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NEWS
Above: Francis Ford Coppola for Wall Street Journal. (Photographed by Austin Hargrave)
- In a new interview with Deadline, Francis Ford Coppola has announced that he's starting to assemble a cast and prepare financing for his long-gestating passion project, the epic film Megalopolis. "I’m still willing to do the dream picture, even if I have to put up my own money, and I am capable of putting up $100 million if I have to here."
- Hou Hsiao-hsien and Lee Kang-sheng are currently attached to Twisted Strings, a TV anthology series written and directed by Huang Xi. Hou will be the executive producer of the series, while Lee will star in a role that is "like nothing he had ever portrayed before."
- Kaycee Moore, the star of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, has died. Throughout her career, Moore also starred in Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts and Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Above: The Black Film Archive.
- Founded by Maya Cade, the Black Film Archive is an essential online resource that "showcases Black films made from 1915 to 1979 currently streaming."
- A chilling teaser for Jane Campion's Venice competition title The Power of the Dog. Based on the novel by Thomas Savage, the film stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons as two rancher brothers torn apart by the arrival of the younger brother's wife, played by Kristen Dunst.
- NEON's teaser trailer for Pablo Larraín's Spencer shows Kristen Stewart as an uneasy and overwhelmed Princess Diana, accompanied by a children's choir singing Lou Reed's "Perfect Day." Spencer will premiere in-competition at the Venice Film Festival September 3.
- The trailer for the 59th edition of the Viennale is an "an elegy to time and life" by Terence Davies.
- AppleTV+ has released the official trailer for Todd Haynes' documentary The Velvet Underground, which includes previously unreleased footage of the band. The film will be released on AppleTv+ October 15.
- Variety has the exclusive trailer for Helena Girón and Samuel M. Delgado's feature debut They Carry Death, which premieres at Venice and will compete at San Sebastian. Inspired by a 2004 essay by feminist scholar Silvia Federici and set in 1492, They Carry Death follows three men from the crew of Christopher Columbus, and a woman who tries to save her dying sister. Girón and Delgado's short, Neither God nor Santa Maria, played on MUBI in 2016.
- For GQ, the one and only Tony Leung (who stars as the villain in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) walks us through the process and story behind his most iconic roles in films like Chungking Express, Hard Boiled, Hero, and Lust, Caution.
- A brand new restoration of Francis Ford Coppola's The Outsiders, entitled The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, will be released October 15. In Coppola fashion, this new version is the director's preferred iteration, and it includes 22 minutes of extra footage and new music.
- A trailer for the Luc Moullet retrospective at La Cinémathèque française!
- A trailer for Julie Delpy's first TV series, On the Verge, which arrives to Netflix September 7. Delpy directs and stars in the series as a French chef who struggles to balance motherhood, marriage, and work.
- At the Maysles Documentary Center's virtual cinema, you can now watch the films programmed in the ongoing series Abolition Now! 50 Years of the Attica Prison Uprising. Co-presented with Third World Newsreel, the series features films that "depict the prison as a set of interlocking systems used to subjugate people, extract value, and naturalize racial violence."
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Tony Leung in Shang-chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
- In a conversation with novelist Alexander Chee for GQ, Tony Leung reflects upon his solitary childhood, his preference for villainous roles, and his entry into Hollywood with the Marvel film Shang-chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
- "You come into the world soaked with guilt and you just get guiltier.” In a new interview with Indiewire, Paul Schrader discusses using Facebook to track down soldiers and working with comedic actors like Tiffany Haddish for his new film The Card Counter.
- For the New Yorker, Dennis Zhou visits Tsai Ming-Liang in the mountains of Taiwan for a conversation on his life with Lee Kang-sheng, the paintings he's completed during the pandemic, and his frustrations with commercial cinema.
- Beatrice Loayza investigates the imperfect legacy of Romeo Must Die, which stars Aaliyah and Jet Li in a blinkered interracial romance and a convergence of hip-hop and martial arts.
Above: Diego Luna, Gael García Bernal, and Maribel Verdú in Y Tu Mamá También (2001).
- The stars of Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También reflect on the bold sexual openness of the film and its resonance, twenty years later.
- In an interview with Nicolas Rapold for Screen Slate, Amalia Ulman describes her collaboration with her mother and the representation of poverty and art in her new film El Planeta.
- Film Desk Books has published The World of Jia Zhangke by Jean-Michel Frodon, an expansive book that covers each of Jia's films and includes interviews with the filmmaker, as well as actor Zhao Tao, and other main collaborators.
- You can also pre-order Film Desk Book's upcoming re-publication of Amos Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art, in which hundreds of errors have now been corrected.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- A journey into the soulful sonic world of Takeshi Kitano, presented by NTS' Sounds on Screen series.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Mariana Queen Nwabasili writes on the circular structure of Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah’s film Public Toilet Africa, which investigates the exploitation of the African image.
- In a new video essay, Michaela Popescu takes a meditative look at how Hou Hsiao-hsien portrays women, with a focus on their labor, throughout his filmography.
- For the Deuce Notebook, co-founder of the New York Asian Film Festival, Grady Hendrix discusses two 1981 releases from Hong Kong, Mad Monkey Kung Fu and The Mystery of Chess Boxing.
- Luke Goodsell's Notebook Primer on pop fictions is an exploration of cinema's relationship to popular music and how the shape-shifting genre has progressed throughout the decades.
- Patrick Preziosi reflects on Matias Piñeiro's Isabella and the foundational classicism of Piñeiro's last decade of films.
- Ruairi McCann takes a sprawling look at Vidor's American opus Our Daily Bread and how Vidor's own politics informed the film.