Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.
NEWS
Norma Rae (Martin Ritt, 1979).
- The Academy Foundation Workers Union has approved its first contract, including structured raises, extended leave time, increased job security, and other benefits.
- Just weeks after the conclusion of the festival, Hot Docs has announced it will lay off staff and temporarily shutter its year-round cinema in Toronto.
- The Hollywood Commission, chaired by Anita Hill, has introduced an online tool to report workplace abuse in the American motion-picture industry.
- The organizing wave in New York cinemas continues as the Cinema Village union becomes official.
IN PRODUCTION
- In his signature direct-oblique style, David Lynch is teasing “something…for you to see and hear,” which “will be coming along” on June 5.
REMEMBERING
Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004).
- Morgan Spurlock has died at 53. The filmmaker followed his debut feature, Super Size Me (2004), with Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? (2008) and other gonzo documentary projects for film and television.
- Richard M. Sherman has died at 95. As in-house songwriters for Disney, he and his late brother, Robert B. Sherman, were responsible for the music of Mary Poppins (1964), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and even that Disneyland old-mill earworm “It’s a Small World.”
- Darryl Hickman has died at 92. After roles in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), and many others, the former child actor briefly entered a monastery before rejoining show business as an executive.
- Richard Foronjy has died at 86. The actor—known for such films as Serpico (1973), Repo Man (1984), Midnight Run (1988), and Once Upon a Time in America (1984)—had previously served eight and a half years in Sing Sing and Attica prisons. “I was especially good at playing cops,” he once said, “no doubt because I got to know them so well when they were busting me every other week.”
RECOMMENDED READING
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller, 1985).
- “If that first film was warning…the newer pictures feel not so much prescient as present: sado-comic visions of our own maddening, resource-starved world.” For Wired, John Semley considers the increasingly urgent climate-fiction of George Miller’s Mad Max franchise.
- “At times, it felt like being at a frantic, crazy party that you could never leave.” On his Substack, Hanif Kureishi writes about his experience on film festival juries, at Venice in 1992 with a “benign and charming” Dennis Hopper, and in Cannes in 2009, where Asia Argento and Robin Wright managed their “turbulent personal lives…from an underground bunker on the French Riviera.”
- “The West’s general approach towards Indian cinema is laced with an inability to know how to juggle the diversity of cultures and languages within the country.” For the British Film Institute, Soham Gadre queries the 30-year gap between Indian main competition entrants at Cannes.
- “I remember calling Spike up after we made the deal, and I said I’d changed my mind, I don’t want you to do it, but he said, ‘Too bad, it’s too late.’” For IndieWire, Sam Moore conducts an oral history of Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994), a family affair.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Den Muso (Souleymane Cissé, 1975).
- London, May 29 through July 31: BFI Southbank, the Garden Cinema, and Tate Modern present “Tigritudes,” a program initiated by filmmakers Dyana Gaye and Valérie Osouf as “a subjective, chronological anthology of Pan-African cinema” from 1956 to present.
- Los Angeles, June 1 through 7: The American Cinematheque presents the third edition of Bleak Week, celebrating “a cinema of despair in pursuit of unpleasant truths and raw empathy,” after which the program will travel to New York.
- New York, June 7 through 21: Museum of the Moving Image presents a twelve-film retrospective of Agnieszka Holland ahead of the theatrical premiere of Green Border (2023).
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
A Woman Crying in Spring (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933).
- “What remains of Shimizu’s films for Shochiku reveals an artist embedded within the studio system, using its resources and toolkit to experiment with form, and constructing social portraits open to the complexities and tensions of a society in flux.” Ruairí McCann looks at two films by Hiroshi Shimizu from 1933, as the director made the transition from silence to sound.
- “I went to a dentist’s house, which was full of VHS tapes that he had recorded in the ’80s from Argentine television. His archive was incredible.” Rodrigo Moreno shares five inspirations for The Delinquents (2023), his existential bank heist caper.
- “I walked around New York City reading light in my free time. And that’s when I learned that I needed to trust my eyes.” Paul Attard speaks with Ernie Gehr about over fifty years in the avant-garde of cinema.
- “It’s a movie that dares to leave threads dangling and doors ajar, allowing certain images and ideas to scuttle into your subconscious.” Adam Nayman considers Red Rooms (2023), Pascal Plante’s Quebecois courtroom thriller.
- “No one likes films about filmmaking more than film people.” In his dispatch from Cannes, Daniel Kasman focuses on Quentin Dupiex’s latest and Jean-Luc Godard’s last.
- “I don’t come to Cannes for confirmation, but for the pleasure of discovery.” Also writing from the festival, Leonardo Goi covers new films by Tyler Taormina, Carson Lund, India Donaldson, Truong Minh Qúy, and Payal Kapadia.
- Cannes coverage continues with capsules from the Croisette by critics, filmmakers, and programmers.
EXTRAS
- Applications are now open for Critics Campus, a four-day workshop for emerging film critics organized by Notebook’s own Leonardo Goi, to be held at the Golden Apricot International Film Festival in Yerevan, Armenia, July 7 through 14. The deadline to apply is June 3 at noon AMT.