Yes No Maybe So: "Joker: Folie à Deux"

by Nick Taylor

Remember the fucking hubbub around Joker when it premiered at Venice back in 2019? Stephanie Zachareck fearing MRA riots? Lucrecia Martel giving it the Golden Lion? Leading the Oscar nominations with a whopping eleven citations, with Mark Friedberg’s incredible sets somehow left out in the cold? Winning Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix and Original Score for Hildur Guðnadóttir? Wild times!

Although Joker: Folie à Deux was first announced roughly two years ago, it feels as though the spectre of it has been haunting us for so much longer. At long last, the sequel is on its way, in just over two months. The first full-length trailer dropped less than 24 hours ago, and we here at The Film Experience are ready to dig in to whatever the hell is going on...

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Venice Main Competition Round-Up (plus London and NYFF Openers)

by Nick Taylor

BLITZ (2024) Steve McQueen

So many film festivals the past few days have come to make an announcement! Steve McQueen’s Blitz, about Londoners trying to survive a bombing during WWII starring Saoirse Ronan and Harris Dickinson, has been named the opening film for the London Film Festival. Meanwhile, the New York Film Festival will open with Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel helmed by Hale County This Morning, This Evening director RaMell Ross.

A lot of films have been announced for TIFF, and will presumably keep being announced until the festival starts in September. We’ve also received word of the full lineup for the 81st Venice Film Festival, and since they’ve got much fewer releases than TIFF, I’ll be doing a quick run-down of which titles are most exciting to me personally. While I won’t be able to attend Venice, you can still see me watching them take off from the sidelines, like a 20th century mother waving to her children as they set sail on a voyage to a new country, hoping for the absolute best but steeling myself to be strong, just in case of disaster...

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Annecy 2024: A First Look at "The Wild Robot"

by Cláudio Alves

Photo by Marc Piasecki | © Getty Images for DreamWorks Animation

Paper airplanes fly through the air, zipping across the auditorium and above the audience. Some crash land on unsuspecting heads, while others sway wild into oblivion, lost in dark corners of the cinema. It's a merry sight, which only grows merrier when these crafts arrive at their intended destination – the stage – prompting applause from the crowd in good festival fashion. Within this hubbub of enthusiasm, a sense of community prevails, made more heartfelt by the presence of children among press folk, the families of filmmakers and animators excited to see how the world reacts to their work. Such was the scene at the Annecy Film Festival, as DreamWorks Animation came to celebrate its 30th anniversary and present The Wild Robot…

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Tribeca Review: Under a Microscope in “The Knife”

By Abe Friedtanzer 

It’s always intriguing to see what projects actors choose when they step behind the camera to direct for the first time. Nnamdi Asomugha has been working behind-the-scenes as an executive producer and producer since Beasts of No Nation, helping bring to life films he’s starring in like Crown Heights and Sylvie’s Love, the latter of which earned him an Emmy nomination for Outstanding TV Movie in 2021. For his debut venture as director, Asomugha has chosen a tense story of crime and policing in America, written by him in conjunction with Mark Duplass…

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Tribeca Review: Parallel Stories in “The Freshly Cut Grass”

By Abe Friedtanzer 

Most films tend to focus on one or several protagonists or feature a true ensemble where there’s no lead. It’s rare to find a film with two main characters who have absolutely nothing to do with each other, or at least don’t appear within the same narrative. Yet The Freshly Cut Grass does just that, following two intellectuals who are both not overly satisfied with their lives and begin to see the allure of something that feels distinctly fresh and unlike what they’ve felt in a long time…

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