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Part of our continuing partnership with the online film journal cléo, which guest programs a film to watch on Mubi in the United States. In conjunction, we'll be hosting an exclusive article by one of their contributors. This month Mallory Andrews writes on Cecil B. DeMille's Joan the Woman (1916), now showing through December 15, 2015.It’s a bit of a shame that Cecil B. DeMille’s two-hour 1916 silent film will likely always be overshadowed by Carl Theodor Dreyer’s indelible The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). The universal praise for Dreyer’s intimate take on La Pucelle is well-earned and full of images that remain some of the most moving uses of close-ups in cinema. By contrast, Joan the Woman (being a typical DeMille joint) is concerned more with epic, operatic imagery. The climactic Battle of Orleans is teeming with detail, an elaborate scope that pushes at the boundaries of the square Academy ratio frame,...

"Dance, dance, feel it all around you Dance, dance, dance, Never thought love had a rainbow on it See the girl dance See the girl dance."- Neil Young, "Dance, Dance, Dance"***When I watched Katy Perry’s recent Super Bowl performance I got very excited. There was a lot of shrieking. So much so that my roommate, who had been diligently watching screeners of important art films one floor below, came up to see what was happening. A friend who was over to watch the game, who I often go to repertory movies with, later told another friend he had never seen me so excited. The third friend watching it with us, she’s a writer, was also excited. In her excitement she sent all of her twitter friends a picture. In my own excitement I sent yet a fourth friend a text message. ******My text message may have been sent off haphazardly,...

Everybody's favorite movie decade: Which ones are the best movies released in the 20th century's second decade? Best Film (Pictured above) Broken Blossoms: Barthelmess and Gish star as ill-fated lovers in D.W. Griffith’s romantic melodrama featuring interethnic love. Check These Out (Pictured below) Cabiria: is considered one of the major landmarks in motion picture history, having inspired the scope and visual grandeur of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Also of note, Pastrone's epic of ancient Rome introduced Maciste, a bulky hero who would be featured in countless movies in the ensuing decades. Best Actor (Pictured below) In the tragic The Italian, George Beban plays an Italian immigrant recently arrived in the United States (Click below for film review). Unfortunately, his American dream quickly becomes a horrendous nightmare of poverty and despair. Best Actress (Pictured below) The movies' super-vamp Theda Bara in A Fool There Was: A little...

James D'Arcy as King Edward VIII, Andrea Riseborough as Wallis Simpson in Madonna's W.E. Singers have been dabbling in movies with varying degrees of success for as long as feature films have been around. Opera star Geraldine Farrar became a movie star for Cecil B. DeMille in early silent-era productions such as Carmen (1915) and Joan the Woman (1916). Later on, there were Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Yves Montand, Elvis Presley, Charles Aznavour, Barbra Streisand, and the list goes on and on until we get to Madonna, whose sophomore directorial effort, W.E., has just premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival to generally negative reviews. W.E. tells two separate stories: That of Wally (Abbie Cornish), a married New Yorker who becomes enamored of a security guard (Oscar Isaac) at Sotheby's, and bits from the life of American divorcee Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) and her relationship...