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NEWS
Chicken Run (Nick Park and Peter Lord, 2000).
- After earlier claims that they were “not in jeopardy,” the 29-location Landmark Theatre chain now faces foreclosure, though IndieWire reports that may not be such a bad thing.
- After releasing a trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis that included phony, apparently AI-generated pull quotes attributed to real film critics, Lionsgate has issued an apology and ceremonially fired a marketing consultant.
- The fast-food chain Chick-Fil-A plans to launch a streaming service, which will apparently include game shows and reality programming.
FESTIVALS
- Ahead of its premiere this weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival, we are pleased to share the first poster for Sofia Bohdanowicz's Measures for a Funeral (2024), designed by Charlotte Gosch of studio other types.
DEVELOPING
- Jeremy O. Harris and Charli XCX have co-written a screenplay for a film in which she will star, directed by Pete Ohs, currently in production in Poland.
REMEMBERING
Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968).
- Gena Rowlands has died at 94. The American actress frequently worked with her husband, John Cassavetes, in such films as Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and Opening Night (1977), and with their son, Nick Cassavetes, in Unhook the Stars (1996), She’s So Lovely (1997), and The Notebook (2004). Of her work with the former, Richard Brody writes that the two “seem almost to be meeting at the surface of the image, yielding a sense of shared risk, shared vulnerability, and equality.”
- Alain Delon has died at 88. The French actor worked with many of the foremost European directors of his time, starring in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Michelangelo Antonioni’s L'Eclisse (1962), Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967), Jacques Deray’s La Piscine (1969), and Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein (1976), among many others. On the occasion of a retrospective of his work in New York this spring, Manohla Dargis wrote that, like those of James Dean, Delon’s “looks create a strange disturbance in the air. They don’t simply attract your attention, they command and trouble your gaze.”
- James Darren has died at 88. The American actor is best known for the part of Moondoggie in Gidget (1959), though he also had success as a pop singer and later took television roles in The Time Tunnel (1966–67), T. J. Hooker (1983–86), and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1998–99).
RECOMMENDED READING
- “I felt guilty for laughing; I questioned my guilt.” For The New Republic, Benjamin Charles Germain Lee reviews footage from Jerry Lewis’s unreleased The Day the Clown Cried (1972), a comedy set in Auschwitz, which has finally become accessible to the public via the Library of Congress.
- “On some level, I wanted her to get help, because you grow to love these characters and look after and protect them.” For Vanity Fair, Chris Murphy interviews Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the star of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths (2024).
- “He’s if Zero Mostel ate Jack Benny ate Jerry Lewis — crazy, over-the-top, but there’s an elegance about him.” For the New York Times, Esther Zuckerman takes stock of Richard Kind by way of the impressions of his friends and colleagues—including Michael J. Fox, quoted above.
- “While there has been no talk of a Seventh Generation, the culture of descent – of Chinese cinema as a site of baton-passing – has remained strong.” For New Left Review’s Sidecar, Leo Robson considers the resonances and frictions between the Fifth and Sixth Generations of Chinese filmmaking, and the difficulty of naming their successors.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Upside Down (Faith Hubley, 1991).
- New York, through October 31: The Museum of Modern Art presents “Family—A Faith Hubley Centennial,” a 14-program retrospective of the acclaimed experimental animator.
- London, September 7 through November 3: LUX presents “in the house of names,” an exhibition by Sulaïman Majali featuring the titular phone-camera film, in which “more than its technological application, the device becomes poetic, cinematic and literary.”
- New York, September 6 through 15: Film at Lincoln Center presents “Isso é Brasil: Cinema According to L.C. Barreto Productions,” a 13-film retrospective of the Brazilian production company including the premieres of many digital restorations.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The acclaimed video essay account Every Frame a Painting has released its first installment in nearly eight years, a recommendation of the sustained two-shot.
- Bleecker Street has shared a trailer for Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths (2024), premiering Friday at the Toronto International Film Festival.
- Nikkatsu has shared a trailer for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud (2024), also screening at TIFF this week, which our own Leonardo Goi calls “a work that both distills some of the director’s motifs and heralds intriguing departures.”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Crossing (Levan Akin, 2024).
- “I often feel like a sleepwalker at a film festival, like a conduit for these films to move through me.” The first two correspondence pieces from the 2024 Locarno Critics Academy are online, with a third forthcoming. In the first, Pierre Jendrysiak, Cici Peng, and Julia Scrive-Loyer respond to the corporal experience of filmgoing. In the next, Leonard Krähmer, Lucía Requejo, and Katarina Docalovich look at contemporary offerings by the light of the festival’s Columbia Pictures retrospective.
- “Akin spares us the ubiquitous drone shots, thank God, and the city’s historic wonders—the fabled palaces and hammams—are mercifully left untouched.” Kaya Genç delves into Levan Akin’s representation in Crossing (2024) of Istanbul and some of its most marginalized communities: trans people, immigrants, and street children.
- “If the catastrophe has started, then maybe the best we can hope is for cinema to turn into a kind of time machine.” In his first dispatch from the Venice Film Festival, Leonardo Goi finds the strongest arguments for cinema’s power in some of the most fatalistic works.