The Honoraries: Danny Glover as Producer

by Cláudio Alves

Danny Glover's cameo in BAMAKO

Despite his fantastic career as an actor, Danny Glover isn't receiving an Honorary Oscar to recognize that work. Instead, AMPAS is honoring him with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award as a way of celebrating his lifelong actions as a community activist, fighting for worldwide justice, and other such efforts. If anything, those values are more imminently evident in Glover's filmography as a producer rather than as an actor. Since the early 90s, after becoming a box-office star, the American thespian started leveraging his success to try and make specific projects happen. Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger marked Glover's first experience as a producer, and the funding was mainly secured through his participation in Lethal Weapon 2. From then on, Danny Glover has been a strong supporter of underrepresented filmmakers, helping them make their cinematic dreams come true… 

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Best International Feature: Costa Rica, Peru, Uruguay

by Cláudio Alves

Even though the Best International Feature category exists to celebrate world cinema, AMPAS tends to be biased in favor of European films. Productions from Africa, Asia, and Latin America tend to get shortchanged, although many stupendous films harken to those continents. Those tendencies may be waning though; In the last decade, only half of the winners came from Europe. With recent victories for Mexico and Chile, maybe we're living through a newfound openness from the Academy towards Latin American excellence? Speaking of which, we've already reviewed the flicks from Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela. Now, it's time to examine the submissions of Costa Rica, Peru, and Uruguay… 

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Best International Feature: Chile, Mexico, South Korea

by Cláudio Alves

Nathaniel has recently shared the Best International Feature Contenders List and given us an overview of the stars and directors and stats. Like last year, I'll be reviewing as many of the contenders as I can get my hands on, beyond the reviews already shared here at The Film Experience for the submissions from Czech Republic, Georgia, Guatemala, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Palestine, Romania, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Venezuela. The number of contenders is at an all-time high!

To start our voyage around the world, let's take a look at the submitted films from the last three champions of the category: Chile (2017, A Fantastic Woman), Mexico (2018, Roma), and South Korea (2019, Parasite)… 

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Beauty Break: Maribel Verdú, Goya Darling and Birthday Girl

This post has been updated from its original form, years ago...

Those Goyas must be heavy!

Happy 50th birthday, today, to Spanish beauty Maribel Verdú of Y Tu Mama Tambien and Pan's Labyrinth fame. How many women can claim to have terrorized Snow White and been tag teamed by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, and knifed a dictator's officer right in the face? How many women have been nominated for a Goya eleven times and won twice*. Just Maribel, that's who... 

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Don't Miss "Invisible Life"

by Cláudio Alves

After a limited release in US theaters, Karim Aïnouz's Invisible Life is now available to stream on Amazon Prime. The film was Brazil's submission for last year's Best International Feature Oscar and, although the Academy chose to overlook its merits, that doesn't mean the picture is undeserving of our attention. This tropical melodrama is one of 2019's most ravishing cinematic experiences, a saturated explosion of deep feeling and chromatic excess, as beautiful as it is devastating. Harkening back to the glory days of Old Hollywood's women's pictures, Invisible Life is like a cocktail made of equal parts Douglas Sirk and Black Orpheus, a hint of Fassbinder adding an abrasive zing to the recipe…

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