The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
Follow TFE on Substackd
We're looking for 500... no 390 Subscribers! If you read us daily, please be one.
THANKS IN ADVANCE
Sunday, October 15, 2017 at 9:08AM by Nathaniel R
Sorry to begin your day with something so grim but it's actressy. Today marks the centennial of the execution of exotic dancer Mata Hari by firing squad for espionage during "The Great War" (aka World War I)...
Friday, September 22, 2017 at 12:40PM 
Tim here. This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the tiny gems in the careers of Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney, and director Stanley Donen: Two for the Road. It's a British film that picked up a handful of important awards nominations – writer Frederic Raphael at both the Oscars and BAFTAS, Hepburn at the Golden Globes, Donen with the DGA – and went on to be largely overlooked in the following five decades.
That's understandable; it's not a film primed to appeal to the fandom that it seems like it should have. Donen in the director's seat and Hepburn as the top-billed lead both suggest certain kinds of films, if not necessarily the same kind of film: bubbly comedies in his case, elegant Continental romances in hers (splitting the difference, four years earlier they collaborated on Charade, a bubbly Continental comedy). Two for the Road isn't devoid of humor, but it's not primarily a comedy. Instead, it's a serious depiction of a marriage of some ten years or more, long enough for comfortable familiarity to have settled into tetchy boredom.
Monday, September 11, 2017 at 5:15PM by Lynn Lee
Sneakers turns 25 today, and until last week I’d never seen it. Although it came out when I was of moviegoing age, it was barely on my radar. All I remembered of it later was that it was about hackers and maybe also spies and the NSA, and I tended to confuse it with Hackers (which I’d never seen either). My husband was amazed to learn this, having seen Sneakers more times than he could count, and said I had to see it. But wouldn’t it be awfully dated now, I wondered? He insisted it still held up, despite admitting he hadn’t seen it in a while. There was only one way to find out…
Monday, September 11, 2017 at 11:00AM "The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.
Before we get started, let’s all share a brief moment of resentment that Judy Becker didn’t win a production design Emmy last night for Feud. Boo.
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled episode of The Furniture. Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchačevič ze Schluderpacheru, the character actor otherwise known as Herbert Lom. He fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939 for Britain, where he would have a long career in both film and television. He appeared in three Best Production Design nominees: El Cid, Spartacus, and Gambit. I will be writing about none of them.
Instead, here’s some love for the design of the films for which he is remembered most widely. Lom played Police Commissioner Charles Dreyfus, the long-suffering boss of Inspector Clouseau, in seven Pink Panther films. The first of these, A Shot in the Dark, is probably the best of the lot. It also has some charmingly ridiculous prop comedy and an array of colorfully absurd sets.
Here, for example, is the first example of a gag that runs throughout the series...
Wednesday, August 16, 2017 at 8:36AM by Eric Blume
It’s difficult to believe that it’s fifty years this month that Arthur Penn’s 1967 classic Bonnie & Clyde debuted in theaters. On one hand, it’s been part of the American film imagination for so long, that it’s been colossally influential on many other movies. Yet every time you watch it, it feels as fresh, vital, and new as if it were just shot.
Surprisingly, the movie starts with Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie behind bars… holding onto the bars of the headboard of her bed...
