Luis Bunuel's "Tristana" is 50...

by Eric Blume

Fifty years ago director Luis Bunuel's Tristana, his second collaboration with Catherine Deneuve, opened. It went on to become  a 1970 Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee.  While it lost the statue to Elio Petri's excellent Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion from Italy, it's fascinating to look back at Bunuel's fourth-to-final film and see it still standing strong.

In many ways, Tristana is one of the more straightforward and accessible Bunuel films, but "straightforward Bunuel" is thankfully still pretty fucked up...

Click to read more ...

"Boys in the Band," the film version, is 50

We've talked before about how instrumental legendary movie star Natalie Wood was in getting the groundbreaking gay play Boys in the Band made. It was such a hit off Broadway in the spring of 1968 that it a film version was in theaters two springs later; The film version premiered 50 years ago on this very day...

Click to read more ...

Almost There: Lana Turner in "The Bad and the Beautiful"

This week The Film Experience will be celebrating Lana Turner for her Centennial. Here's Cláudio Alves

According to legend, Lana Turner was discovered in 1936, when she happened to be spotted by the publisher of The Hollywood Report while drinking a Coke at Schwab's Pharmacy. As with most myths of the cinematic Olympus, the story is unlikely to be true, though that doesn't take away from the allure of the actress. Whatever her origin story, Turner appeared in her first film the following year and quickly became one of Hollywood's most beloved sirens, an icon of glamor and sensuality, a megawatt star the likes of which we haven't seen in decades. 

Despite it all, stardom doesn't necessarily equal prestige. Turner was often seen as little more than a pretty face and her acting craft was underappreciated. In 1957, a conflagration of many scandals, personal and literary, secured her a single Oscar nomination for Peyton Place. That wasn't the first time she was in the running for awards, however...

Click to read more ...

Fellini @ 100: "Roma" (1972)

A few volunteers from Team Experience are revisiting Federico Fellini classics for his centennial. Here's Cláudio Alves...

If Rome is the Eternal City, then Federico Fellini might be the Eternal Filmmaker. His cinema exists outside of time, both ancient and strangely new. A filmography that's a circus of pleasures where the grotesque and the beautiful are hand-in-hand, always dancing to a song of transgression and perversity. The faith of the church and the clown's laughter coexist too, precariously, but assuredly, and the images their communion produce are profane marvels. Like ancient frescos, there's a patina of age to these pictures, but they're bright as if they were freshly painted by master artists.

Perhaps no single film better exemplifies these wonderful contradictions than Fellini's Roma…

Click to read more ...

Fellini @ 100: "La Strada"

A few volunteers from Team Experience are revisiting Federico Fellini classics for his centennial. Here's Mark Brinkerhoff...

My first recollection of watching La Strada is in a class at school as a youth. Oddly though, I neither can recall which class nor at what age exactly I saw it. But Federico Fellini’s 1954 breakthrough is nothing if not a film that sticks with you, like a bracing force which leaves an imprint that lasts.

A masterwork in Italian neorealism, La Strada (“The Road”) is set largely against the backdrop of a traveling circus, centering on a triangle of sorts between a trio of street performers...

Click to read more ...