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NEWS
Above: Fatal Attraction (1987)
- The next season of Karina Longsworth's podcast You Must Remember This will focus on the thorny and sumptuous erotic films of the 1980s and 1990s, including films by Adrian Lyne, Brian De Palma, and Stanley Kubrick. The two-part season will start on April 5.
- Ahead of its theatrical release, the long-delayed Top Gun: Maverick will play at a special screening in Cannes for the 75th edition of the festival in May. This year's Cannes Film Festival also has a new official partner: TikTok. The partnership will include exclusive festival-related content for users and an in-app competition called #TikTokShortFilm.
- James Morosini's I Love My Dad and Rosa Ruth Boesten's documentary Master of Light lead this year's SXSW Film Festival awards.
- Actor William Hurt has died at the age of 71. Hurt was known for his charismatic performances in 80s films like Ken Russell's Altered States, Kiss of the Spider Woman (for which he won an Oscar for Best Actor), The Big Chill, and Broadcast News. As Variety notes, he continued to play unforgettable supporting roles throughout the decades. Most notably, he captivated with only 10 minutes of screen time in David Cronenberg's History of Violence.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Tatiana Huezo's powerful coming-of-age story Prayers for the Stolen arrives in UK and Irish cinemas April 8. The film will be streaming on MUBI in the UK, Ireland, France, Italy, India and more from April 29.
- The trailer for HBO's Tokyo Vice is here, starring Ansel Elgort as American journalist Jake Adelstein and Ken Watanabe as a Japanese detective in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. The series is a loose adaptation of Adelstein's reports on the TMPD’s operations in the late 1990s. Michael Mann serves as executive producer of the series, and he will also be directing its pilot episode.
- The trailer for Gaspar Noé's Vortex, his split-screen story of an aging couple (played by Françoise Lebrun and Dario Argento) in a Paris apartment. Read our review of the film by Peter Kim George here.
- A trailer for The Girl and the Spider, Ramon and Silvan Zürcher's follow-up to their feature debut The Strange Little Cat. The film follows a woman who moves out, and into, two different apartments. Read our review of the film by editor Daniel Kasman, and an interview with the filmmakers by Jordan Cronk.
- NEON's trailer for Ninja Thyberg's debut feature Pleasure, which tells the story of a young woman who enters the Los Angeles porn industry.
- Ecstatic Static is currently streaming five films by Turkish-American artist Nazlı Dinçel, made between 2011 and 2018. Several of the available films, including Leafless (2011) and Solitary Acts #5 (2015), are discussed in this insightful interview with Dincel by Clint Enns for Incite Journal.
- In this hilarious and inspiring interview with Denzel Washington by Desus & Mero, Washington discusses the difference between screen and stage acting, theatrical and streaming experiences, and how much he dislikes pineapples on pizza.
- In this video essay produced by Film Fest Ghent, Chiara Grizzaffi and Astrid Ardenti "craft an elegant and elliptical montage" around the details of Jonas Carpignano's A Chiara.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
- In a new profile written by Alexandra Kleeman for the New York Times, Michelle Yeoh explains how she prepared for the upcoming sci-fi action comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once, which marks "the first time audiences will see Yeoh play someone whose movements are uncertain, someone with abundant gray hairs, someone whose body struggles to do what she asks of it."
- In an interview with The Film Stage, Arnaud Desplechin discusses Deception, his new feature adaptation of Philip Roth's novel of the same name, and working with actors Léa Seydoux and Denis Polydalès.
- Nat Segnit reviews Paul Fischer's exciting new biography, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures, about the French artist Louis Le Prince, who mysteriously disappeared shortly after inventing an early motion picture camera.
- For 4Columns, Melissa Anderson provides an overview of the films directed by Kinuyo Tanaka, the subject of an upcoming retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
- In his report from this year's SXSW Festival, Reid Davenport describes the "secret and not-so-secret" complacencies displayed by film festivals towards disabled audiences in their programming and policies.
- Annabel Brady-Brown writes on the subversive pleasures of Agnès Varda's Le bonheur for Metrograph, where the film is playing as part of the series Left Bank Cinema.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- From March 31 to April 7, Film Society of Lincoln Center will be hosting the ninth edition of Art of the Real, which showcases nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking. This year's festival includes films by Lina Rodriguez, Dane Komljen, Jonathan Perel, and more. The films of Alice Diop will be presented in a special section.
- At the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, programmer Dorota Lech will be presenting REVOLUTION!, a series dedicated to "the meteoric rise of socialist revolt" in 20th century cinema. The series begins April 9 with a screening of Dziga Vertov's History of the Civil War.
- The eighth edition of the Essay Film Festival will take place between March 19 and April 23 across London cinemas (including the ICA, Birkbeck Cinema, Bertha DocHouse and the Goethe Institute) and online.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Savina Petkova gives Valdimar Jóhannsson's Lamb its Close-Up, focusing on how the film explores the boundaries between human and animal. Lamb is showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries in the series Debuts.
- The director of Great Freedom, Sebastian Meise tells us his Moviegoing Memories.
- "Repairing the roofing is an act of love." Translated by Craig Keller, French novelist Yannick Haenel's essay on Pedro Costa's Vitalina Varela celebrates the film's poetic beauty.
- In an interview with Leonardo Goi, Italian audiovisual artist Yuri Ancarani discusses his latest feature Atlantide, a portrait of teenage life in the outskirts of the Venice lagoon.
- Olaf Möller reports on the uneven competition presented at this year's Berlinale.
- Kelley Dong investigates the complexities of Jeen-Yuhs, the new four-and-a-half hour Netflix documentary about the artist and mogul Ye.
- Adrian Curry's latest entry for the Movie Poster of the Week column presents the most popular posters on Movie Poster of the Day on Instagram.