Cannes at Home: Days 2 & 3 – Blood, Sweat & Tears

by Cláudio Alves

WILD DIAMOND (2024) Agathe Riedinger

The first two days of competition screenings have whipped up a storm at the Cannes Film Festival. Things started normal enough with Agathe Riedinger's Wild Diamond, this year's only feature debut vying for the Palme. Reactions were a tad tepid, but the same can't be said about Magnus van Horn's Girl with the Needle, which has horrified some viewers. All hell broke loose on the second day of competition, when both Andrea Arnold's Bird and Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis had their world premieres. The British auteur earned general praise, though some found it confounding. As for the American master's long-awaited opus, opinions are so divided that a chasm seems to have broken open across the Croisette. Some say it's a catastrophe of epic proportions, while others see value in its epic mess. Whatever the case, it sounds like a fascinating watch, even as reports from the troubled shoot have enmeshed the picture in controversy. 

Since Riedinger has no previous features, she won't be included in the Cannes at Home fest. For the other filmmakers, let's revisit Sweat, Red Road, and Apocalypse Now…

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Cláudio's 2021 Top Ten

by Cláudio Alves

Ever since late 2019, there's seldom been a week when I didn't write for The Film Experience. Being part of the blog's team is a dream come true in many regards, having followed it since I was a baby cinephile back in the mid-aughts. Considering how much The Film Experience has become part of my life, it's with great delight that I'm now sharing my year-end personal top 10 in these hallowed pages. While I love to read everything my fellow Team Experience colleagues write, we all have distinctive tastes. Indeed, many are the movies where many disagree – just look at the polarizing reactions to Spencer. This means that it's unlikely there's much overlap in any list of favorites, including that of our beloved editor, Nathaniel. Our heterogeneous opinions are part of what makes The Film Experience so special. 

With that in mind, here are my ten favorites features released in 2021. (First, though, some honorable mentions)…

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Stage Door: The Pulitzer winning "Sweat"

Stage Door bringing you intermittent theater reviews when we manage to get there. Here's Nathaniel R

Awards have a way of hyping certain creations, especially the modest kind, to a point where disappointment is an obvious risk. The gifted playwright Lynn Nottage is only 52 but Sweat is already her second Pulitzer winner for Drama (the first was for Ruined). This places her in the rather astonishing company of prolific geniuses Tennessee Williams and August Wilson, and just one prize away from Edward Albee (!) and marks her as the most awarded living playwright and the most awarded female playwright, living or dead. As a result I spent the first act of Sweat wondering what the fuss was about. The Fuss does not identify itself in the second act but by then you can meet the play halfway with its likeable flawed characters and appreciate Nottage's earnest thematic thrust as the play mourns the loss of intersectional solidarity, without clumsily naming it as such...

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