Chita Rivera Awards: 2025 Nominations for Film and Broadway

by Nathaniel R

We've mentioned the low-profile Chita Rivera Awards a few times here at The Film Experience. The awards, named after the legendary Broadway performer of West Side Story, The Rink, Chicago, and Sweet Charity fame are a fun idea, honoring dance in both feature films and on Broadway (the more common place for dance to be honored). Since we love all three art forms and the namesake we are all for this! The 2025 honors will be their 7th installment.

This year's ceremony will be held in NYC on May 19 with the amazing Tony & Emmy winner Bebe Neuwirth (Chicago, Cheers) as host. The most famous nominee this year is surely Jonathan Groff. While we've had an enormous crush on him for years, we swear that it's his abundant talent and not his beauty that have kept the fires burning. Plus mad respect for the surely difficult but highly welcome balancing act he's been doing mixing feature films, tv shows, and Broadway shows fairly consistently for years. Groff is involved in both the stage and film categories this year. Read on for the nominations and a few comments...

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A Memorial for "In Memorium"

One last piece on an individual moment from Oscar night?

by Baby Clyde

They couldn’t have started off the In Memoriam segment of the 96th Annual Academy Awards, in a more sober fashion. Recently assassinated Russian opposition leader and subject of last year's Best Documentary winner Alexei Navalny appears on screen, speaking directly to the audience. It’s a bold, surprising opener, somewhat at odds with the slick, professional and ever so slightly dull show that made up the rest of the runtime. This grim reminder of a world outside the Hollywood bubble gives absolutely no indication of the calamitous 4 minutes we're about to endure...

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TIFF: Melissa Barrera and Paul Mescal in the Dazzling ‘Carmen’

By Abe Friedtanzer

There have been many films recently about young women crossing the border from Mexico to the United States and coming across someone whose attitude towards illegal immigrants softens considerably after the chance meeting. But Carmen is something different entirely, an update of much older material, based on a Seville-set novella and opera from the 1800s by Prosper Mérimée. This time the setting is present day in surroundings that will be more familiar to audiences but just as enchanting…

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Review: "Inu-Oh", a punk riot and true spectacle

by Nathaniel R

Last week we had the pleasure of an invitation to the East Coast premiere of the anime rock opera Inu-Oh, which opens in theaters today. It's distributed by GKids, a company which has long championed non-Hollywood animation for US audiences who we all know can be stubbornly myopic about animation, viewing it as a genre rather than a medium capable of all kinds of genres and visual experiences. The screening was at Japan Society here in Manhattan. I bring this up primarily because I had somehow never been there and must highly recommend the venue which has monthly screenings of both anime films and acclaimed live action Japanese films, too (recent films included everything from Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke to the kaiju film Mothra, to Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha).  Seeing specialty films, which generally play to tiny arthouse crowds, in a beautiful respectful context to a large packed crowd is always a thrill (one of the reasons film festivals, never lose their thrill).

And Inu-Oh deserves a big screen so don't wait until streaming if it hits a theater near you...

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2022 Chita Rivera Winners

We told you back in May that the Chita Rivera Awards, which hadn't been held since 2019, would be back for 2022. The nominations were a mix of both the 2020 and 2022 Broadway seasons as well as the 2021 film year. In short, COVID-19 really did a number on all awards shows, no matter how niche! After the jump the winners (and nominees) of this prize honoring dancers and choreographers in movies and on stage.

OUTSTANDING CHOREOGRAPHY FOR A THEATRICAL RELEASE

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