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Entries in All About My Mother (13)

Saturday
Feb082020

1999 with Nick: When "All About My Mother" triumphed over ???

In advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis has been looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.

After that trip back to the Documentary race, we're ending the week by spotlighting the other category that's taken the hugest strides to adjust its nominating process and champion better work. It’s also no accident that I’m ending with a category that Nathaniel has tracked with unusual care and detail since Oscar-focused websites have existed—indeed, long before many of his peers paid more than cursory attention. The 72nd Academy Awards took place eight years before the transformative addition of an Executive Committee to the vetting process that produces the annual roster for "Best Foreign Language Film," which of course this year got rebranded as "Best International Film". This category used to be heavy with inoffensive mediocrities, or sometimes offensive ones. Tracking down the contenders, which was often difficult to do, rarely felt like making contact with the best of world cinema in any given year, and with very few exceptions the winners across the 1990s were an undistinguished lot. (Or maybe you’re a major devotée of Mediterraneo or Kolya?)

By that standard, 1999 was a pretty good year, since I imagine that Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother would be most people's choice as the best film to cop this prize during the whole decade. This critical and popular favorite needed no help from any Executive Committee to stay alive during the balloting. In fact, the only mystery is why the movie couldn't make more inroads into admittedly competitive races like Actress, Supporting Actress, Director, Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing, or Picture...

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Tuesday
Jun042019

Best LGBT Movies?

by Nathaniel R

For Pride month you may have heard that Rotten Tomatoes has expanded and updated their list of the greatest LGBT films ever to a full 200 movies wide.

Given that they've just done this, we thought it might be a good idea to share multiple "best lgbt films list" to give you lots of rental ideas for Gay Pride month. We've also listed the pros and cons of a few of the key lists out there. Do you feel like you've seen your share of queer classics perusing these or do you have endless hours of screenings ahead to catch up?

The Rotten Tomatoes list and 4 additional lists are after the jump. Which lists is friendliest to your tastes?

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Saturday
Sep092017

Top 5 Films Without Repeating a Language or Country

by Sebastian Nebel

Name your Top 5 films without repeating a language or country of origin.

That was the challenge I posed on Twitter last month. It's tricky enough to limit your favorites to a specific number, and I was interested in seeing what kind of responses this added degree of difficulty would garner.

Turns out Twitter loves making lists! I got a ton of replies – way too many to collect all of them here, unfortunately. But I've rounded up a handful of them after the jump including lists by The Film Experience contributors, film critics and film makers...

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo)
2001: A Space Odyssey
Police Story (警察故事)
Delicatessen
Santa Sangre (Holy Blood)

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Friday
May122017

Pedro Party: All About My Mother

It's a Pedro Party all week. Here's Lynn Lee on her introduction to Almodóvar...


To all actresses who have played actresses.  To all women who act.  To men who act and become women.  To all the people who want to be mothers.  To my mother.”

All About My Mother was the first Almodovar film I ever saw, and as it happens, I saw it with my own mother.  I don’t remember why I picked it for us to see together.  It certainly wasn’t because of the title or because I thought it would be something she’d particularly like.  In fact, if I’d thought about it more, I might have been anxious that she would find it too outré.  Or for that matter, that I would; as both a movie lover and a young adult, I was just beginning to learn what was out there and how far it stretched beyond my own personal experience.

To our credit, or rather to Almodovar’s, there was no reason for such trepidation...

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Thursday
May112017

Pedro Party: The Music of Alberto Iglesias

We're celebrating Pedro Almodóvar all week. Here's Chris Feil on Pedro's standby composer...

Here at The Film Experience, ruminating on Pedro Almodóvar’s list of frequent collaborators would most likely find an actress’s name come up first. But aside from his onscreen talent, there is one now prolific relationship the director has that’s equally worth celebrating: composer Alberto Iglesias.

The Almodóvar/Iglesias collaboration is now ten films deep, dating back to 1995‘s The Flower of My Secret without a single gap film since. His work is inextricable from what Almodóvar creates on screen, a cohesive piece of the melodrama that enhances the tone rather than defining it. Let's discuss five favorites from his work after the jump...

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