Buzz Linkyear

• Interview here's a dream pairing Interview has Ben Whishaw and Andrew Scott in conversation on sexuality, chemistry and imagination
• Letterboxd Edgar Wright is programming a series at Alamo Drafthouse for next week. Wild thrilling Technicolor masterpiece Black Narcisssus is among the movies so you can see it on the big screen where it belongs!
• Variety How's this for a strange story? That Joan Rivers miniseries which was to have starred Kathryn Hahn has already been cancelled because they hadn't secured the life rights from Melissa Rivers (D'oh!)

More after the jump including Ryan Gosling's next project, Trainspotting, Last Night in Soho, Eternals, and a movie about Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear...

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Year in Review: Top 10 First Watches of 2020

by Christopher James

Many people discovered new hobbies while under quarantine. I, however, re-discovered my love for movies. As many film fans can attest, it sometimes feels like you have to watch so many new films each year that it can be hard to find time to fill in classic blind spots. But with the 2020 quarantine (plus the fun of insomnia), I turned to the Criterion Collection and basically got a whole second film school education. As 2020 comes to a close, I’ve had over 120 new-to-me watches for the year, not counting films released in 2020. They span from silent era cinema through Camp (2003). 

Since the final week of December is always about lists, here are my top 10 favorite first-time-for-me watches from 2020...

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1947: Kathleen Byron in "Black Narcissus"

by Nick Taylor

Ah, 1947. Back when the Golden Globes only announced their winners and neither NYFCC (age 12) nor NBR (age 2) had supporting acting categories. Searching for alternatives to Oscar’s lineup -- as we like to do when approaching a new Smackdown --  is appealingly open-ended. There are ways to find other options without awards bodies, though. The simplest is to call upon decades of film history to see which of any year’s most durable films have noteworthy female performances. For instance, has any other 1947 film so formidably established itself in the canon as Powell & Pressburger’s Black Narcissus... particularly as an offering of great actressing?

Centered on a group of Anglican nuns instructed to open a school on a Himalayan mountainside already infamous for scaring off other settlers, the film maintains the directors’ penchant for overripe atmosphere and jaw-dropping spectacle... 

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Posterized: Movies About Nun

by Nathaniel R

Sally Field as "The Flying Nun"... but that's a TV showThough we hate that every movie wants to become a 'universe' now, box office pundits predict that The Nun -- part of The Conjuring series -- is going to be huge. And, hell, we kind of love nun movies because we didn't grow up Catholic so it always seems like a fun or exotic other to us with peculiar hangups and fashion sense. Perhaps Catholics don't like nun movies quite as much or go into them with far more complicated baggage?

There are LOTS of B movies about nuns -- particular of the naughty variety (whether that's horror films or sexual films) but we're looking at only the more known titles here. (And surely there are a TON of foreign films about nuns that we're unfamiliar with though we've included a few famous ones in the list below.) 

This list is dedicated to Sally Field The Flying Nun, and Ann Dowd's nun in the short-lived TV series Nothing Sacred (both of whom we love) because this list is about nun movies.

OK, let's survey the posters. How many of these 39 nun movies have you seen?  If we've discussed the movie, it's linked up below... 

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The Furniture: Black Narcissus's Maddening Matte Paintings

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

In movies, if perhaps not in life, people can be driven mad by mountains. In films by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, they can be driven mad by paintings of mountains.

Black Narcissus is the story of a group of Anglican nuns who trek up to an abandoned cliffside palace in the Himalayas to establish a new convent. Deborah Kerr, cinema’s most consistent nun, is Sister Clodagh, the young mother superior. Her mission is doomed from the beginning, of course, though not necessarily because the locals reject their presence. Rather, it is the landscape that overwhelms their emotions and breaks their faith and their vows.

Powell and Pressburger did not shoot on location in India, however. The set was built at Pinewood Studios. [More...] 

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