Toshiro Mifune @ 100: Yojimbo

Team Experience is celebrating the Centennial of Japan's great movie star Toshiro Mifune for the next couple of nights. Here's Eric Blume...

When the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo was released in 1961, he and Toshiro Mifune already had collaborated on over a dozen films, and this collaboration is widely considered one of their greatest.  It essentially birthed the character of The Man With No Name, was remade three years later by Hollywood as A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood, and has had an enduring influence on films for almost sixty years...

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Toshiro Mifune @ 100: The Hidden Fortress

Team Experience is celebrating the Centennial of Japan's great movie star Toshiro Mifune for the next few days. Here's Nathaniel R...

Raised as an American child (through no fault of my own) in the era when the original Star Wars trilogy first captured the world's hearts, it's perhaps unsurprising that I knew Star Wars before any of its influences. Though my innate interest in cinema led me eventually to "Akira Kurosawa's greatest hits" somehow The Hidden Fortress (1958), always escaped my eyes. I knew of it mainly only as 'that movie that everyone says inspired George Lucas's space opera.' 

It would be foolish to pretend with snobbish cinephilia that the original Star Wars film doesn't improve on its then 19 year-old inspiration, but The Hidden Fortress deserves more than this footnote status; minor Kurosawa is still Kurosawa...

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Posterized: Romanian Cinema

by Nathaniel R

Whistlers, the Romanian submissions for this past Oscar race opened in a few US cinemas this past week (we reviewed it in November). It's a blackly comic noir that's been compared to the work of the Coens and it comes from one of the most celebrated Romanian New Wave auteurs, Corneliu Porombiou.

Romanian cinema was largely neglected and underfunded until after the fall of Communism in 1989. Things began to pick up after that. In the mid-Aughts the country's cinema became a critical cause with prize-winning films emerging with great frequency. The country's most acclaimed cinema is often categorized by gallows humor and incisive or satiric socioeconomic and political commentary.

For the second episode of this new season of "Posterized" and  "Making Waves" a retrospective of Romanian cinema currently playing a US tour, we've selected the (arguably) 15 most famous and/or acclaimed films from the country over the past 30 years. How many of these  have you seen? Don't feel bad if your number is very low (we haven't seen the majority of them either) but do you see anything you've been meaning to catch up with or that now piques your interest? 

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Sophia Loren Returns...

by Eric Blume

Variety recently announced that Netflix has acquired rights to an Italian remake of the 1977 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, Madame Rosa. Now titled The Life Ahead, it stars Sophia Loren in the Simone Signoret role, who this time "forges a bond with a 12-year-old Senegalese immigrant boy named Momo."

There's a lot to unpack here.  The original Madame Rosa movie is notoriously one of the worst winners of that Oscar category, and for good reason:  the movie is sentimental garbage.  This French film won over, among others, Luis Bunuel's challenging The Obscure Object of Desire and Ettore Scola's A Special Day, starring Marcello Mastroianni and...Sophia Loren...

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"Parasite" and the other most popular foreign film hits of our lifetimes.

by Nathaniel R

In lieu of the traditional box office charts for the holiday weekend, it's time to marvel yet again at how leggy Parasite (2019) continues to be. After its Oscar win a week ago it doubled its screen count and is expected to take in over $5 million this weekend once the actual money has been counted. So let's take a look at the very biggest international hits since box office stats began to be a commonly reported thing. Which foreign films were the all time biggest hits (since the late 80s)? For clarity we're talking about films that weren't in English but also weren't from the US which removes Mel Gibson's weird dead language projects like Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima, and the recent Lulu Wang hit The Farewell among a few others. 

THE 25 HIGHEST-GROSSING INTERNATIONAL
FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILMS
IN DOMESTIC RELEASE (1987-2019)

01 Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (Taiwan, 2000) $128
10 Oscar nominations including Best Picture. 4 wins. There will never be another subtitled hit as big as this one but what a glorious film to find up top. 

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