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Cate Blanchett is going for her third Oscar with “TÁR,” but before that, she’ll have a chance to capture her third Best Actress BAFTA Award. Should she do so, she’ll move up to second place on the all-time winners list in the category.

A three-time BAFTA champ, Blanchett has two Best Actress trophies for “Elizabeth” (1998) and “Blue Jasmine” (2013) and one for Best Supporting Actress for “The Aviator” (2004). In the lead category, she’s one of 11 with two victories. That list gets drastically smaller the higher you go. She’s looking to become just the fourth person with three Best Actress wins, one shy of Maggie Smith‘s record of four.

Blanchett would join Anne Bancroft, Audrey Hepburn and Simone Signoret as three-time champs — but their ledgers come with a caveat. Until the ceremony in 1969 when they were consolidated into Best Actress, the BAFTAs had two actress categories: Best...

During a three-hour discussion on a recent episode of “The Empire Film Podcast,” Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino revealed the existence of their makeshift quarantine movie club over the last 9 months. As Wright explained, “It’s nice. We’ve kept in touch in a sort of way that cinephiles do. It’s been one of the very few blessings of this [pandemic], the chance to disappear down a rabbit hole with the hours indoors that we have.” Tarantino added, “Edgar is more social than I am. It’s a big deal that I’ve been talking to him these past 9 months.”

A bulk of the film club was curated by none other than Martin Scorsese, who sent Wright a recommendation list of nearly 50 British films that Scorsese considers personal favorites. In the five months Wright spent in lockdown before resuming production on “Last Night in Soho” — and before he received the...

Someone save Judith Hearne, for she can’t save herself. Jack Clayton’s film of Brian Moore’s novel has stunning performances by Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins — but whew, for many of us its social cruelties will feel like traumatic emotional abuse. Not enough nasty people and clueless victims in your life? … this show will give you your fill.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1987 / Color / 1:75 widescreen / 116 min. / Street Date June 24, 2019 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99

Starring: Maggie Smith, Bob Hoskins, Wendy Hiller, Marie Kean, Ian McNeice, Alan Devlin, Rudi Davies, Prunella Scales.

Cinematography: Peter Hannan

Film Editor: Terry Rawlings

Original Music: Georges Delerue

Written by Peter Nelson from the novel by Brian Moore

Produced by Richard Johnson, Peter Nelson

Directed by Jack Clayton

Fine acting doesn’t get finer than that seen in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, a book adaptation...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook)

The Handmaiden is pure cinema — a tender, moving, utterly believable love story. It’s also a tense, unsettling, erotic masterpiece. There’s a palpable exhilaration that comes from watching this latest film from Park Chan-wook. From its four central performances and twisty script to the cinematography of Chung Chung-hoon and feverish, haunting score by Cho Young-wuk, The Handmaiden is crafted to take your breath away.

Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This April will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.

To sign up for a free two-week trial here.

Monday, April 3 The Chaos of Cool: A Tribute to Seijun Suzuki

In February, cinema lost an icon of excess, Seijun Suzuki, the Japanese master who took the art of the B movie to sublime new heights with his deliriously inventive approach to narrative and visual style. This series showcases seven of the New Wave renegade’s works from his career breakthrough in the sixties: Take Aim at the Police Van (1960), an off-kilter whodunit; Youth of the Beast (1963), an explosive yakuza thriller; Gate of Flesh (1964), a pulpy social critique; Story of a Prostitute (1965), a tragic romance; Tokyo Drifter...

Maggie Smith shines, Ben Mendelsohn impresses as a poker addict and Spike Lee shows his love of Michael Jackson

“For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like,” Maggie Smith trilled 47 years ago in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. It’s become Smith’s defining line, encapsulating her expert hauteur, yes, but also perfectly describing the cosy teatime fare she almost exclusively makes these days. For those who like that sort of thing, The Lady in the Van (Sony, 12) is most pleasing.

A droll adaptation of Alan Bennett’s memoir, the most challenging thing it does is get its leading lady out of her habitual pearls and into the grime-caked rags of Mary Shepherd, the well-bred tramp who camped out on Bennett’s driveway for the better part of 15 years. She’s good value too: drily irascible, as is her wont, but...

British star was known for performances in The Haunting and Tomb Raider among others.

Veteran British star Richard Johnson has died at the age of 87, his family has said.

Johnson was a distinguished stage and television actor whose screen career stretched over six decades.

He was under contract to MGM in the late 1950s, co-starring with Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen in Never So Few (1959).

Major roles followed in The Haunting (1963), The Amorous Adventures Of Moll Flanders (1965), opposite his second wife Kim Novak, Khartoum (1966) and Oedipus The King (1967).

Johnson was also active as a writer and producer and was a founding member of United British Artists, producing Turtle Diary (1985) and The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne (1987).

More recent film work included Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas (2008) and his final role in Radiator (2014), winner of the first Audience Award at the Glasgow Film Festival in March this year, which was attended...

We're getting to know The Film Experience community one-by-one. Today we're talking to Morgan Borthwick from New Zealand. We've never been but it's on our brains due to Jane Campion's stunning miniseries "Top of the Lake". Here's Morgan.

 

Hi, Morgan. Do you love Jane Campion? (Please note: There is only one correct answer to this question)

Morgan: Of course! She understands film is as much art as it is storytelling and I could rhapsodise all day about her many gifts.  As a director, I love what she does with her actresses, particularly Barbara Hershey who is beyond superlatives in Portrait of a Lady, Abby Cornish in Bright Star and Elizabeth Moss in Top of the Lake, making me forget Peggy of Mad Men ever existed. She should have two best director nominations by now at least, but that's a gripe for another time about the academy and their "we've nominated you once,...

A friend, who was perhaps not quite tactful enough to become the movie producer he wanted to be, once met the actress Kerry Fox, and told her that her work in Jane Campion's An Angel at My Table was the best female film performance he had ever seen, "Apart from Maggie Smith in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne."

While one might think that coming second in the whole of cinema history was still doing pretty well, and that there's no shame in coming second to Maggie Smith in anything, and that the addition of another name and title to the statement shows that my friend had really thought about it and wasn't just blowing smoke up the Fox ass, she apparently didn't look all that pleased. Perhaps she would prefer to be judged up against all actors, not just a female subset. But perhaps the problem was that...

The far-from prolific Jack Clayton has the right to be considered a great filmmaker purely on the basis of The Innocents, The Pumpkin Eater and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, but only the first of these is well-known, and the rest of his scattershot career shows little of the thematic consistency beloved of auteurists. His nature was to be interested in a wide range of things, and he didn't make enough movies to tie them all together into an artistic personality coherent enough to suit critics. But interested parties should check out Neil Sinyard's excellent study of the filmmaker.

The Disney Corporation was going through a somewhat incoherent spell itself in the early eighties, commissioning unusually sombre, bizarre, scary or adult movies which it then didn't know how to sell: Altman's Popeye, Carroll Ballard's Never Cry Wolf, Dragonslayer (in which the Disney Princess gets eaten by baby dragons), Tron,...