Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
- This year the Directors' Fortnight (Quinzaine des réalisateurs) in Cannes is celebrating its 50th anniversery. The poster for this year's festival uses a photo by William Klein, whose film The Pan-African Festival of Algiers was in the 1971 edition.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The trailer for Paul Schrader's fabulous new film First Reformed. Our critics raved about it (here and here) last year from the Toronto International Film Festival.
RECOMMENDED READING
- The last interview Hollywood filmmaker Nicolas Ray (Johnny Guitar) recorded was in 1979 with Sarah Fatima Parsons and Kathryn Bigelow. The Italian film magazine La Furia Umana has the full text in English.
- With last week's release of Ready Player One getting all fans of Steven Spielberg in a tizzy, the A.V. Club has run a compendium of the best set pieces of the director's career.
- The Courtisane festival in Belgium has published online and for free its monograph devoted to Chinese documentarian Wang Bing.
- Actor Burt Reynolds was recently fêted with a retrospective at New York's Metrograph and is the subject of a new documentary, The Last Movie Star. That film's distributor, A24, has interviewed the legend—and it's damn fun.
- Film Comment talked to Filipino auteur Lav Diaz about his new film, the deeply political musical Season of the Devil.
- Farran Smith Nehme has paid homage to actress Stéphane Audran, who died last week:
Catherine Deneuve is often cited as the epitome of cool French beauty, but Audran, who died last week at the age of 85, had an equal claim to that title, with her sculpted face, extraordinary eyes, and chicly slender figure.
- INTO magazine goes into the details and controversy surrounding the possibility of adapting Leslie Feinberg's trailblazing novel about a gender non-conforming person, Stone Butch Blues, into a movie, despite the author's expressed lack of permission.
- Interview is running two delightful conversations, one between Will Ferrell and Joaquin Phoenix, and the other featuring Al Pacino in conversation with, variously, Jessica Chastain and directors Christopher Nolan, Mike Newell, and Michael Radford.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Cult favorite poster designer Midnight Marauder gave us his top ten favorite posters.
- Part 1 of an overview of director Douglas Sirk's career at Universal-International Studio, where he made his best and most famous work.
- With MUBI Release Lover for a Day now showing in the United States, we have a Close-Up on Philippe Garrel's latest film.
- Finally, an ode to actor Lee Marvin:
He was an enigmatic tough guy, as emotive as a six-foot fist, labile, his facial features clenched like four fingers and a thumb, and behind that stony facade something seemed to seethe. He wielded a weapon deftly, as if it was an organic appendage, yet he seemed to get no pleasure from using it. Violence for Marvin was an unfortunate inevitability, one he for which was exceedingly qualified.
EXTRAS
- New images—no doubt publicity photographs—from Claire Denis's new film, High Life, a sci-fi starring Robert Pattison and Juliette Binoche.
- A Kickstarter has been launched to fund an English edition of the 1937 autobiography of none other than Georges Méliès!