A couple of weeks ago, The Cinema Guild announced that it had acquired US distribution rights to what, for me at any rate, remains the best new film of the year so far, Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse. TCG is planning a theatrical release for "this winter." Tarr, in the meantime, is heading to the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which opens on Wednesday, where he'll present what he still insists is his last film. What's more, he's "programmed a trio of little known (in the UK) masterpieces of Hungarian Cinema." Then it's straight to Novi Sad, where Cinema City (running Saturday through June 25) will present a retrospective of Tarr's work and host a Q&A with the director. Earlier: Berlinale roundup.
The lineup for Japan Cuts: The New York Festival of Contemporary Japanese Cinema is now complete. "32 new titles — the biggest line-up in the festival's history with (almost) nothing but premieres and one-day only shows — [will be] screening from July 7 to 22, including 10 co-presentations with the New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF)."
"It may seem hard to believe now, but there were awards given out in Hollywood before the Oscars came along," writes Susan King in the Los Angeles Times. "Nine years before the first Academy Awards were handed out in 1929, the movie fan publication Photoplay magazine created the first motion picture awards. Unlike the Oscars, which are voted on by the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Photoplay Magazine Medal of Honor winner was selected by readers. All the surviving winners of the medal of honor from 1920 to 1928 will be screened Monday evenings during the academy's Summer of Silents at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater." The series begins tonight with Frank Borzage's Humoresque (1920).
IN OTHER NEWS
"Laura Ziskin, a veteran film producer who helped break Hollywood's glass ceiling for women, has died. She was 61." Steven Zeitchik and Nicole Sperling in the LAT: "Best known for producing all the films in the Spider-Man franchise — including the upcoming release The Amazing Spider-Man — Ziskin had a profound effect on what contemporary moviegoers watch. In nearly three decades as a producer and studio executive, she made or oversaw a wide range of films, including the 1987 Cold War thriller No Way Out; the 1990 Richard Gere-Julia Roberts romantic comedy Pretty Woman; and 1997's James L Brooks's Oscar-contending dramedy As Good As It Gets."
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