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NEWS
Above: M. Night Shyamalan on the set of Old (2021).
- Berlinale has announced that the one and only M. Night Shyamalan will serve as the Jury President for the festival's 2022 edition. In a statement, Shyamalan said: "I have always felt like an independent filmmaker within the system of Hollywood. It is exactly those things in us that are different and unorthodox that define our voice. I have tried to maintain these things in myself and cheer others on to protect those aspects in their art and in themselves. Being asked to be a part of Berlinale is deeply meaningful to me. It represents the highest imprimatur for a filmmaker. Being able to support and celebrate the world’s very best talent in storytelling is a gift I happily accepted.”
- David Fincher is partnering with Netflix on a documentary series dedicated to visual essays about cinema, entitled Voir. The series is executive produced by Fincher and will be directed by David Prior (The Empty Man) as well as Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou, the team behind Every Frame a Painting.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Terrence Malick recently directed a commercial for Ford, narrated by Don Cheadle. As stated by PR Week, the grand and nature-filled commercial promotes Ford's new BlueOvalSK battery factories.
- The official trailer for The Beatles Get Back by Peter Jackson, a three-part documentary series that covers the making of the album Let It Be.
- Netflix has released the trailer for Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Lost Daughter, which premiered at Venice. Based on the novel by Elena Ferrante, the film follows a college professor who becomes obsessed with a young woman and her daughter while on a summer holiday.
- Strand Releasing's trailer for Christopher Makoto Yogi's I Was A Simple Man, which opens at Metrograph November 19th.
- Xavier Dolan has directed the music video for Adele's new song, "Easy On Me," continuing a collaboration started with the video for "Hello" in 2015. ("Rolling in the Deep" also features in the title sequence for Dolan's 2018 The Death & Life of John F. Donovan.)
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Betty Gordon, photographed working on Variety (1984). (Photo by Bette Gordon)
- "I was not a feminist, I just wanted to make trouble. Do you know what word I would use to define my work? Subvert." Desistfilm's Víctor Paz Morandeira recently interviewed Bette Gordon about her structuralist films made with James Benning, theorist Laura Mulvey's influence on her feature Variety, and how each of her films is a road movie.
- In an interview with Devika Girish for the New York Times, Haile Gerima discusses the self-distribution of his film Sankofa in 1993, his conflicted feelings on being recognized by Hollywood as he prepares to receive the inaugural Vantage Award at the opening gala of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
- Vicky Krieps speaks with Slant Magazine about her role in Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island and the lingering presence of Ingmar Bergman throughout the making of the film.
- For Vulture, Alison Willmore investigates Ben Affleck's uneasy relationship to fame and tabloids and how it has defined his greatest role to date: the reluctant celebrity.
- Reverse Shot's coverage of the New York Film Festival continues with reviews of Wang Qiong's All About My Sisters, Panah Panahi's Hit The Road, Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground, and more.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- A long-time collaborator of Todd Haynes, the great director of photography Ed Lachman talks about his work on the new music documentary The Velvet Underground.
- For the latest Notebook Primer, Jacob Lindgren introduces a subgenre of American action movies depicting state-surveillance, espionage, network technologies, and perpetual motion.
- In an interview with Lukasz Mankowski, Ryusuke Hamaguchi discusses his film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and his approach to rehearsals, melodrama, comedy, and trauma in his work.
- For his column The Action Scene, Jonah Jeng dissects a visceral chase scene in an episode of zombie show Black Summer, which functions as a microcosm of the show’s overall philosophy.
- Susana Bessa reflects on Manuela Serra's The Movement of Things, the filmmaker's first and only film, which pushes forth a conversation on and confrontation with the male-dominated film industry of Portugal.
- Caitlin Quinlan recommends Fire on the Plain, the impressive, noirish debut from Zhang Ji that tells a fractured tale of a serial killer and troubled romance in China's northeast.
EXTRAS
- We love Criterion's packaging for its newly announced 2K digital restoration of Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration. Designed by Century.Studio, the cover pays tribute to the tenets of the Danish Dogme 95 movement, of which Vinterberg's film was the very first.
- And here's Jamie Lee Curtis dressed as Marion Crane (played by Curtis' mother Janet Leigh) from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho on the red carpet for Halloween Kills. Curtis clarified that she's "actually going as Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh in the movie Hitchcock. [...] We never knew what color Janet Leigh's dress was because it was a black-and-white movie."