Are you watching "Squid Game" or "Midnight Mass"?

by Nathaniel R

I received an email from a reader yesterday earlier this week suggesting that we discuss "Squid Game" which has become very popular, quite rapidly, all over the world. We've had lots of internal discussion here at The Film Experience about how much television to cover since TV and Film have been merging into a two-headed amorphous beast for at least a decade now. The movies the general public likes best now are inarguably, the "continuing series" movies which makes them much more like television than their blockbuster ancestors. Today I screened Dune and it is literally just half a movie!  Meanwhile the TV series that win the most acclaim, if not always the biggest audiences, are inarguably the ones that feel the most "cinematic", a simmering change that reached a boil with Mad Men (if you ask us) since it looked and sounded as delicious and expensive as the very best the cinema itself had to offer. For the past ten years movies are getting longer (the new James Bond is almost three hours. WTF) and television seasons keep getting shorter! I suspect younger audiences don't fully get how much different the landscapes are now than they were even 15 years ago... but I digress. This is all a long way of saying we never know which series to cover and we obviously need a bigger team!

Speaking of longwindedness. If every showrunner on earth is now allowed to just make people wait for something to happen until episode two or even three (that would have got you immediately cancelled pre-2010s when shows would shove every possible hook they could into a pilot episode) I can begin this discussion of Squid Game with a detour to Midnight Mass... 

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Almost There: Nicole Kidman in "To Die For"

by Cláudio Alves

This October, the Criterion Channel is celebrating all things death and murder, be it fantastical or otherwise. Indeed, amid its new collections, one can find a curated program of movies that reflect the idea of True Crime in some way or another. Gus Van Sant's pitch-black comedy To Die For is one of those films. The story of an ambitious weather girl with aspirations of TV fame who manipulates teenagers into killing her husband was a breakthrough for Nicole Kidman back in the mid-90s. After years of being systematically undervalued by audiences and critics alike, the actress got immense critical acclaim and came close to an Oscar nomination…

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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...

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Streaming Review: "Worth"

By Ben Miller

With the 20th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks approaching, Sara Colangelo’s Worth paints a compassionate picture of the victims and their families while attempting to get into the heads of the lawyers in charge of assigning a dollar amount to the victims. While the lead trio are each superb, the host of character actors and actress recounting their lost loved ones tug at the heartstrings.  Poignantly acted and directed, the film lacks the flash and grandstanding of the usual Hollywood fare, but still delivers a heartfelt message on the value of life.

Following the 9/11 attacks, to stave off the potential of economically disastrous lawsuits against the airlines, the United States Attorney General assigns respected lawyer Kenneth Feinberg (Michael Keaton) as the Special Master of the fund allocated to compensate victims and their families of the attacks...

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Review: Sandra Oh in "The Chair"

by Lynn Lee

In my younger days, I wanted to be an English professor.  I was pretty serious about it, too – serious enough to major in English, get a fellowship, and enroll in a Ph.D program.  Ultimately, I realized academia wasn’t for me and left with just a master’s.  I’ve never regretted that decision.  Yet I still wonder occasionally what my life would have been like if I’d stuck with my original dream.

So it’s no wonder I immediately let myself sink into The Chair, a new Netflix (mini?)series starring Sandra Oh as the titular chair of the English department at Pembroke University. That's a fictional Ivy League school in what looks like a permanently snow-covered New England college town, although the show was actually shot in Pennsylvania.  Basically, it’s my alternate-universe existence if I were as cool and charismatic as Sandra Oh and as brilliant and committed as her character, Ji-Yoon Kim...

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