Luca Guadagnino @ 50: A Trilogy of Desire

Happy belated 50th to Luca Guadagnino.

by Cláudio Alves

Like many a director in film history, Luca Guadagnino's cinema is characterized by common themes, through lines transversal to all his works, though more evident in some than others. During the release and promotional tour of Call Me By Your Name, the Italian auteur came to realize that his last three films could be construed as an unofficial trilogy of desire, though he later repudiated the notion. Nevertheless, akin to Bergman's Silence of God tercet, Guadagnino's I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me By Your Name complete a three-part thesis in cinematic form. Instead of the Swedish master's spiritual dread, we have a multifaceted portrait of human desire as a force so great it's both overwhelming and life-changing, magical and terrifying, a blessing, a curse, perchance a deliverance…

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Almost There: Ralph Fiennes in "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

by Cláudio Alves

With Netflix's The Dig arriving friday, let's talk about the remarkable Ralph Fiennes. Oscar-wise, the British actor hit it big quickly, earning a nomination for his third feature, Best Picture champion Schindler's List. For a handful of years, it seemed like he'd become an awards season perennial, but things turned out differently. While he conquered another Oscar nomination for 1996's The English Patient, he's won little buzz since. That doesn't reflect a decrease in the quality of his work nor a turn to less prestigious fare. Oddly, even when he gets great reviews in titles beloved by AMPAS, an acting nomination remains elusive. This was never more evident than in 2014 when Fiennes delivered a tour-de-force in one of the most nominated movies of the year, The Grand Budapest Hotel…

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Showbiz History: Ralph Fiennes, Waiting to Exhale, and Moment by Moment,

random things that happend on this day, December 22nd, in showbiz history 

1932 The Mummy, the fourth "classic monsters" picture from Universal (following Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, and Frankenstein) and the second to star Boris Karloff ("Karloff the Uncanny"), arrives in theaters. It was only a modest success and received no official sequels but was instead "rebooted" though they weren't using the term back then, with The Mummy's Hand (1940).

1939 Two years after Disney premiered the US's first animated feature, Snow White, another animated feature makes it to movie theaters via Paramount Pictures: David Fleischer's Gullivers Travels...

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The Strange Pleasures of "Strange Days"

by Cláudio Alves

In a future that's now our past, Strange Days tells a beguiling and disturbing tale of addiction and police brutality. Kathryn Bigelow's most most ambitious project to date, at least at the level of form and theme, opened in movie theaters twenty-five years ago today. Mixing social commentary with action excitement, insane feats of camera choreography, and feverish performances, the movie's a testament to its director's skill even if it wasn't the title that won her the Oscar. It's also a heady thrill ride that's out to dazzle the spectator, to shock them and galvanize too. Pleasure and violence are forever intertwined in this dream of celluloid.

The setting is Los Angeles on New Year's Eve, 1999, and the air is suffused with the threat of revolt. Strange Days, which opened in movie theaters on this very day in '95, posits a near future where technological advancements have made it possible to record and share memories...

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Yes No Maybe So: No Time to Die

by Deborah Lipp

The twenty-fifth official James Bond movie, No Time to Die, was originally scheduled for release in April, and was the first major movie to suffer delay due to the coronavirus pandemic. It is now scheduled for release on November 21st and a new trailer recently dropped.

How badly do we want to see it? Let’s break it down…

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