Review: "Nightmare Alley" only in theaters

by Matt St Clair

Nightmare Alley, Guillermo del Toro’s anticipated follow-up to The Shape of Water, is quite a risk for the Oscar-winning auteur. Del Toro ditches the phantasmic monsters he’s known for in favor of human monstrosity, the beasts within all of us that drive our carnal needs. As with the original 1947 noir, Nightmare Alley is an exemplary exercise on the folly of man and what happens when the line between man and beast becomes blurred. 

The main anti-hero who toes that line is Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper), a carny with a knack for manipulating people. His subjects include fellow carny and eventual love interest/accomplice Molly Cahill (Rooney Mara), Paul Krumbein (David Strathairn) and his fortune teller wife Zeena (Toni Collette), and a wealthy fearsome widower Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins). Cooper's piercing eyes and bewildering smile make him a perfect casting fit for the manipulative con man. He is a man of few words which is just as well; the words when they come are lies and deceit. It is in Cooper’s expressive face where we see Stan’s constant fear of his troubled past resurfacing...

Click to read more ...

Beauty Break: To Rita Moreno on her 90th Birthday

by Nathaniel R

Today marks 90 years since the blessed birth of the legendary EGOT winner Rita Moreno. With Steven Spielberg's West Side Story remake upon us in theaters, the trailblazing Puerto Rican star is back in the spotlight. Not that light hasn't always followed her.... hell, emanated from her. Are we laying it on thick? Who cares, she deserves it!

As faithful readers know, the original West Side Story (1961) is my all time favourite so it was hard not to be skeptical / worried about the remake. Naturally then, the new rendition is taking me a bit of time to process but, in short, though some of the raves are hyperbolic, the movie is mostly a thrill. Of its many pleasures, the one that we most emphatically co-sign was uttered by Rita Moreno herself who said...

Click to read more ...

Review: Jake Gyllenhaal's one-man show "The Guilty"

by Matt St Clair

Despite being a proponent of Bong Joon-ho's advice to overcome the "one-inch barrier" of subtitles, I confess that I never got around to seeing the popular Danish film The Guilty (2018) which became an Oscar finalist for Best International Feature in its year. As a result of this blind spot, none of my thoughts on the new English-language remake will pertain to how it measures up to the original. Instead, let's talk about what a tense one man show this is. 

Although Jake Gyllenhaal has actors surrounding him, both in-person and through vocal performances on the telephone, The Guilty is laser focused on his character, 911 dispatcher Joe Baylor. Joe is on the phone trying to save a woman named Emily (voiced by a skillfully elusive Riley Keough) who’s being kidnapped by her ex-husband...

Click to read more ...

Cruella's best looks: A "complete" ranking

by Cláudio Alves

If there were any doubts that Jenny Beavan is a costume design goddess, Disney's latest live-action remake/villain origin story proves it beyond any reasonable doubt. Unencumbered by the financial restraints inherent to independent cinema, Beavan serves up an orgiastic ecstasy of excess and punk rock fashion pastiche. According to interviews, she conceived 47 different costumes for Emma Stone's redeemed villainess, making Cruella the most-dressed movie of the year. It's also a good contender for the title of best-dressed. It's fair to say that an Oscar nomination is all but guaranteed. However, since the 94th Academy Awards are still nearly ten months away, let's focus on other matters.

Specifically, let's delve deep into the matter of Emma Stone's outlandish outfits and decide which are her grandest, most devilishly glamorous looks…

Click to read more ...

The Postman Rings Four Times

by Brent Calderwood

The Lana Turner / John Garfield classic The Postman Always Rings Twice opened 75 years ago in US theaters. Based on James M. Cain’s bestselling 1934 novel about a wife who colludes with her lover in an attempt to pull off the perfect murder, Postman had to gloss over the grime to get past the censors, but it remains one of the best-loved film noirs of all time, and its huge box office success has been credited with cementing Turner’s status as a top-billed star. 

While The Film Experience isn't set to celebrate the movies of 1946 until June, Postman belongs to multiple years. Here's a rundown of the four most famous screen adaptations of Cain’s crime novel, listed more or less in order of their critical reputation today...

Click to read more ...