Halfway Mark - Team Experience Favourites

I'll be sharing my midyear ballots (such as they are) over the next couple of days but first let's hear from the whole team. Or, some of them - those that volunteeered their little in progress top fives. The team hopes you enjoy these little peeks into our individual film experiences from January through June at the movies (and in some cases, at home).

Chris Feil's midyear top five  
Twitter | Instagram | This Had Oscar Buzz | TFE Articles 

01 Her Smell's redemptive anarchy in five acts

02 Ari Aster's hilarious Midsommar -time sadness

03 Claire Denis' sci-fi descent into the black hole of our biology High Life.

04 The haves-and-have-nots horror of Us.

05 Zhao Tao giving another masterclass in Jia Zhangke's Ash is Purest White.  

Paolo Kagaoan's midyear top five
Twitter | Instagram | All of Paolo's articles

01 Homecoming: A Film By Beyonce... When  Beyonce descended from those steps, Sergei Eisenstein rose back from the dead, burned every copy of Battleship Potemkin, and killed himself.

02 Elizabeth Olsen in Endgame because she reminded me that Thanos is an asshole... 

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Podcast: Last Black Man in San Francisco, Toy Story 4

by Murtada Elfadl and Nathaniel R

 

Index (49 minutes)
00:01 Toy Story 4. Fun but was that necessary?
06:57 Emma Thompson shines in Late Night. Deserves a bigger audience.
20:10 Sienna Miller's character study American Woman 
32:00 We highly recommend the stylized, moving The Last Black Man in San Francisco.
47:11 The wrap-up 

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Late Night and Last Black Man in San Francisco

Now Playing: "Late Night" and "Last Black Man in San Francisco"

Lots of new movies this weekend. Dark Phoenix and The Secret Life of Pets 2 are nationwide. The two highest profile limited releases were both reviewed by Murtada at Sundance earlier this year. They've finally arrived for the rest of us, so go see 'em!

Last Black Man in San Francisco (A24, platform release)
While watching The Last Black Man in San Francisco - a gorgeous, specific, and fantastical fable of a film with a decidedly assured tone - I kept thinking of Oprah Winfrey’s introduction of Precious  star Gabourey Sidibe at the Oscars. “Where did that come from?”, “Where did you learn how to do that?” I was asking these questions of writer/director Joe Talbot and writer/actor Jimmie Fails. They had collaborated on a short film before, but this is their feature debut... READ THE FULL REVIEW

Late Night (Amazon Studios, select cities this weekend... nationwide next week)
Emma Thompson plays legendary talk show host Katherine Newbery (think Letterman, 2 decades younger, English and a woman but just as famous and revered) in the new comedy Late Night. Early in the film Newbery meets a male employee from the writers room who is asking for a raise because he recently had a baby. In two minutes Thompson eviscerates him, and all of the decades of sexism and inequality in the workplace. She likens having babies to having a drug problem that one can’t shake. The latter is an unexpected and illogical simile until, that is, you hear it coming out of Thompson’s mouth. The writing’s funny and sharp, and Thompson is on full-throttle hilarious commitment... READ THE FULL REVIEW

Murtada's Sundance Awards

Murtada Elfadl closing out his Sundance coverage. Thanks, Murtada!

My first ever Sundance was a blast. So much so I’m already making tentative plans to return next year. Please indulge my 'jury of one' as I hand out awards in traditional categories and ones made up just for your reading pleasure. Please note that I only had time to see 23 movies. Some of the more popular ones I missed included the documentary One Child Nation , Shia LaBeouf's vehicle Honey Boy and the popular comedy Brittany Runs A Marathon. So take all this with a grain of salt...

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Abe's Sundance 2019 Wrap

Abe Fried-Tanzer closing out his Sundance coverage for TFE. Thanks, Abe!

Holliday Grainger and Alia Shawkat in ANIMALS (2019)

The Sundance Film Festival is officially over, closing out a busy week and a half of nonstop movies. I managed to catch 46 titles this year, most of which I enjoyed. Among them were the Grand Jury Prize winners from the U.S. Dramatic Competition, Clemency, and the World Cinema Dramatic Competition, The Souvenir, both of which were written up by Murtada. While I appreciated both of those films, here are my choices for BEST of the fest in various categories... 

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