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Entries in Robert Eggers (10)

Tuesday
Apr282020

The New Classics: Living Deliciously in "The Witch"

Hey everyone. Michael Cusumano here, excited to be back for a second season of The New Classics (and not just because publishing one of these every Tuesday will help me tell the weeks apart!) Each which we annoint one the best of the 21st century by discussing a single scene. 

Scene: Living Deliciously
The ending of Robert Eggers’ The Witch certainly feels like a happy ending. How could it not, with that final thrilling image of a cackling Thomasin rising nude into the moonlight, embracing her place in Black Phillip’s coven? She has shed her fanatically repressed biological family like she shed her blood-splattered “shift” at Black Phillip’s whispered command, and now she’s off to see the world and taste butter by the churnful. Liberation!

But at what cost?

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Wednesday
Oct302019

Link is a cabaret... 

Marisa Berenson, Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli at the premiere of Cabaret (1972)Vanity Fair smart piece by Mark Harris on what four Oscar campaign's (or rather the potential success thereof) might tell us about the "new" Academy including Lupita Nyong'o in Us

The Guardian
talks to Marisa Berenson (Cabaret) on why she walked away from the spotlight so many years ago.

After the jump animated short Oscar hopefuls, Taylor Swift Cats news, Jeff Goldblum, a new film from The Lighthouse's Robert Eggers and more...

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Friday
Sep062019

TIFF: Robert Eggers' euphoric hell of "The Lighthouse"

by Chris Feil

As gloopy with various bodily fluids as it is with sea foam, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse lulls us into insanity from its first foggy frame. Diverging from the more straightforward horrors of his debut The Witch, Eggers thrusts us into the isolate hellscape that is the male mind with this Mellville-esque absurdist dark comedy. The bizarre quotient is high, both in the film’s psychosexual hysterics and crusty verbal dexterity, as the film devolves into an abstract battle of the wits and wills of two men meant to preserve the titular phallic monument. It’s genius and a complete hoot.

Set over a century ago on an offshore island, this tempestuous and physically taxing setting plays host to the two male egos of Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe’s lighthouse watchmen. Dafoe’s superstitious, more experienced Thomas immediately puts Pattinson’s Ephraim to back-breaking arduous work, dominating him further over candlelit dinnertime monologues...

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Monday
Jan162017

One Link at a Time

The Pool the shelf life of 'the cool girl' is getting shorter. Which actresses will we be told to hate in 2017?
Variety a depressing report about which future movies are being talked about the most on social media. Cars 3 is number 2? Gross
Screencrush here's to the behind the scenes administrators and shooting schedule people. This is hard work. Consider that Doctor Strange is absent for ALL scenes which involve Doctor Strange in Avengers Infinity War (now filming)
The Guardian... is disturbed by this as we all should be. Especially with "ghosting" happening via Rogue One

Variety yet another award for Isabelle Huppert -- this time in Paris. (Speaking of -- I'm so excited to see how Elle and Things to Come fare at the Césars. Those nominations are Jan 25th)
Page Six Are Kiki Dunst and Jesse Plemons engaged now? Fargo brings people together
MNPP Which is hotter "The Rock" or "The Slab" in Baywatch
The Retro Set looks back at Russia House (1990)
Vulture Ben Affleck was embarassed by his love scene in Live by Night so he cut it. He has been so depressed lately, people. What is up with the glum face. It's been since, what, Gone Girl? (Or was it before that?) 
Awards Daily Sasha's favorites of the year 
MCN David Poland's 15 most underrated films of the year from Deadpool (wha--- that seems overrated which is the opposite) to The BFG and Pete's Dragon 

Long Reads
The Hairpin Hitchcock's legacy of possession in Marnie, Vertigo... It affects even our language
Bright Wall Dark Room is Robert Eggers the next great filmmaker? (The Witch which has been mistreated this awards season.)
The Tracking Board examines what went wrong with The Founder's release 

Stage
Guardian La La Land considering stage version
Playbill We knew they were remaking the Murder on the Orient Express movie to be released this year. It's also coming to the stage.
Playbill Nicole Kidman nixes plan to take Photograph 51 to Broadway 

Sunday
Feb212016

Review: Creepy Puritans and "The Witch"

Though we'd already seen The Witch at festivals I sent a friend to see it this weekend, a non-horror guy, to see if he'd like it. Meet Eric Blume. - Editor

The Witch debuted last January at Sundance and finally got a wide release via A24 this weekend.  It’s borderline shocking that this movie is being treated like a Hollywood horror movie, because it feels more like a foreign film, with the same essential disdain of fanatical religiosity that’s usually reserved for something like Cristian Mingiu’s great 2012 film Beyond the Hills.  And in tone, it’s thoroughly austere:  we’re thrown into the 17th century setting with as much reverence and severity as we are into the 19th century world of The Revenant. I read somewhere that the latter was tough to shoot… The Witch must have been so, too, with everyone making a lot less money to be miserable.

The plot centers around a Puritan family who is banished from their community and forced to move to an area bordered by an ominous-looking forest.  In the movie’s first ten minutes, the family newborn is snatched up by something living in that forest, and the family unravels from there.  It’s a contained universe from which Eggers gets maximum tension, putting a slow squeeze on you from the start and never quite letting go.  

The film plays beautifully off of how incredibly creepy the Puritans were.  But Eggers doesn’t stop there and also harnesses what's creepy about the woods (specifically, their insulation); farm animals (their seeming placidity); and twins (everything).  He even conjures memories of how creepy Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is.  The Puritanism is the front-and-center text, but the puritan (small p) is the subtext, and Eggers puts the characters’ guilt, shame, confusion, and marriage to sin into a continuous wash cycle.  The family dynamics feel true and perverse, and the performances he captures from all six actors are whoppers.  Lead Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the oldest daughter, has the baby/sinner face of a young Michelle Williams and carries the movie with complete authority.

Visually, the movie looks as one might expect, with the drained-color palette that’s popular in non-Puritan horror movies.  But early in the picture, Eggers and his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke use streaks of daylight on the actors that due the period costumes occasionally recalls a Vermeer painting, without being self-conscious about it.  The filmmaking team seems to have made The Witch with their hearts in their throat, and their full-throttle approach gives the movie a genuine force.  It’s not a major picture, but the debut of perhaps a major talent.  Eggers comes at the film not just to scare you, but to make you feel dread in the best sense.  The culmination at the end, while true to its horror roots, has a release with a surprisingly exultant comic edge to it.  Eggers has a nice sick streak.

Did you see The Witch this weekend? Sound off in the comments. (Previous posts on The Witch)

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