How had I never seen... "Z" (1969)
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by Mark Brinkerhoff
![](/storage/1960s/z-poster.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1571775231251)
The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
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by Mark Brinkerhoff
In this new series, members of Team Film Experience watch and share their reactions to classic films they’ve never seen.
by Lynn Lee
The 1970s may have been a great era for cinema, but they were a pretty lousy time for faith in the great American experiment. Between the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, the Church Committee reports, and of course Watergate, there were seemingly endless reasons to suspect the U.S. government and other institutions meant to serve and protect the public were instead covering up all manner of malfeasance—and that they might be watching you if they thought you were a threat. This generalized paranoia found fertile ground in Hollywood, leading to a spate of conspiracy thrillers of varying quality and goofiness.
Until last month, the only one of these films I’d seen was All the President’s Men (unless you count Chinatown and Network, which I’d argue you could). But something about the social and political tensions of today made these movies seem especially current again. So it seemed like a good occasion to watch two of the most famous examples of the genre: Three Days of the Condor (1975) and A Parallax View (1974)...
by Anna
Twenty-five years, a new British filmmaker made a dark splash at Cannes. Danny Boyle’s directorial debut Shallow Grave, which would become a significant sleeper success in 1995, opens with flatmates David (Christopher Eccleston), Juliet (Kerry Fox) and Alex (Ewan McGregor) looking for a new boarder (and subsequently trolling the prospective candidates). They settle on Hugo (Keith Allen) but he dies from a drug overdose within hours of moving in. Then the trio find a suitcase full of money under Hugo’s bed, and that’s where the plot (and the meaning behind the film’s title) really kicks off.
Roughly a decade of award-winning films from the likes of Stephen Frears and David Attenborough, Boyle came and turned British cinema as a whole on its ear...
by Nathaniel R
Have you heard that news that Annette Bening and Michelle Pfeiffer have signed on as the leading ladies of a new feature film? If you've heard that news than you'll understand that I, Nathaniel, am typing this from heaven as I must have died and gone there for this to be true. Last thing I remember I was on a plane back to NYC (more on where I've been shortly) and then I was dead. Death by actressexuality. What a way to go.
The future film what done me in is called Turn of Mind and it's based on the novel of the same name by Alice LaPlante. Gideon Raff (best known for creating the Israeli series that TV's Homeland is based on) will be directing the thriller with Doug Wright (Quills) doing the screenplay. Annette Bening plays Dr Jennifer White, a retiree suffering from Alzheimers and suddenly accused of killing her longtime best friend Amanda (Michelle Pfeiffer) and unable to remember whether she actually committed the crime...
Guest contributor Tony Ruggio reporting from SXSW
Between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five years-old I witnessed what they would call the 11:11 “phenomenon.” Essentially, I saw a three or four-number combination of 1 in all walks of life. I saw it on television, often the last four of a Crash Bandicoot lawyer’s telephone number. I saw it during lunch time, the split-second moment a microwave hit that magic number. Most of all, I saw it on a clock, at least once a day every day. The paranoid and pretty rad among us consider this phenomenon many things: good luck, a sign from God, a glitch in the Matrix, a pang of the end times, or even a calling to those chosen to effect change and save the world from itself. Jordan Peele must have been a “witness” himself or simply heard about it and did his research, because Us is littered with references to this numeral phenomenon and the conspiracy theories that have sprung of it. More traditional horror than Get Out, and a better film too, Us gets hung up on making a big statement, but ends up making a great horror film regardless.
This might be sacrilegious to those already devoted to Peele: Get Out is a good film, one whose merits lay more in writing than in directing. Silly folks label it a thriller, denying it “horror” status. Even if you grant that Get Out was not a horror film in concept, it's definitely a horror film in execution. Therefore, I knocked it at the time for not being scary enough. With Us, Peele is firing on all scary-movie cylinders, and doing so with a wider array of tools at his disposal, chief of all his confidence...