South Korean Film Awards & the Oscar Race

by Nathaniel R

THE UGLY... one of 19 films competing to become the Oscar submission

Since we've just starting hearing about Oscar submission decisions from the 100+ countries that Oscar invites to participate each year, let's talk about a country that wisely invested in their own arts, with both deregulation and regulation tactics (reducing government censorship whilst protecting home-grown cinema from Hollywood dominance via screen quotas) for the past couple of decades. The results have been impressive and South Korean entertainment is big in multiple countries now, including the US. While their cinema has been popular and lauded for some time, the American Oscars haven’t quite come around, with the sole exception of Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite (2019). It helped that Parasite had a) absolutely exquisite timing of festivals-to-theater-to-awards pipeline and b) was easy to spot as an instant classic / masterpiece. The former is hard (though not impossible) to manage and the latter is exceedingly rare! 

We suspect that Oscar’s resistance to South Korean cinema has to do with the Academy's general genre-aversion...

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Turkey, Czech Republic, and Germany kick off the Best International Feature Film race

by Nathaniel R

We wondered which country would be the early bird this year and that distinction goes to Turkey. Since the submissions are due by October 1, the process in many countries is already well under way and the announcements typically come fast and furious from mid-August through September.

TURKEY 
Turkey has selected last year's Venice Horizons Jury prize winner One of Those Days When Hemme Dies to represent them at the Oscars. The film is the directorial debut of Murat Firatoglu who wrote, produced and stars in the film as a laborer on a tomato farm who decides to kill his boss (the titular character, Hemme) due to unpaid wages...

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Wes Anderson Ranked: Part One - Travelogues

by Cláudio Alves

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME starts streaming on Peacock next Friday, July 25.

Have you seen The Phoenician Scheme already? Wes Anderson's 12th feature film went straight from its Cannes Competition premiere to a worldwide theatrical release, before making its way to digital. The film arrives ready to delight those who've kept faithful to the director's vision and enrage the many who already loathe his style. It's the kind of project that's unlikely to change anyone's mind about the auteur, perpetuating the same strategies he's been developing from the very start. But it's also the sort of thing that inspires a retrospective look at the Texan's filmography, tracing how one goes from Bottle Rocket to these latter confections. There's nobody like him working today. Not on such a scale, at least. Not in Hollywood, where such formalism is a common sacrificial lamb at the altar of conventional appeal.

But, because we love list-making at The Film Experience, this retrospective shall take the form of a personal ranking, divided into three parts (similar to the Hayao Miyazaki one, though less extensive). Hopefully, you'll be on board as I try to explain what each of these pictures means to me and how I've come to fall in love with the cinema of Wes Anderson…

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Halfway Mark Pt 3 (Finale): Twenty-Five Favorite Performances (Continued)

by Nathaniel R

Olivia Colman in PADDINGTON IN PERU

CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POSTS
In part one we looked at favourite films and favourite craft achievements from January through June-ish releases. In part two we moved to the beautiful people to list 25 performances we adored in one way or another. The first dozen plus included Dakota Johnson as a conflicted matchmaker, Jack O'Connell as an Irish vampire, and Brad Pitt as a race-car driver.

Let's wrap things up now with another dozen actors including two film-stealing Oscar winners, two leading men still waiting on their first Oscar nod, and a former superhero playing against type.We'll rejoin that 'favs of the year' (thus far) list in progress with three fast-rising stars...

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Halfway Mark Pt 2: Fav Performances of 2025 (thus far)...

by Nathaniel R

Florence Pugh as "Yelena" in THUNDERBOLTS*

Favorite does not always equal "Best" but it's close enough for list-mania purposes! To close out the celebration of the best of approximate first half of the cinematic year (to be precise films that opened between January 1 and July 11 in the US), a shout-out to scene stealers, charismatic leads, and foundational supporting players. There's even a couple of day players in the mix here who made their tiny parts feel essential in one way or another. Herewith a non-definitive list of 25 performances that did it for this moviegoer from the first six months of screenings in 2025. (The numbers: I screened 41 new films in that time span and the 25 stand-outs ended up coming from 19 of those). 

I hope you'll share some of your favourite recent star turns in the comments. These twenty-five performances, presented in two parts (otherwise it would take way too long to post),  are in alpha order because this exercize is like comparing apples to oranges before sizing them up against mushrooms and succotash and dividing them by airplanes and railroads if you catch my nonsensical impossible drift. Ready? Let's go... 

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