I Cannot Tell a Link

Guardian Glenn on 10 best Australian documentaries ever including Canes Toads (in 3D) a film I saw at Sundance years ago that freaked me right out
The Tracking Board Martin Scorsese might make a George Washington biopic. Hmmm, how does Leonardo DiCaprio look in a white powder wig?
Oscars.org Los Angelenos readers take note. Alan Menken and Angela Lansbury will be taking part in a 25th anniversary screening of Beauty & The Beast on May 9th. You can buy tickets at the link. 
MNPP Jason attends a special Aliens screening and Q&A with Sigourney Weaver (who is still looking incredible) 
Awards Daily thinks Passengers (the sci-fi film starring Chris Pratt & Jennifer Lawrence) could be one of our Best Picture nominees

The Playlist new images from The Neon Demon. Can't wait to see this 
New Yorker Richard Brody provocatively argues that film critics and publications need to move beyond "theatrical release" or "festival" when considering what makes a movie worth writing about
Variety more Cannes news. While we've already discussed the main jury, they've announced the sidebars. All three will be presided over by women (!): Actress Marthe Keller for Un Certain Regard; Director Naomi Kawase for Short Films; Director Catherine Corsini for Camera D'Or
Coming Soon has a new Kubo and the Two Strings trailer if you're interested (my general personal rule of thumb now is to stop after the first teaser or trailer so nothing is spoiled). Laika makes such great movies I don't even need a trailer. I'm always in.
/Film The Jungle Book has a how-they-did-it visual fx reel going around
i09 the X-Men finally get to wear costumes that are a smidgeon like their comic book origins at some point in X-Men Apocalypse (hopefully not just at the end)
Interview talks to programmer Thomas Beard about the current Film Society program 'Queer Cinema Before Stonewall '
FSLC ...and there's a few more days of that program left if you're in NYC

Provocative Thought O' The Day
Uproxx "Are more famous people really dying in 2016 or does it just seem that way?" which delves quite a lot into the 1980s as relevant cultural force

Off Cinema
Drama Desk Awards The nominations are in. Hamilton was eligible last year (since Off Broadway productions factor into these awards) which is why it's not up for anything. The revival of She Loves Me (with two of musical comedy's greatest stars: Laura Benanti & Jane Krakowski) leads all productions with 9 nominations. American Psycho wracked up the most nods for a new musical (well, it's tied with Steve Martin & Edie Brickelle's Bright Star) EXCEPT the big one: Best Musical. Weird, right. That's gotta sting even if the high nomination count isn't any sort of axe to the head for the show. Famous TV & Film actors nominated this year for their stage work include: Jessica Lange, Michael Shannon, Michael C Hall, and Frank Langella. Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o, who has been much-buzzed for her performance in Eclipsed, was not nominated this morning. Hmmm.

Today's Watch
Chase Whale interviews Key & Peele about their kitten heist movie Keanu. Fun bit.

Doc Corner: Anita Hill, O.J. Simpson and Timothy Conigrave highlight doc and narrative divide

Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we're looking at three documentaries and their narrative counterparts.

In the recently aired Confirmation (reviewed right here) about Anita Hill, director Rick Famuyiwa keeps the action to a very strict window of time surrounding the appointment of Judge Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court. What could have been a chance to explore the greater issues around Hill’s controversial moment in the spotlight ultimately becomes little more than a re-enactment that even so much as shrugging at committing to a belief that Thomas did or did not do what he was claimed to have done. The film only truly entertains when it goes backstage and peeks behind the Washington curtain of handshaking and decision dealing and by allowing us non Shondaland disciples the chance to watch Kerry Washington at work. The poster suggests "it only takes one voice to change history", but beyond title card lip service at film's end, they never explore this claim.

This isn’t an unfamiliar place for a film about Anita Hill since Freida Lee Mock’s documentary, Anita (2013), also suffered from a similarly narrow focus. Disappointing, really, since Hill and her story are fascinating and still so very relevant today as they were in 1991. [More...]

Click to read more ...

Reporting From The Edge of Oblivion

Team Experience still reporting from the just-wrapped Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on 'Special Correspondents' and the doc 'Obit.'

Do you ever watch a scene and just feel terrible for the actor being forced to deliver the dialogue they're being forced to deliver? There's a scene in Special Correspondents - a triviality that played Tribeca just before debuting on Netflix later this week, starring Ricky Gervais (who wrote and directed) and Eric Bana as a pair of journalists faking their war reports from the comfort of a Queens attic - that had me feeling just awful for one of its actors. 

Click to read more ...

Strike a Pose

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Manuel on Strike a Pose.

Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Strike a Pose with Madonna: Truth or Dare. After all, that now iconic documentary is really on a league of its own. Then again, this newer doc, which focuses on the male dancers from that 1991 film (and from the Material Girl’s Blond Ambition Tour) cannot help but drum up the comparisons. As a pseudo-sequel to Truth or Dare, Strike a Pose is perhaps less enthralling—no Warren Beatty or Antonio Banderas here—but just as entertaining. And while the first twenty or so minutes of the film do indeed feel like a sequel in spirit if not in name (we get to revisit the tour and the doc in ways that show us how much these dancers kept to themselves even as they seemingly opened up their lives for Madge and the camera), this documentary soon reveals itself to be something much rarer.

In profiling these men 25 years after the fact, Strike a Pose becomes a rare portrait of the middle-aged dancer, a figure that we’re not often offered on screen. It’s often hard to hear what these guys went through—you’ll be surprised to hear candid talks about AIDS that even Truth or Dare, despite its activist zeal given its time,couldn’t and didn’t breach—and it’s even more heartening to see their resilience. It was hard, many of them note, to have always lived with the, for better or for worse, “Madonna dancer” label especially given how their relationships to the Queen of Pop frayed soon after (addiction, rehab, and lawsuits didn’t help). By the time we see all of them reunite for the first time in decades and see them playing the infamous game of “Truth or Dare” again, you cannot help but feel a kinship to these people some of us have felt we’ve known for just as long. For Madonna fans, this is an unmissable film. But where directors Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan succeed is in producing a touching portrait of ageing, of finding the inspiration and the drive to keep going even when the promise of youth (and the promise you had in your own youth) threatens to disappear.

Grade: B+

Doc Corner: Nostalgia for the (Cinema) Light

Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand. This week we're highlighting Nostalgia for the Light.

Nostalgia seeps through Peter Flynn’s sophomore film, The Dying of the Light. For good reason one might say. Like many of a certain generation who were too young to appreciate the glory of the mechanics of film projection when it was as common as day and night, I sometimes sound like a fetishist when it comes to talking about the flicker of celluloid as it whirs through its paces on its way to being projected onto the big screen.

Flynn, it would appear, is the same. His first film, Blazing the Trail: The O’Kalems in Ireland, was about people behind the camera in the 1910s, but his newest film is about the people behind the projector – the men and (infrequently) women who were in charge of spinning and threading the celluloid from reel to reel of film through projectors and onto cinema screens. (more after the jump)

Click to read more ...