Red Carpet Lineup: 30 Looks from Venice 2020

The 77th Venice Film Festival wrapped today with the Golden Lion going to Chloe Zhao's Nomadland (which we'd predicted as far back as our annual April Foolish Predictions to be in the forthcoming Best Picture and Best Director lineups (we'll update all those charts this week). Venice wasn't the star-studded affair it usually is due to the shortage of travel and the ongoing troubles of the pandemic but they shouldered on. Cate Blanchett was in town for the whole festival as the President of the Jury and she made the all too rare decision to be sustainably fashionable by wearing only red carpet looks she'd worn before at other glitzy events. But her superpower, well one of them at any rate, is to make any year's fashions look utterly timeless.

29 other looks after the jump from the small batch of stars who went to Venice...

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Jean Gabin: French Superstar

by Cláudio Alves

The 11th Academy Awards marked an important first in Oscar history. Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, a French drama about class hierarchies and political strife in World War I, received a Best Picture nomination. It became the first non-English language film to ever do so. As we all know, it'd take 81 years for one such picture to win Hollywood's most coveted trophy, but we're not here to talk about Parasite's glorious victory as tempting as that is. Instead, our subject matter is one of French cinema's greatest stars, a brilliant actor that grew to be a cultural monument, the leading man of that historic '38 Best Picture nominee. Jean Gabin was a divinity of the Silver Screen, as magnetic as he was devastating…

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Back to the movies with "Tenet" and a "Personal History..."

by Eurocheese

I drove 100 miles (one way!) to see two movies last weekend. Was it worth it? Well… yes and no. Here’s my take on returning to theaters and my thoughts on the two films I went (way) out of my way to see: Tenet and The Personal History of David Copperfield.

First, the moviegoing experience itself...

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Emmy Review: Comedy Series

By Abe Friedtanzer

It's Schitt's Creek vs. Mrs Maisel for the gold.

We here at The Film Experience hope you've all enjoyed our category reviews. The Emmys begin in a few days on the 14th with the Creative Arts awards (i.e. below the line categories) before the big final awards night on September 20th.

Comedy series is the category where, by all visible indications, the winner is already set: Schitt’s Creek. While I don’t love the show, I harbor no ill will against it and am already prepared for it to win. Its two biggest hurdles seem surmountable to me. As far as I can tell, only two shows have won this award only for their final seasons: Barney Miller in 1982 and Fleabag last year. For the former, it was a nominee all eight seasons, and the latter wasn’t nominated in any category for the first of its two total seasons. This is only the second nomination for Schitt’s Creek. The other factor is that most of us – and the Internet – aren’t Emmy voters, and could it be possible that the collective enthusiasm around the show won’t materialize on Emmy night? If it doesn’t, what show wins instead?

I’ll try to avoid major plot details in my analysis – but if you’d like more spoiler-filled descriptions, click on the episode titles. Let’s consider each nominee…

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"Elvis" gets back to work

by Ben Miller

Elvis and his manager Colonel Parker in 1958

Though the coronavirus is still raging in the US, the rest of the world is starting to get back to normal, and that means the restarting of international film productions.  One of the most noteworthy of those productions,  restarting in Australia, is Baz Luhrmann’s (as of yet untitled) Elvis Presley film, starring Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood’s Austin Butler as the King of Rock and the world’s most famous COVID patient, Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker.

The project itself is relatively unknown, but we do know Luhrmann, so don't expect the typical biopic treatment...

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