Oscar Dressed as Each 2019 Best Picture Nominee

Chris here. One of my very favorite annual Oscar traditions comes from artist Olly Gibbs. Every year he drapes the Oscar statuette with a memorable look from each of the year's Best Picture nominees, adding in small touches to fawn over. Some of my favorite details in this year's offering: the Parasite peach and Foofoo guest appearance, Marriage Story's award pedestal being split in two, Jojo Rabbit's secret cabinet, and the perfect color story match to Joker's curtain. You can get a closer look at each of Olly Gibbs' statues here!

Criterion Teases 2019

Chris here. One of the cinematic treasures of the new year is always the Criterion Collection's annual animated tease of what they have coming for us cinema hounds. And dare I say that this year's puzzle is as confounding as ever - or maybe, eek, I'm drawing a blank on some of the more rarified blind spots here. One film we can count on: John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch, already teased by the filmmaker last year. Might that be this drawing's owl and earthworm? Can you spot any other film's in the drawing?

Willem Dafoe is Monumental in "At Eternity's Gate"

by Eric Blume

Willem Dafoe plays Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate, director Julian Schnabel’s film about the last year in the life of the great Dutch painter.  And Dafoe’s delivers a magnificent performance here: his face is the canvas of the film, in all its agony and ecstasy.

Schnabel, a painter himself who made the stunning films Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, gives us a deeply detailed movie of a painter by a painter.  The mechanics of landscape and portrait painting, the walks to the viewpoints, the tools, and the intimacy with the subject all become the fabric of this movie.  Schnabel’s attention to these subtleties establish his credibility and give the movie real texture...

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Middleburg: "Ruben Brandt" Collects and "Widows" Thrills

Day two of the Middleburg Film Festival

Friday kicked off with a special "sneak" of Stan & Ollie (which, more on tomorrow) and then two more movies which went like so...

Ruben Brandt, Collector
From the opening shot of this animated film from Hungary you know you're in for an idiosyncratic lark. We're humorously crosscutting between an ultra fast moving train and the molasses crawl of a snail on the tracks. Then we're inside the train with Ruben Brandt, a famous psychotherapist who is promptly attacked by a little girl with a very sharp bite who is dressed suspiciously like Diego Velázquez's  "Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress". I say 'dressed like' because it's hard to make the connection at first...

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Did you enjoy 'Mermay'? A few words on "Splash" and "Siren"

by Nathaniel

You guys. I only just recently learned about "Mermay" in which you celebrate mermaids during the month of May. How did I not know about this? We could have been celebrating mermaids in film and television all month long! The least we could have done is pay tribute to Tully's mermaid dream imagery. Because that film did NOT get enough attention. Jason Reitman + Diablo Cody + Charlize Theron = dream team (see also: Young Adult)...

I thought I could whirlpool up a top ten list of movie mermaids but realized I hadn't seen some key texts like Mr Peabody and the Mermaid (1948), Night Tide (1961), the silent film The Mermaid (1904) and a few others. Sadly merman films seem all but nonexistent... 

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