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NEWS
- The Cannes Film Festival has announced its official poster, a tribute to the late Agnès Varda. The poster depicts Varda on the set of her very first feature, La pointe courte (1955).
- We are saddened by the news that the brilliant Swedish actress Bibi Andersson died at the age of 83. Best known for her remarkable turns in The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and Persona, Ronald Bergan provides a thorough obituary of the timeless artist for The Guardian.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The first teaser for J.J. Abrams conclusion to the new Star Wars trilogy, Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker. We published an extensive 5-part dialogue conducted last year that wrestles with George Lucas's much contested prequels.
- Kino Lorber's trailer for the re-release of Frank Simon's The Queen (1968), a documentary about the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Contest, a drag queen beauty pageant. As Kino Lorber states, the documentary far precedes later works about drag, like Paris is Burning and RuPaul's Drag Race.
- Zhang Yimou's Shadow finally arrives in U.S. theaters this May. The latest trailer for the film provides a glimpse into its greyscale battlefield of metal umbrellas and spears. Read our review of Shadow here.
- A preview of the forthcoming program of Kinet Media, a "virtual studio" for avant-garde cinema. The program, available to stream for free beginning tomorrow, features films by Alexandre Galmard, Angelina Battais, Isaac Goes, Michelle Yoon, Miguel Mantecon, and Jeremy Moss.
RECOMMENDED READING
Jordan Peele's Us.
- Film Comment's newest column, "Feeling Seen," focuses on personal reflections on cinema, the first of which is a dialogue between critics K. Austin Collins and Devika Girish about Jordan Peele's Us.
- On the occasion of an ongoing retrospective in New York, Beatrice Loayza considers the witchy films of Nelly Kaplan, and the auteur's complicated relationship to feminism.
- Durga Chew-Bose approaches Claire Denis's High Life through an arrangement of connections, from Paper Moon (1973) and Paris, Texas (1984) to a personal encounter with her father. Over at the New York Times, Denis speaks with Barry Jenkins, discussing the anxieties of being a young filmmaker and learning self-expression.
- For Film Quarterly, Meheli Sen, Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Monika Mehta, and Anupama Kapse offer their take on the recent Bollywood anthology film Lust Stories, which has garnered controversy for its frank depiction of sexuality and centering of women's experiences.
Keanu Reeves. Photo by Daniel Jackson.
- The prolific Yuen Woo-ping discusses his latest, Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy, which marks his fifth decade of martial arts filmmaking.
- Mariam Ghani's documentary What We Left Unfinished gathers the unfinished films and the stories of their stifled production under communist rule in Afghanistan, from 1978 to 1991. Dan Schindel's review reflects upon the film as a "quasi-historical document" of a long-discarded mirror.
- "He's determined to act like a normal person, [...] and it's helped him pull off the nearly impossible feat of remaining an enigmatic cult figure despite having been an A-list actor for decades." For GQ, Alex Pappademas profiles Keanu Reeves, punctuated with stunning black and white photographs of the actor by Daniel Jackson.
- At Hazlitt, Alexandra Molotkow traces the genesis of Bob Fosse's ill-fated final film Star 80, and his troubled yet always impassioned personal and artistic lives.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- What is "a Claire Denis film"? Darren Hughes examines how the established idea of the High Life director's oeuvre is often insufficient in fully describing the changes and shifts throughout her career.
- Caden M. Gardener's review of Joel Potrykus's Relaxer pairs the film with Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, examining how both works favor outsiders disconnected from modern life.
- Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) is showing on MUBI from April 15 – May 14, 2019 as part of the series A Straub-Huillet Retrospective. Christopher Small provides a guide to the film, from its budget to its "barrage of visual and aural information."