The Ten Best Dance Sequences of 2018

Each day a new year in review list. Here's Dancin' Dan

If there was a common theme among the films of 2018 when it came to dance, it's the idea of losing yourself to the dance, of dancing as a trance-like state where either the viewer, the dancer, or both can shut everything else out and focus on this one thing. I think that's something we all could have definitely used in 2018, but it certainly wasn't all happiness and fun that was offered up for us to get lost in.

Before the countdown begins, though, a shout-out to three honorable mentions: Marina's disco fantasy in A Fantastic Woman (which was kind of last year but also kind of this year which makes listmaking INFURIATING), the climactic lighthouse sequence of Annihilation (which isn't technically a dance, but sure as hell feels like one), and this rightly cut but nonetheless adorable scene from A Simple Favor (Henry Golding has never been so adorable).

And now, let's get down and dirty...

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Christmas at TFE: The Lion In Winter

Members of Team Experience have been asked to share their favorite holiday film. Here's Dancin' Dan with his...

AH, Christmas! That special time of year when family gathers around the tree to shower each other with love, presents, and good tidings... and backstabbing, long-held resentments, and petty grievances! Which is exactly why The Lion in Winter is my kind of Christmas movie.

Of course families love each other. That goes without saying. But no family is perfect. For many people (I'm tempted to say everyone, but you never know!), going home for the holidays is a prospect that inspires fear and dread. You may only see these people once or twice a year, and there's only so long that certain things can go unsaid...

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Parker Posey's On Top

WHO'S ON TOP AND WHO'S ON BOTTOM NOW, HUH?

Happy Birthday to Parker Posey, who gave us the best worst audition of all time.

And here's to Libby Mae Brown and her healthy blizzard. 

 She'll always be our teacher's pet.

Stage Door: Bernhardt/Hamlet

by Dancin' Dan

It's a tall enough order to write a play about one of the greatest actresses the world has ever known. It's quite another to write a play about that same actress taking on one of the most famous plays ever written. But Theresa Rebeck has never been one to back away from a challenge. Her delightful new play Bernhardt/Hamlet imagines what it must have been like for the great Sarah Bernhardt to assay the role of none other than Hamlet, all the way back in 1897. To say the least, it was difficult.

Bernhardt (Janet McTeer), in her fifties, was past the point where she could believably play the dying ingénues that made her famous (and also far past the point where she wanted to). Out of money but full of ambition, she decides that Shakespeare's melancholy Dane will be her vehicle for a comeback after her last play, written by Edmond Rostand (Jason Butler Harner), flopped with audiences despite love from critics. But she is having difficulty "finding" the Prince, frustrated by his ease with flowery verse and his inability to take action.

Can a powerful woman play a powerful man? Bernhardt is absolutely sure of it. She says...

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Stage Door: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

by Dancin' Dan

You'd be forgiven for thinking, as I did way back in 2013 when it was first revealed a Harry Potter play was in development, that Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was going to be an unmitigated disaster. The last time a stage show based on a billion-dollar book and film franchise requiring inspired technical elements opened on Broadway, it was Julie Taymor's legendarily disastrous Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, a production plagued by poor decisions and bad luck from the start. You'd even be forgiven for still being skeptical when Cursed Child opened in London in 2016, and reports from the West End were nearly all rapturous. After all, Rowling and Potter are national treasures, so surely the Brits might have been blowing this a bit out of proportion, right?

Well, dear reader, I'm here to tell you to believe the hype...

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