“King Richard” Serves Up A Real Crowdpleaser

by Christopher James

Everyone has to start somewhere - even Venus and Serena Williams.Early on in King Richard, Will Smith’s Richard Williams drills his daughters - Venus and Serena - on serving. Their goal, to hit a precise spot on the court where a stack of balls lie. Even as pre-teens, they are able to achieve remarkable precision with their shots. This drill is an apt metaphor for Reinaldo Marcus Green’s latest film, King Richard. It always hits the spot on the court, just as you expected it to.

King Richard never subverts the tropes of the inspirational sports movie, it just tries to do them better. This doesn’t make it a daring or interesting film, but the formula does work incredibly well...

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Middleburg: Crowd-pleasing with "King Richard" and "Belfast"

by Nathaniel R

The family watching "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" in BELFAST

The 9th annual Middleburg Film Festival wrapped up Sunday night but they programmed well so the joy lingers. The two events that always have after parties, Opening Night and Saturday Centerpiece, were King Richard and Belfast respectively. In both cases you could feel the love in the room even before the booze began to flow. Since the Middleburg audience is a reasonably good proxy for the bulk of Oscar voters (mature, well to do, cultured, and with movie tastes that fall somewhere between critics and the general public) it's easy to imagine both films greeted just as warmly on Oscar nomination morning...

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Oscar Charts: Will "Best Actor" be Peter Dinklage vs Will Smith?

by Nathaniel R

Peter Dinklage in the 2019 stage production of Cyrano. Photo from Jeenah Moon for the New York Times

Jose Ferrer won the Oscar playing Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) and forty years later French movie star Gérard Depardieu was nominated for the same role. Thirty-one years later will Peter Dinklage prove lucky number three while having a go at the classic big-nosed role? About that big-nose, though. In the pre-COVID stage run, the production got people talking partially because it made significat alterations to the material, the most visible of which was the lack of that infamous nose. The thinking was that we all have things that make us insecure so the world-famous nose might be a stand-in for anything.

The other major alteration was that it was a musical with songs by The National. What will Joe Wright make of all this for the big screen?

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How Had I Never Seen..."Independence Day"?

by Cláudio Alves

Some of my recent choices for the "How Had I Never Seen" series may have leaned towards the esoteric. Probably most people don't wonder why or how they have never set eyes on Valley of the Dolls or Girlfriends. This time around, however, I've decided to fix a pretty deep lacuna in my movie-watching, one that's firmly in the mainstream rather than an arthouse curio. Today marks the 25th anniversary of Roland Emmerich's 1996 Oscar-winning mega-blockbuster Independence Day. To commemorate the date, I finally watched the flick that turned Will Smith into a star of the silver screen, redefined the effects-driven summer movie, and birthed a new era of Hollywood entertainment… 

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Showbiz History: Three celebrity weddings and a biopic suggestion

4 things that happened on this day, December 31st, in showbiz history

1992 Czechoslovakia is peacefully dissolved and the Czech Republic and Slovakia both emerge from the split. Which means, for our purposes here at TFE that they started all new Oscar submission histories ;) Czechoslovakia had had six Oscar nominations and two wins from 23 submissions the bulk of which were in Czech (though one of their winners, The Shop on Main Street was Slovakian). Interestingly enough just after the split in 1993 only Slovakia submitted to the Oscars while the Czech Republic took a year off. The Czech Repubic has since won one Oscar (Kolya) and had two additional nominations (Divided We Fall and Zelary) and a finalist (The Painted Bird last season). The Czech submission this year is Charlatan. Slovakia has yet to be nominated though they have a Holocaust drama this year, The Auschwitz Report... 

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