Monday, March 16, 2020 at 1:45PM 
Vanity Fair has the exclusive first photos from Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story. They are certainly colorful, in more ways than one, if your main concern about this remake was the usual grayish color palette of Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski.
Authenticity in casting is what differentiates this version, according to Spielberg.
Saturday, February 1, 2020 at 10:10AM Abe Fried-Tanzer reporting from Sundance
Any time a foreign film is truly successful, there seems to be almost instantaneous talks of either a remake or a TV series coming soon for American audiences. Parasite is considering the latter and last year at Sundance, After the Wedding was a hot ticket, adapted from the 2006 Danish film. There was some skepticism when it was announced that the uncomfortable Swedish comedy Force Majeure, nominated for a Golden Globe and well loved here at The Film Experience, was getting an American treatment, but surprise: this remake is worth the price of admission...
Thursday, October 10, 2019 at 4:24PM
• The Guardian - an excellent profile of Pedro Almodóvar by Xan Brooks
• /Film Daveed Diggs to play Sebastian in the live-action Little Mermaid. But Sebastian is a crab so this is probably not fully live-action but half and half style.
• Vulture - 15 essential Judy Garland performances. Solid list with some strong points made, though I think dead wrong about why Zellweger is awards worthy in Judy (as noted on the podcast I liked her performance quite a bit but what’s missing is exactly what’s cited here as the chief strength, the capturing of Judy’s once in a century kind of talent.
Friday, August 9, 2019 at 11:46PM This week at TFE we're celebrating the centennial of one of cinema’s most prolific and legendary producers, Dino De Laurentiis. Here's Nathaniel R with a film that made the producer even more globally famous.
Dino de Laurentiis with "a new star" Jessica Lange
It's easy to see the retro but continuing appeal of King Kong to filmmakers. The legendary Beauty & Beast story is always about the movies themselves. An actress is the damsel in distress, the plot catalyst character is a movie director, the supersized monster is the myth being made. Along the way the story intending to be told by the showbiz cast of characters radically changes but the movie still manages to be about putting on a show. It's just another kind of show altogether after they meet Kong. The story, or, more accurately, the need to reboot it over and over again, is a great metaphor for the amoral churning of Hollywood as Capitalistic Machine. In most versions of King Kong, you dispose of the talent just as the show ends. Death to Kong! (Long live New Kong!)
While De Laurentiis was not actually a director, he was enough of a character in showbiz to often feel like the man behind the curtain instead of the man calling the shots on set (Directed by who?). Such was the case with his remake of King Kong (1976)...
Thursday, July 25, 2019 at 10:15AM 
The refrain echoing through many of the negative reviews of Disney's new remake of The Lion King – and even a few of the not-as-enthusiastic positive reviews – has been that the film is "pointless." Which, yeah, it is: a scene-by-scene, line-by-line, and frequently shot-by-shot remake of the 1994 classic that is weaker on essentially every possible point of comparison. The only reason to watch the new film while the 1994 film exists is because the new one is in theaters and thus is bigger.
So let's not belabor that. Instead, let's try, as much as possible, to take the film on its on terms. Let's pretend, if we possibly can, that this is a brand new story told using cutting-edge technology, and freed from the shackles of memory and nostalgia. Sad to say, even if that might mean that The Lion King isn't pointless, it's still not very good...
