Happy Cannesiversary to "In the Mood for Love"!!

by Nick Taylor

We at TFE are wishing a Happy 25th Birthday to Wong Kar-Wai’s melancholic romantic drama In the Mood for Love, which debuted on this day at Cannes. It went home with the Best Actor award and the Technical Grand Prize for its cinematography and editing, and if you ask around there’s a good chance folks would say it still got short-shrifted by Luc Besson’s jury. Its stamp on the cinema firmament, an apex of the sumptuous mood and style Wong made his name on, is beyond reproach. If you haven’t seen it, you’ve almost certainly felt its reverberations in art house cinema writ large, on individual directors like Barry Jenkins, aesthetic blogs or photoshoots, and an entire chapter of Everything Everywhere All At Once. More importantly, if you haven’t seen it then go watch it! Right now! You’re back? Then let’s discuss this masterpiece . . . .

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What Director to Rank Next?

by Cláudio Alves

I don't know about you, but I had a lot of fun ranking Hayao Miyazaki's feature filmography. So much so that I feel inspired to do the same with some other beloved auteur. The only issue is deciding which director to rank next. In those write-ups, a commenter suggested David Lynch, so he's on the list of candidates, but there are many more possibilities, storied careers full of fascinating films. Why not put it to a readers' vote and let you choose who you wish to read about? That's exactly what we're doing, and you have ten possibilities to choose from, all of which have works I love and a filmography small enough to be manageable…

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MUBI: Three by Wong Kar-Wai

by Cláudio Alves

Happy birthday to Wong Kar-Wai. The Hong Kong auteur turns 65 today, the same day I say goodbye to 28 and welcome my 29th year –we're birthday twins! But of course, I've loved the director long before discovering we shared July 17th, having fallen for his cinema when I glimpsed Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung cross paths in slow-motion, saw the treacherous enchantment of a kitschy lamp lost in Buenos Aires, experienced a Nouvelle Vague color kaleidoscope to the sound of "California Dreamin'." It's only fitting to celebrate the date by pouring over some of Wong's most ravishing pictures, remembering his mastery as we mourn a decade since his last feature.

Join me as I consider three films MUBI has programmed specially for July, a collection they call As Time Goes By. A trio marked by lavish spectacle, they reach for the stars – a wuxia experiment, a sci-fi lament, and a martial-arts biopic like none other…

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Star profiles, Heart stoppers, Shanghai blossoms, and more...

• THR Heartstopper (and other series) make Netflix the leader for the Children & Family Emmy nominations -- by a large margin, too
• Advocate Kit Connor (who plays Nick on Heartstopper) just came out as bisexual because he felt pressured to with the online accusations that he was queerbaiting. 
• Fangoria Talks to TV creator/showrunner Bryan Fuller (Hannibal, Pushing Daisies) about Crystal Lake which will be a prequel series (of sorts) to the Friday the 13th movies

After the jump comes more movie news, fun articles, or actor profiles like the superstar who came back down to earth Jennifer Lawrence, and rising hotties Ismael Cruz Córdova (Rings of Power) and Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness)...

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Cláudio's Best Shot Pick: Happy Together (1997)

The next episode of our series, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot,' arrives Thursday night. Since the Cannes Film Festival is around the corner, it's focused on Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together, which screened at the Croisette 25 years ago. You still have time to participate! Here's Cláudio's entry.

In film criticism, few expressions vex me more than the old "style over substance" adage. To presuppose the audiovisual stylings of any picture should be subordinate to its text, thus taking for granted that true depth exists only in narrative rather than form, is a fundamental misunderstanding of cinema as an art. Such matters come to mind because the works of Wong Kar Wai represent one of the best counterpoints to these erroneous wisdoms. The director's style is indissociable from whatever meaning, narrative, or emotion the viewer can take from his films. That is especially true of Happy Together, one of his masterpieces and one of my all-time favorite pictures…

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