The Hunchback of Notre Dame @ 25: The first movie I ever saw

by Cláudio Alves

Do you know what the first movie you watched in a theater was? While I have no memory of the event, my parents were kind enough to remember my inaugural trip to the movies. When I was just two, they took me to see the latest Disney flick to hit theaters, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). Supposedly, I was besotted by the sight and, when the picture was released on VHS, proceeded to re-watch it to my heart's content. I still have that videocassette today, a treasured memento of childhood and a token of a kid's blossoming love for cinema. So today, as The Hunchback of Notre Dame turns 25, I revisited that underrated classic of the Disney Renaissance and see if I still loved it…

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The many versions of "Anna and the King of Siam"

by Cláudio Alves

Seventy-five years ago, Anna and the King of Siam premiered in theaters. The film was adapted from a book by the same name, which purported to present a fictionalized, yet historically-based, account of the years spent by Anna Leonowens in the court of King Mongkut of Siam - present-day Thailand - in the 1860s. Novelist Margaret Landon based her work on Leonowens' memoirs, creating a window into an otherworld that dazzled readers and moviegoers of the 1940s. Over the years, the story's popularity persisted, and it has been retold in several different mediums. On the anniversary of its first cinematic adaptation, let's look at the four movie versions from the Oscar-winning costume drama to a forgotten animated catastrophe…

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Review: "In the Heights" sets the bar high for modern movie musicals

by Nathaniel R

A young man stares out of his bodega window, his favourite block coming alive in the reflection. This shot of Usnavi, our leading man and guide into the film version of Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights is already beloved and with good reason. It gives you character (this man is something of a dreamer, caught between two places), world-building (the vibrant Latinx community of Washington Heights) and joyful genre specificity (the musical). It's not even the first clever moment in the movie at that, but something In the Heights builds up in its ever-escalating opening number after already providing you with gorgeous aerial shots romanticizing NYC as 'a city made of music', sounds from hoses, traffic, manhole covers, and alarm clocks as musical accompaniment, and introducing us to most of the main characters.

Above all else this visual beat as well as the larger song sequence that contains it, instills immediate confidence that the creative team, especially director Jon M. Chu (of Crazy Rich Asians fame) understand the oft-forgotten cinematic language of the film musical...

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In the Linked Heights

• /Film Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan will be starring as the key journalists in Universal's She Said a dramatization of the NYT exposé on Harvey Weinstein in 2017 which shook Hollywood.
• IndieWire Christian Petzold (Undine, Phoenix) offers 7 tips for a successful career
• Illuminerdi Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta rumored to be playing Namor the Submariner in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, which means the plot will probably be an Atlantis vs Wakanda situation

More after the jump including the first 8 minutes of In the Heights and a video game based on... Vertigo?

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Three of TFE's favourite actresses in limited runs on stage this summer!

by Nathaniel R

Donna Lynne, Sutton, and Ann

Theater is finally starting up again this summer and though the news is coming fast and furious about MANY productions there are three you really must know about involving great shows starring three special actresses that TFE loves dearly: Donna Lynn Champlin and Ann Dowd (both of whom have been kind enough to guest-star on this very site!) and Sutton Foster who is a longtime obsession...

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