Review: A Hidden Life

by Cláudio Alves

Though I'm an atheist, I've long been fascinated with stories of faith and spirituality. When it comes to cinema, this is especially true. It's difficult to not be drawn to Bergman's reveries about a cruel God, Dreyer's religious ardor or Bresson's catholic severity. They move and engage, they challenge and inspire, even when the viewer doesn't believe in the cosmic orders they take for granted. Terrence Malick is a good name to add to that list. After all, the Philosophy professor turned filmmaker has dedicated much of his career to the transmutation of the soul into film. He creates spiritual odysseys out of light and color, intuitive editing and ephemerous scripts, star-studded casts and beautiful cinematography.

His style is so specific it's become prone to parody and his self-important themes can feel alienating. A Hidden Life exemplifies all of this to the extreme and, in some ways, it seems to announce itself as the ultimate Terrence Malick project…

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Over & Overs: "Sister Act"

Please welcome new contributor Kyndall Cunningham...

As a churchgoing kid with a fairly good singing voice, choir took up a big chunk of my adolescence. I attended weekly rehearsals, went to my choir mates’ houses to practice and woke up at the crack of dawn on Sunday mornings to perform for the congregation (and God). I had a strong affection for gospel music, but my intense involvement in ministry at such a young age felt deeply uncool at times, if not isolating from the rest of the world. It wasn’t until I picked out Sister Act from my family’s VHS closet one day that I saw that part of my life tied to pop culture in an exciting way. Needless to say, I began screening the film religiously. 

Sorry. 

Like a lot of stories about women turning a new leaf, Sister Act begins with a breakup and ends with a love story...

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Review: "Cyrano, My Love" & "By the Grace of God"

by Cláudio Alves

Pity those who live in the shadow of Oscar's champions. Such is the case of two French films from last year which now arrive in American theatres. If they were Hollywood productions, we'd surely be talking about Cyrano, My Love and By the Grace of God as potential contenders. As it stands, they can expect some golden recognition in the shape of the César rather than a little golden man. They must also expect eternal comparisons to more famous movies... 

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AGLIFF: Gay Choruses, Trans Athletes, and Chicken-Fried Everything

by Nathaniel R

Nathaniel and two fellow jurors (though we weren't in the same jury) at AGLIFF

Hello "y'all" (when in Texas...) writing to you from blistering hot Austin where the 32nd annual aGLIFF festival is nearing its wrap. The festival, which runs from Thursday to Sunday each year in late August is actually the oldest film festival in Texas. Yes, even older than SXSW though not as famous.

The festiviites began Thursday night with a packed house at the Alamo Drafthouse for a performance by the Austin Gay Men's Chorus followed by the opening night film, Gay Chorus Deep South (2019). It's a very moving documentary about a the iconic San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus and an all volunteer charity tour they made of the Deep South after T****'s election. The tour was an attempt to bridge divides between red and blue, and combat rising anti-LGBT sentiment within the country and specificially the ever-present anti-LGBT sentiment within our nation's churches...

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De Laurentiis pt 2: The '60s epics of Dinocittà

This week at TFE we're celebrating the centennial of one of cinema’s most prolific and legendary producers, Dino De Laurentiis.  Here's Tim Brayton...

Yesterday, Eric took us on a tour of the first phase of Dino De Laurentiis's one-of-a-kind career as a producer, the era when he and Carlo Ponti helped usher a number of major works of late Neorealism into the world, introducing the first wave of international art cinema masterpieces. We now arrive at the 1960s, when De Laurenteiis was emboldened by those early successes to indulge himself in the first of his many flights of staggering, ill-advised ambition. Near the start of the decade, De Laurentiis opened a movie studio on the outskirts of Rome, an enormous playground for moviemaking nicknamed Dinocittà (after the famous Cinecittà, then and now the heart of the Italian film industry).

The Dinocittà experiment perfectly describes De Laurentiis's singular personality. A visionary producer can tell what is going to be popular in the future, and thus can jump in on trends at the moment of their inception. The hacks who make up the bulk of commercial producers know what was popular a year ago, and thus crank out movies that feel like uninspired cash-grabs and knock-offs. De Laurentiis had the gift and curse of knowing what's popular right this instant, and so his biggest swings – and too often, his biggest misses – came out just barely on the back side of the historical moment when they could live up to his extravagant hopes...

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