Yes No Maybe So: "Mary & George"

by Nick Taylor

Hello you disgusting Royalists. As the final season of The Crown makes its way onto Netflix at a dignified pace, I can guess what some of you will be thinking as you watch it. “God, I hate having to look between the TV for  highly pedigreed British drama and my phone for high-quality artworks of men having sex. Who will finally, FINALLY give me both options at the same time!?!?” 

Worry not, dear reader, for a happy medium has slotted itself between these two pillars of your psychologically wrought Eiffel Tower. Mary & George, a miniseries based on the true story of Countess Mary Villiers molding her son George to suck and fuck his way to the graces of King James I of England, comes to Starz sometime in 2024. Created by playwright D.C. Moore and directed by Oliver Hermanus, the first trailer dropped earlier today, and we here at The Film Experience decided to give it the proper once-over it clearly deserves...

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Emmy FYC: Marielle Heller in "The Queen's Gambit"

by Cláudio Alves

As we all found out this past October Marielle Heller is a woman of many, perchance infinite, talents. Since 2015, Heller has been dazzling cinephiles everywhere with her work as a writer/director. The Diary of a Teenage Girl was one of the best American debuts of the decade. If possible, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood were even better, analyzing complicated real-life personalities with as much humanistic gentility as razor-sharp precision. All that, and we now know that Heller is also an amazing actress. Returning to her first vocation in splendorous fashion, Marielle Heller delivers the best performance in the popular Netflix awards juggernaut The Queen's Gambit…

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Lunchtime Poll: Which Lizzie would you rather be axe murdered by?

It will never fail to amuse us how Hollywood can rarely go more than, say, six months without announcing competing projects about the same topic. Today we hear news that Elizabeth Olsen (surely feeling the love from the WandaVision reception) will be playing axe murderer Candy Montgomery in an HBO miniseries called Love and Death based on the non-fiction book "Evidence of Love: True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs". This book was previously adapted into a TV movie A Killing in a Small Town which won Barbara Hershey the Golden Globe in the 1990s. But this miniseries is NOT the same project as the previously announced Candy which is based on the same crime with Elisabeth Moss headlining. But since we haven't heard a peep about the Moss project in several months, maybe that one isn't happening after all. 

Nevertheless it all begs the question: Which Lizzie would you rather be axe murdered by?

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Emmy Review: Limited Series

by Juan Carlos

"And the Emmy goes to Watchmen."

Truth be told, it is hard to see a scenario where any other nominee overtakes HBO's series, which is the most nominated this year. The second-most nominated limited series Hollywood (with 11 nominations) was not even nominated in this, the top category. All of the other shows have a crucial nomination missing. Watchmen’s nomination haul demonstrates overwhelming support. Interesting to note that all of the nominees in this category are female-driven stories. Here is one last take on the contenders for limited series…..

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Almost There: Liv Ullmann in "Scenes from a Marriage"

by Cláudio Alves

I confess that, when I first came up with the idea for this week's Almost There write-up, I didn't expect its subject to be so weirdly topical. First up, there's the actual raison d'être for the piece, which is the Criterion Channel's new "Marriage Stories" collection, in which Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage is featured. Then there's the whole Hamilton kerfuffle, which caused controversy over the Academy's definition of what is and isn't cinema or what should and shouldn't be eligible for the Oscars (two importantly different questions). This is relevant because the ineligibility of Bergman's film caused a major ruckus back in 1974 and even prompted a couple of notorious open letters (another topical subject, unfortunately). Finally, we have the recent news that the television cut of Scenes from a Marriage is going to be remade by HBO with Michelle Williams and Oscar Isaac in the leading roles. 

We'll return to some of those matters later on, but, for now, let's concentrate on Liv Ullmann's masterful performance as Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage…

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