Beauty Sleep

After wrapping up the film year and February ending TFE needs some beauty sleep but we'll back on Sunday night or Monday morning, refreshed. Have fun this weekend! See lots of movies. 

COMING IN MARCH
Celebrations of Toshiro Mifune for his centennial and Rachel Weisz for her 50th + the new Smackdown schedule + trips to the movie theater for Wendy, Saint Frances, The Hunt, A Quiet Place Part 2, Emma. And you know how we love anniversaries so we'll look back at The Picture of Dorian Gray, Tristana, and Muriel's Wedding for their 75th, 50th, 25th respectively. All that plus whatever you assign us on streaming since that Voyage experience went well. 

February. It's a Wrap

Here are some highlights you might have missed from the month that was. (Yes, there's one day left but we're taking a weekend) 

Voyage of the Damned (1976) you assigned us this topic. We'll do another reader's choice soon
Carol 2 ??? No, it's just a set photo from Nightmare Alley.
10 Unforgettable Oscar Moments - what were your favourites?
And Then We Danced don't miss this lovely drama about gay dancers in homophobic Georgia
Birds of Prey hasn't been superhero-sized hit but Chris liked it
Sundance Sum Up - Murtada tells us how it was in snowy Park City
The French Dispatch - are you excited for Wes Anderson's latest? 
Interview: Rodrigo Prieto the great cinematographer looks back at his career and why he's an auteur favourite
Nathaniel's top 10 of 2019 Woman at War, Marriage Story, The Farewell etc
2019 Film Coverage is a Wrap a guide to all our coverage of the year that was

Review: The Invisible Man

by Chris Feil

What was once meant for the microwaved territory of the would-be Dark Universe has found new, timely, and sometimes ingenious life as a one-off. Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man morphs its source material with a shift in perspective, making its mad scientist a complete phantom figure to the audience.

However, he is a monster all too intimately familiar to the protagonist, Elisabeth Moss’s fraught survivor Cecilia. The film aims to place itself alongside the greats of our current age of horror by placing us thrillingly in her escape from abuse, and in turn offers something fresher to its namesake than previously imagined. If not always a complete success in its genre elements, on a conceptual basis, The Invisible Man is valuable and invigorating as a portrait of the fallout from enduring domestic abuse.

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The Emmas of Yore: ITV's "Emma"

by Cláudio Alves

The character of Emma Woodhouse is a tricky one to play. At least, if the actress is trying to reproduce the personality Jane Austen wrote in her famous novel. She's a daughter of privilege who has grown to believe she's much cleverer than what is true. A matchmaker by vocation, Emma is a busybody who's always interfering in other people's lives, presumptuous and terminally judgmental of all that surrounds her. She can also be a bit of a mean girl when indulged. Still, these character flaws are nothing but the folly of youth and the consequence of a provincial upbringing. Emma Woodhouse is naïve to a fault and desperately romantic. More importantly, she's not intentionally cruel or callous, just foolish.

This mix of a meddler's instinct and a daydreamer's heart is a difficult one to represent without skewing the balance of the characterization. In that regard, Kate Beckinsale might be the best Emma of them all…

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Doc Corner: Oh, the horror! 'Scream, Queen!' and 'Horror Noire'

By Glenn Dunks (who is currently counting down my top documentaries of the decade over on Twitter. Follow along!)

Horror movies are obviously an audience-beloved industry-entrenched part of the movie business. Even if the genre hasn’t always gotten the respect it deserves, horror has been a vital part in the cinematic stories for African American audiences and for queer audiences. These are, after all, viewers that have been ignored by the mainstream industry at large for as long as movies have existed. Minority audiences have often found the catharses and long-documented history of othered subtext of scary movies to be rare portals of release.

How great it is then to see two new documentaries Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street and Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror focusing on these elements and offering glimpses into the complicated realm of what it is like to be a viewer and a creator in these spaces...

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