A Case for Hong Chau in "Downsizing"

By Spencer Coile 

Downsizing took a quick downward turn during awards season. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival last August, it was met with exceedingly positive notices. This goodwill vanished after its lackluster showing at TIFF and its absence from subsequent awards conversation. And although the film is arguably not very good and looking like a non-entity for any major Oscar consideration, it does still have one strong asset: Hong Chau...

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What's the Sexiest Golden Globe Category this weekend?

by Nathaniel R

The 75th annual Golden Globe Awards hit this Sunday night on NBC (5 PM PT/8 PM ET) so I asked Team Film Experience and friends of TFE which category is making them the thirstiest? They answered like so but please do vote yourself in the commments won't you?

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Interview: on the Ghostly Costume Design of "The Beguiled"

 by Nathaniel R

The costume designer Stacey Battat has, to date, worked mostly in female-oriented contemporary indies. That's quite a perfect niche to build a design career from. Or at least it is when the women who've visually helped define your early work are such stylish talented icons themselves. Battat first made her mark on two Parker Posey features in the late Aughts (Broken English, Happy Tears). Soon after she was deep in the Julianne Moore business (Still Alice, Freeheld, What Maisie Knew). Other credits include The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her and Him and Mozart in the Jungle but it's been her partnership with writer/director Sofia Coppola that's come to define her young career.

The two began working together on the LA dreamy Somewhere (2010). Battat proved invaluable to all the fashiongasms of Coppola's arguably most underrated feature The Bling Ring (2013). Then came an atypical challenge: a forgotten girls school deep in the Civil War era.

I spoke with Battat recently by phone to talk about one of the most visually striking films this past year, The Beguiled, and what she brought to it. Our interview, edited for clarity and length follows...

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Will "Call Me By Your Name" Be Ignored by Oscar?

The following article was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad. It's reprinted here with some updates... 

Though you might feel like you’ve been hearing “Oscar buzz” for months, it’s always good to be reminded that timetables are askew and “buzz” is a lot faster/noisier than the real thing. Academy members don’t actually start filling out their nomination ballots until Friday morning!

They’ll have one week to determine which movies and performances are in the running for the industry’s most coveted golden statues. Each year some adult-oriented movies risk going wide without Oscar’s blessing while others lay in wait, banking on Oscar favor to help sell them to a wider audience. One of the pictures that’s trying the lay-low-until-Oscar game is the gay coming-of-age drama Call Me By Your Name. Though it’s been in theaters for six weeks it still hasn’t expanded past major markets and is only on 115 screens (stateside) at this writing. It’s poised to become either one of the biggest Oscar players or one of the most “snubbed”. So this seems as good a time as any to share some anxiety about it...

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FYC: "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" for Best Cinematography

by Ilich Mejia

Sometime this fall, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer began recurring less and less in conversations surrounding films likely to be Oscar nominated this month. The fact that a film featuring a vindictive teen with supernatural powers was even in any awards-friendly conversation despite voters’ general aversion to anything paranormal is a testament to its many assets: a compelling cast well led by Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, and Barry Keoghan (and even child actors Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic, both easily disturbed but unmoved like any Lanthimos vet), an eerie score tuned flawlessly to make you laugh out loud at the most horrific sight, and some of the most concealed but poignant contemporary costume work in film this year. But perhaps the movie’s greatest showcase is Thimios Bakatakis’s cinematography as he paints ordinary Cincinnati into a most chilling Epidaurian stage.

Come read more about Bakatakis's wizardry, wary of miiild spoilers!

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