Merry Christmas!

by Cláudio Alves

It's the season to be jolly, so happy holidays to all The Film Experience readers, wherever you are across the globe.

I don't know about you, but in my family, there's a tradition of watching a film together on Christmas day, and I'm still pondering our options for today. Maybe we should go with the All of Us Strangers screener since that is technically a Christmas movie. One of its best scenes embraces all that barbed nostalgia and merry melancholia, lights twinkling while the Pet Shop Boys' “Always On My Mind” sounds off its queer lament in the background. Then again, that's probably not the merriest of choices, a gift of tears rather than cheers. Still, it's a beautiful film whose adaptation choices probably deserve a post of their own. But that's a matter for another time. Today, we celebrate.

Do you have a similar tradition? If so, what movie will do the honors in 2023? And beyond Andrew Haigh's ghost story, is there another film from this year that joins your Christmas canon?

Paul Mescal is the Melancholic Heartthrob of Our Dreams...

by Cláudio Alves

...but not even he could make Foe worth watching.

Since Normal People hit the small screen in 2020, the Irish actor has enjoyed a rise to fame like few before. Still, his breakthrough performance as Connell Waldron could have been a one-hit wonder with its staggering vulnerability never to be repeated. Thankfully, that wasn't to be. Though his big-screen debut, The Lost Daughter, didn't ask much from the Maynooth-born hunk with perpetually sad eyes, the 2022 double feature of Aftersun and God's Creatures revealed surprising range. So much so that he secured his first Oscar nomination for the Charlotte Wells stunner, a rare honor for its kind of understated work.

Garth Davis' Foe is the first significant stumble in a mostly impeccable resume. Still, that need not be the end-all-be-all of Mescal's 2023…

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Weekend @ 10: A Modern Gay Classic

by Cláudio Alves

Ten years ago, Andrew Haigh's Weekend opened in American theaters after a long travail through international film festivals. The director's second feature put his name on the map and opened up an artistic path that would bring us such precious cinematic gems as 45 Years and Lean on Pete, as well as the televisual delights of Looking. Contextualizing the work in such ways makes it seem even smaller than it already is, a miniature of gay urbanite life and the emotional ties that blossom from a night of casual sex. Despite the limited scope of all his projects, everything Haigh has done since Weekend feels much larger, more conspicuously ambitious. And yet, a decade later, that small British indie still stands as the director's most remarkable achievement…

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Soundtracking: "45 Years"

by Chris Feil

“They asked me how I knew...”

“Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” by The Platters is a cinematic staple, constantly showing up in films and yet hasn’t become a cliche. The song has been used for umpteen other tragic romances in film like Blue Valentine and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, not to mention countless less narratively significant needle drops on screen. But Andrew Haigh's 45 Years is the one that wrings it for every last drop of its sweeping grandeur and matches the scale of its emotion...

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Review: Lean on Pete

by Eric Blume

Andrew Haigh, the director of the new film Lean on Pete, is a major, major talent.  He pulled a career-best (and Oscar-nominated) performance from Charlotte Rampling in his last film 45 Years, made a splash a few years before that with the lovely two-hander Weekend, and his big HBO show Looking was for my money one of the best gay anythings ever made.

Haigh has a particular talent with actors, and also for establishing moments of quiet power within a story. What's more he trusts that that power is enough.  These talents are firmly on display in Lean on Pete, the story of 16 year-old Charley (Charlie Plummer) who finds himself completely alone alongside the eponymous, discarded quarterhorse...

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