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NEWS
Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024).
- Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez (2024) leads the Golden Globe film nominations with ten, including for Best Picture (Musical or Comedy), Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress. On its heels are Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024) with seven nominations and Edward Berger’s Conclave (2024) with six. The January 5 ceremony will be hosted by comedian Nikki Glaser.
- The year-end list season has begun in earnest. Check out Adam Nayman’s list of the top 10 films of the year at The Ringer, plus Bilge Ebiri’s and Alison Willmore’s respective rankings over at Vulture, which also hosts John Waters’s picks. Meanwhile, Sight and Sound and NME have shared their contributor-solicited lists as well.
- A new report finds that streamer revenues will grow three times faster than their subscription base over the next five years as many services continue to move to an ad-tiers model.
REMEMBERING
- Malcolm Le Grice has died at 84. The British avant-garde artist was a crucial member of London’s 1960s counter-cultural arts scene, having co-founded the London Film-Makers' Co-op workshop, an experimental cinema collective. Per the British Film Institute, he was “probably the most influential modernist filmmaker in British cinema,” whose work “explored the complex relationships between the filmmaking, projecting and viewing processes which constitute cinema as a medium.” His book Abstract Film and Beyond (1977) stands as an essential history of a certain tendency in avant-garde cinema. In an interview from this past summer, Le Grice discusses his artistic and political origins, all the way back to showing his family Popeye the Sailor cartoons backward: “It's one of the things about film, it can put a microscope on the time.” Of his own films, the best known is Berlin Horse (1970), an experiment with rephotography and image manipulation featuring one of Brian Eno’s early tape-loop recordings.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024).
- “It’s undeniable that the Trump era has seen a rise in glib ‘lib’ moralising – I certainly have no desire to see another Don’t Look Up – but a view of cinema that believes it can have no activist function is as ahistorical as it is, well, antisocial.” For ArtReview, Alex Wang argues against the “aesthetic turn” in contemporary cinema and advocates for an activist approach.
- “We really wanted the architecture of the space, with what was available to us illegally since our landlord never knew that we had made a space out of his basement, to be an architecture that allowed for conversation.” For Screen Slate, Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer interviews filmmakers and programmers Rebecca Barten and David Sherman about Total Mobile Home microCINEMA, the 1990s San Francisco microcinema that coined the term.
- “Will future generations of cinephiles watch Sátántangó and wonder why it reminds them of their childhood? Probably not, but this is the first Disney animal picture to spark such a thought.” For Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz profiles director Barry Jenkins during the production of Mufasa (2024) about his move from the physical to digital realm.
- “None of us are getting out of here alive. It’s so banal to have to say this, but one does have to say it, because there’s so much denial around it.” For the New York Times, David Marchese interviews Tilda Swinton about mortality, the art of activism, and her new film, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door (2024).
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944).
- New York, December 11 through 19: Film at Lincoln Center presents a retrospective of the influential, chameleonic filmmaker Robert Siodmak, including such landmark film noirs as Phantom Lady (1944), The Killers (1946), and Criss Cross (1949).
- Munich, December 13 through May 25: Haus der Kunst presents “Voices,” an exhibition by Philippe Parreno. In the announcement, the French artist promises “A cinema without end — / a film projected not on walls, / but within spaces, / across lands.”
- London, December 14 through 22: The Institute of Contemporary Arts presents “Jean-Luc Godard: Scénario(s),” an exhibition of the legendary filmmaker’s final two works, Scénarios and Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” (both 2024), the latter of which illuminates the thinking behind the former. The exhibition will be accompanied by a program of rarely screened works by Godard.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Mulher de Verdade (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1954).
- Through the end of December, the Locarno Film Festival presents the new 4K restoration of Alberto Cavalcanti's Mulher de Verdade (1954) free to stream worldwide. Reporting from this past summer’s festival, Julia Scrive-Loyer writes that the film “flawlessly strings together screwball comedy with social satire.”
- The Media City Film Festival presents its 27th virtual edition of contemporary moving-image work from December 9 through 30. The 70+ films in the lineup—including new work by Luis Arnías, Sky Hopinka, Ja’Tovia Gary, and Mona Hatoum—are likewise free to stream worldwide.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Ahead of John Waters’s annual holiday tour, Sub Pop Records has released his new seven-inch single, featuring a cheeky cover of The Singing Dogs’s “Jingle Bells” and a raunchy spoken word track, “It’s a Punk Rock Christmas.”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024).
- “Watching the proceedings from under hooded eyes, Cohn appears restless even when still—it is impossible to imagine him happy.” Mark Asch considers the various film representations of the American right-wing operative Roy Cohn, who has been played by James Woods, Ron Vawter, Al Pacino, and now Jeremy Strong.
- “Việt and Nam constitutes a timely intimation of a painful, but necessary, truth about our world: there are seldom ever originals, just echoes of the past.” Amanda Chen compares Trương Minh Quý’s new film to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s video work, finding in both echoes of the Vietnam War’s aftermath, as felt in the diaspora.
- “I came up with one simple maxim: a great idea beautifully executed.” Adrian Curry shares his favorite movie posters of the year.
- Our annual Cinephile Gift Guide includes, for your holiday shopping convenience, the year’s best film books, home-video releases, soundtracks, memorabilia, apparel, and so much more.
WISH LIST
Gross Fatigue (Camille Henrot, 2013).
- Mimesis Edizione has published Miriam De Rosa’s Notes on Desktop Cinema, an analysis of Camille Henrot’s video Grosse Fatigue (2013). It is the second volume of their EX Series, multilingual books devoted to experimental cinema.
- The University Press of Kentucky has published John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick, a biography of the filmmaker that “reveals the autobiographical grounding” of much of his work.