Streaming: Keira Knightley in "The Boston Strangler"

by Matt St Clair

Dynamic of an actress as she may be, Keira Knightley remains quite stuck in the past. As she brilliantly makes each role she plays her own, she consistently transports us into different time periods whether it’s WWII (Atonement, The Aftermath), 5th century AD (King Arthur), or 18th century England (The Duchess). This time around, Knightley is taken to the early 1960s in Boston Strangler, the new journalism crime drama written and directed by Matt Ruskin (Crown Heights)... 

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❤️ Carrie Coon

Sometimes celebrity twitter is a delight.

Same. https://t.co/ldexWlUCUW

— Carrie Coon (@carriecoon) April 6, 2022

Carrie Coon is stealth one of the greats, whether she's just being an awesome actor, politically goodhearted person, sharing her cinephilia online, or just being funny as in the tweet above. You should follow her on Twitter where she regularly shares what movies she's watching (she watches a lot of movies so naturally we're endeared to her) and on Instagram. I once saw her and her husband playwright/actor Tracy Letts get into a cab here in Manhattan and it was such a stupid thrill seeing them in the wild since they're both such brilliant artists.

TV: 'The Gilded Age' Premiere Gives Us Actresses Galore

By Christopher James

Which side do you choose in this actress battle royale - Baranski or Coon?

The Gilded Age has so much going for it. Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon are old money sisters engaging in war with their new-money neighbor, played by Carrie Coon. Created by Downton Abbey and Gosford Park scribe Julian Fellowes, HBO’s latest series promises opulence, conflicts around societal manners, corsets, and actresses galore.

No surprise, then, that there has been considerable interest from the rest of the Film Experience team on The Gilded Age, so we’ll be doing weekly coverage of each episode. Five episodes have been screened for critics, so for today quick overall thoughts, followed by a review of the pilot. Make sure to check back each Monday as we recap the latest episode of the nine-episode first season.

Does The Gilded Age live up to its pedigree?

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The Academy Welcomes 395 New Members

by Nathaniel R

Harry Yoon (Editor), Lee Isaac Chung (Writer/Director) and Christian Oh (Producer) were all invited to the Academy post MINARI

Each year the Academy releases the names of their potential new members. Reports range a bit at how many voting members the Academy actually has. Deadline suggests that if all 395 of the new invitees accept membership, AMPAS will be around 9,750ish members while the LA Times places the number around 10,700. We're not sure where that discrepancy of nearly a 1000 voters comes from but let's just say it's hard to track. We rarely learn who declined membership, for example, and of course people die from year to year since many longtime members are elderly. 

As per usual, even before the Academy's largely successfully diversification and gender parity drive, a good portion of the invitees go out to fresh winners and nominees from the previous season. If they accept Youn Yuh-jung, Maria Bakalova, Steven Yeun, Paul Raci, and H.E.R. (to name a handful of examples) will now be Oscar voters. 46% of the new invitees are women and 39% are from underrepresented groups. One really interesting number is that over half of the new invitees, 53% to be exact, are international invites. Whether that translates to more international titles winning Oscar favor, who knows...

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The Furniture: The Nest and Its Not-Haunted House

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Don’t marry an investment banker!

This, as far as I can tell, is the central message of Sean Durkin’s The Nest. And it’s good advice! Rory O’Hara (Jude Law) is a Gordon Gekko without any of the charm, a stiff Englishman determined to perform his financial success in front of a vaguely imagined audience of the rich and powerful. His wife, Allison (Carrie Coon), is miserably along for the ride. It’s a period piece, but it’s laser focused on toxic aspects of our culture that certainly haven’t gone away. The ‘80s never ended, not really.

And so we watch as Allison and her two children are dragged from their house in the US, already their third home in 10 years, and across the pond to an enormous old mansion in Surrey. Rory’s determination to make it big back in the UK upends everything, from Allison’s equestrian interests to their daughter’s gymnastics. I bring this up because it’s one of our few glimpses at the life before, represented in wide spaces like the sun-dappled walls of the stable and the well-lit, colorful gym...

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