A few notes on the Cannes "lineup" that won't make it to Cannes

by Nathaniel R

Steve McQueen would have had TWO films at Cannes this yearCannes won’t be held this year due to the Coronavirus pandemic but the powers that be at Cannes have announced that 56 films that would have filled out various programs will bear the Cannes label as in "we selected them!". i.e. they would have played there. This will give the films a leg up moving forward should any of the fall festivals actually take place. This does not however tell us anything about what would have “competed” this year at Cannes since they generally only have 20 or so films in the main competition. Spike Lee was meant to preside over the competition jury this year but instead he'll do the honors next summer instead.

It will forever be lost to an alternate history what might have been this year and what film might have held the difficult task of following in Parasite’s footsteps to the Palme d’Or...

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Eric Rohmer Centennial: Six Moral Tales

by Eric Blume

Last weekend marked the 100th birthday of one of France’s greatest directors, Eric Rohmer, and we here at TFE figured that a nice way to celebrate him would be a look back at the six-film series that launched his career, the Six Moral Tales, which were released between 1962 and 1972.  

These films basically have the same plot:  a man obsessed or in love with one girl finds himself distracted by another woman, only to return to the first girl.  Rohmer uses this framework to examine the stunted male psyche, the rationalizations of behavior, and the mystery of love...

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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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1999 with Nick: When "All About My Mother" triumphed over ???

In advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis has been looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.

After that trip back to the Documentary race, we're ending the week by spotlighting the other category that's taken the hugest strides to adjust its nominating process and champion better work. It’s also no accident that I’m ending with a category that Nathaniel has tracked with unusual care and detail since Oscar-focused websites have existed—indeed, long before many of his peers paid more than cursory attention. The 72nd Academy Awards took place eight years before the transformative addition of an Executive Committee to the vetting process that produces the annual roster for "Best Foreign Language Film," which of course this year got rebranded as "Best International Film". This category used to be heavy with inoffensive mediocrities, or sometimes offensive ones. Tracking down the contenders, which was often difficult to do, rarely felt like making contact with the best of world cinema in any given year, and with very few exceptions the winners across the 1990s were an undistinguished lot. (Or maybe you’re a major devotée of Mediterraneo or Kolya?)

By that standard, 1999 was a pretty good year, since I imagine that Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother would be most people's choice as the best film to cop this prize during the whole decade. This critical and popular favorite needed no help from any Executive Committee to stay alive during the balloting. In fact, the only mystery is why the movie couldn't make more inroads into admittedly competitive races like Actress, Supporting Actress, Director, Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing, or Picture...

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"An Officer and a Spy" and "Les Miserables" battle it out for the César

by Nathaniel R

France's Oscar parallel competition, the Césars, have finally announced their nominations for the film year. Roman Polanski's adaptation of Robert Harris's novel An Officer and a Spy leads the nominations. It's based on the Dreyfus affair and Emile Zola's "J'Accuse!" letter, both of which are also the topic of one of Oscar's earliest Best Picture winners The Life of Emile Zola (1937).  The drama leads the Césars with 12 nominations while the Oscar-nominated Les Miserables and the riveting queer romantic drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire were right behind with 10 nominations each. After the jump all the nominations and a few notes...

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