Better Things Season 3: Back and Better Than Ever

By Spencer Coile 

Better Things being renewed for a third season was the miracle we all deserved. Since co-creator/ executive producer Louis C.K. was fired, any worries about the series maintaining its high-wire act of cynical humor and raw emotion should be put to rest. Where the magic of Better Things laid all along was is in its leading lady's craftsmanship. Writing, directing, and playing single mother and working actress Sam, Pamela Adlon is a 2019 force to be reckoned with. 

Better Things has arrived in the wake of a highly contentious Oscar season, and it could not have come back at a better time. Built into every moment is a snapshot (sometimes literal) of the mundane, almost thoughtless acts we so often take for granted. Adlon has rendered these minuscule details into something finely tuned and deeply felt...

Click to read more ...

Jennifer Jones Centennial: Cluny Brown (1946)

For the Centennial of one of Oscar's largely forgotten superstars, we asked Team Experience to pick one of her films to watch. 

by Paolo Kagoaoan

We’ve done centennials here before but this one comes with some degrees of difficulty. It doesn’t help that someone changed her name from Phylis Lee Isley into the whitest name in the world, and that the person who gets more Google results for that name is a curler. As a Canadian I can’t say anything bad about curling, but shouldn't a Best Actress Academy Award winner be on at least equal standing to a Gold medallist? Look up all the women who have had five Oscar nominations and a win (Bancroft, Sarandon, Hepburn, Maclaine, etc...) and imagine the world forgetting them. Explaining Jones to friends is equally difficult, even to people in the film industry who know her second husband's name, David O. Selznick.

I’d only previously seen Jones in Beat the Devil, a terrible dengue fever dream of a film. And it’s on TV all time instead of films with better reputations like Portrait of Jennie, which is her highest rated film on both iMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. Or Cluny Brown, her film with the highest rating on Letterboxd, and one that also came out the same year as Duel in the Sun (the film that brough her her 4th conseuctive Best Actress nomination) so that's what I picked to watch... 

Click to read more ...

Why Green Book's win made me cringe. (It's not what you think.)

By Lynn Lee

I heaved a heavy sigh the moment Green Book won best picture.  But not for the reasons many of the rest of you probably did.

No, my heart sank because, dear readers, I like Green Book.  Liked it when I saw it, still like it now after all the controversies that failed to derail its path to Oscar.  Liked it enough to cringe at the thought of how exponentially the animus it’s already generated would grow following its victory, and how quickly it would be added to lists of the Academy’s Worst Decisions Ever...

Click to read more ...

In praise of Melissa McCarthy, puppet master

by Tim Brayton

The Academy Awards are meant to reward great acting, not provide examples of it, but for a couple minutes during Sunday's ceremony, I'm convinced I saw the best comic performance I'll see for the rest of 2019. When Melissa McCarthy and Brian Tyree Henry arrived to present Best Costume Design in polyglot outfits designed to evoke all five of the nominees, the visual gag is already enough. In a different year or with a lazier duo it might have been all we got. But it's when McCarthy and Henry start to introduce the category that it went from silly to downright inspired.

I am obsessed with every bit of what McCarthy is up to in that clip – and it doesn't even include the best joke of the bit, when she has the bunny attack Henry's hand as he tries help her open the envelope. Part of it, of course, is that she's playing things so completely straight...

Click to read more ...

25th Anniversary: "Reality Bites"

by Mark Brinkerhoff

Sandwiched between (and oft-overshadowed by) the so-called Baby Boomers and Millennials, Generation X, those born between 1965-1980, seems to get little attention from Hollywood — or from anyone, really. In fact, just last month CBS infamously omitted Gen X in an otherwise comprehensive chart, “Generation Guidelines Defined by Birth Year.” For Gen Xers (of which I am one), this was generally considered as simply par for the course. Of course, of course, of course! 

But 25 years ago this week, we got our cinematic Valentine in the form of Reality Bites, the seminal film of a “forgotten” generation...

Click to read more ...