On This Day: The Bling Ring, Bambi, Prizzi's Honor...

Okay, let's get back on track with a robust daily blogging schedule here at TFE. Happy Wednesday y'all. Here are your 5 assignments for the day.

5 Ways to Honor This Day (June 14th) in History

2013 The Bling Ring opens in movie theaters. By and large people fail to recognize its brilliance immediately. This is the same thing that happens to almost every Sofia Coppola movie.

In its honor: Take all early reactions to The Beguiled, good bad or indifferent, with a huge grain of salt. It opens very soon but first impressions are not likely to last. Her movies are sticky.

1985 John Huston's penultimate movie Prizzi's Honor starring Jack Nicholson, Katheen Turner, and eventual Oscar winner Anjelica Huston, opens in theaters. It's not even the earliest release for a Best Picture nominee that year! Get this statistic...

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The Furniture: The Cruel, Curtained Childhood of a Leader

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

We love to collectively pore over the biographies of history’s most monstrous figures, usually in search of both meaning and sensationalism. Our fantasies are full of vindictive parenting, traumatic events and uncanny brilliance. It’s as if we want to reverse Freud, using psychoanalysis as a tool to craft new mythology. And they certainly are myths: Fascism can’t be blamed on paternal cruelty alone.

But what if the protagonist weren’t real? With The Childhood of a Leader, Brady Corbet has contributed a fictional allegory to this evergreen genre. Loosely based on a short story by Jean-Paul Sartre and a novel by John Fowles, the film chronicles a short period in the life of Prescott (Tom Sweet), a very moody child. The year is 1919, in the midst of the post-Armistice treaty negotiations. The boy’s father (Liam Cunningham) is an American diplomat, his mother (Bérénice Bejo) a “citizen of the world.” They’re both miserable...

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Review: Francofonia

The question at the center of Alexander Sokurov’s rich, meditative Francofonia is a rather complex one: would France be France without the Louvre? Would our civilization, for that matter, be a civilization without museums? Focusing on that existential premise, Sokurov crafts a cinematic essay that deals with the seeming randomness of what art is preserved for posterity, the question of fate when it comes to the Louvre’s existence, and even a chronicle of France during the Occupation. Those looking for a plot to follow beware, for the film not only makes do without one, it also invites us to explore it with the open mindedness with which we would wander inside a museum.

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