FYC: Best Editing, Baby Driver

by Tim Brayton

If you know one thing about Baby Driver, surely it's that the film was conceived from the ground up to move in perfect time to music. Every aspect of the film that could be tied to the rhythm of the soundtrack was: the movement of the camera, the blocking of the actors, and the cutting between shots.

Perhaps that sounds like an impressive trick. But "impressive" hardly starts to cover it: love the film or not (I was a little cool on it, overall), Baby Driver is indisputably one of 2017's most audacious piece of film craftsmanship, a high-wire act of choreographing every element of the film production process into one steady flow. And by no means the least of this craft came in the form of the editing done by Paul Machliss and Jonathan Amos.

The editors' work on this film began unnaturally early...

Click to read more ...

Top 5 Films Without Repeating a Language or Country

by Sebastian Nebel

Name your Top 5 films without repeating a language or country of origin.

That was the challenge I posed on Twitter last month. It's tricky enough to limit your favorites to a specific number, and I was interested in seeing what kind of responses this added degree of difficulty would garner.

Turns out Twitter loves making lists! I got a ton of replies – way too many to collect all of them here, unfortunately. But I've rounded up a handful of them after the jump including lists by The Film Experience contributors, film critics and film makers...

edgarwright @edgarwright

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo)
2001: A Space Odyssey
Police Story (警察故事)
Delicatessen
Santa Sangre (Holy Blood)

— August 28, 2017

Click to read more ...

Bening's Jury Announced for Venice

Earlier this month, we learned that Annette Bening, hot off her best performance in 20th Century Women, would be presiding over the Venice Film Festival jury. The last female president was 11 years ago so good on Venice for fixing that. Now we know who'll be debating the selections with her as well as the complete jury lineups for all sections.

That's all after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Podcast: War for the Big Sick Planet of Baby Drivers

In this episode Nathaniel, Joe and Nick talk three new movies with our usual tangent of asides including Michelle Pfeiffer in Ant Man and the Wasp, Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur, and more...

Index (42 minutes)
00:01 National Critics Institute / Michelle Pfeiffer news
07:44 The Big Sick performances, and it's place within the Romantic Comedy ecosystem
19:00 Matt Reeves's War for the Planet of the Apes, Gary Oldman vs Woody Harrelson, prequel issues, and the original 1968 classic.
30:40 Edgar Wright and Baby Driver, plus Kevin Spacey's sexuality, and Jon Hamm as a movie actor

 You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Related Reading
Nathaniel's first restaurant review
Kevin Spacey as Gore Vidal
Emmy Drama Actress roundtable
Gay pornish Planet of the Apes gif

Baby Driver, Big Sick, Planet of Apes

Brief Notes on Baby Driver and Spider-Man

by Nathaniel R

I'd be remiss if I didn't publicly thank Chris Feil for the extra work he did while I was away. Such a good hire. (Send him your love and follow him on Twitter!) Herewith 150 words each on two movies Chris already reviewed but I wanted to chime in briefly just cuz.

BABY DRIVER
As some of you know I just returned from the National Critics Institute. In one session we read a curated batch of stellar articles and we discussed in fine detail as a group what made them pop and resonate...

Click to read more ...