Yes No Maybe So: "Joker: Folie à Deux"

by Nick Taylor

Remember the fucking hubbub around Joker when it premiered at Venice back in 2019? Stephanie Zachareck fearing MRA riots? Lucrecia Martel giving it the Golden Lion? Leading the Oscar nominations with a whopping eleven citations, with Mark Friedberg’s incredible sets somehow left out in the cold? Winning Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix and Original Score for Hildur Guðnadóttir? Wild times!

Although Joker: Folie à Deux was first announced roughly two years ago, it feels as though the spectre of it has been haunting us for so much longer. At long last, the sequel is on its way, in just over two months. The first full-length trailer dropped less than 24 hours ago, and we here at The Film Experience are ready to dig in to whatever the hell is going on...

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Happy Halloween with Hercule Poirot

by Cláudio Alves

I don't know about you, but after the double whammy of Belfast and Death on the Nile, I was ready to give up on Kenneth Branagh as a director. Yet, like Michael Corleone famously said: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!"

Turns out that what Branagh and, more specifically, his Agatha Christie adaptations needed was a healthy shot of nonsense plus the spooky seasonings of horror. A Haunting in Venice, now streaming on Hulu, succeeds by untethering itself from literary fidelity, twisting Christie's Hallowe'en Party out of shape in pursuit of maximum entertainment. Though a sense of melancholy pervades, self-serious prestige is abandoned, or mayhap sacrificed at a witches' altar. And from its deadened carcass, Hercule Poirot emerges as the center of a ghostly storm, the skeptic anchor keeping this Hammer Horror resurgence from floating away on the Lido tide…

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Ranking this year's Oscar speeches

by Cláudio Alves

As we finish our Oscar celebrations and mourn the end of another Awards Season, let's explore this year's Academy Award speeches. Unlike past ceremonies, this one was poor in truly disastrous acceptance speeches. Perhaps people saw the mess of last year's Best Makeup winners and decided they would be prepared to step on stage and receive their little golden men with dignity and generosity towards the teams that got them to that dazzling podium. Whatever the reason, this was a good year for Oscar speeches and we honor them, from the most unmemorable to the god-tier achievements in public speaking.

We begin with the least impressive efforts of the night…

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Women and Best Original Score

by Travis Cragg

Hildur Guðnadóttir already has an Emmy and a Globe. Is an Oscar next?Watching Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir walking up to receive her Golden Globe for Joker was one of the more interesting moments of last weekend's ceremony. My streaming service in Australia suddenly decided to log me out just as the presenter came on stage, so I was cursing the world and rebooting!  Once the anxiety was over, and Hildur was walking up to accept her trophy,  it was time to reflect on a woman winning the equivalent Oscar. The Globe win for Score doesn't always transfer to an Oscar win (sometimes the winner isn't even nominated -- as with All is Lost and First Man in recent years) but could Guðnadóttir repeat?

Has a woman ever won the Oscar for Best Original Score before? Turns out it has happened, but only with double-category caveats…

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