an established filmmaker, Ang Lee, who had made several critical and commercial hits in English and otherwise, the storytelling was tailored to better suit Western sensibilities, it featured international stars known to the English-speaking film market, it received rave reviews and enormous box office returns, and it was both partially funded and widely distributed by a major American studio...

Click to read more ...

Review: "Profile"

By Ben Miller

New and innovative films inevitably lead to imitators. 2018's Searching is the obvious predecessor to Profile, the new film from Russian filmmaker (and Searching producer) Timur Bekmambetov. While the film ratchets up the tension to almost unbearable levels, script issues and over-dramatic characterizations turn this film into a bloated mess, albeit a watchable one.

Valene Kane stars as Amy Whittaker, a struggling freelance journalist who has an idea for a story: what if she can get recruited by Syrian jihadists in order to discover their tactics? Amy creates a fake Facebook profile and in no time at all, "Melody" is befriended by Bilel (Shazad Latif), a London-born ISIS member living in Syria...

Click to read more ...

Lukewarm off the press: MTV Movie Awards, Dune buzz, Norman Lloyd, etc...

Sorry about our radio silence these past few days. But let's catch up with some of movie news that we missed.

• The MTV Movie & TV Awards were held with WandaVision emerging as the big winner taking home Best Show, Best Performance, Best Fight, and Best Villain. Sacha Baron Cohen, Chadwick Boseman, and Scarlett Johansson among others were also honored.

More after the jump including Dune, Disenchanted, and Lord of the Rings for TV news...

Click to read more ...

Gladiator: A dormant genre awakens!

In preparation for the next Smackdown Team Experience is traveling back to 2000

by Cláudio Alves

One way to confirm a work of art's importance and influence - not necessarily its quality - is to see how much subsequent creations tried to imitate it. How many creators have attempted to capture lightning in a bottle for a second time, whether by blatant copy or freeform inspiration? This is especially true of mainstream cinematic successes. A surplus of movies can triumph at the box office any given year. Not nearly as many can claim to have birthed a string of copycats or revived a genre after decades of obscurity. Say what you want about Gladiator, but that Best Picture champion did accomplish such feats, for better and worse… 

Click to read more ...

Sophia Loren crowned again in Italy. And other Italian movie awards news.

by Nathaniel R

Sophia Loren just won her 7th Best Actress statue at home in Italy

Strangely we never saw any of the trades print a full list of Italy's David Di Donatello nominations this year, always just linking to the Italian site which does not have the list displayed in a way where you can copy and paste it easily. Alas. Hidden Away, a biopic of an obscure artist, led the nominations and came out the big winner too. Bad Tales was not far behind in the nomination count but won only one prize. Netflix's Italian original Rose Island had the third most nominations.

The awards were held a few days ago (oops) so it's past time to share the winners. Sophia Loren's Oscar hopes may not have panned out stateside but she won yet again in Italy for The Life Ahead. A few notes after the jump...

Click to read more ...