Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.
NEWS
Queer (Luca Guadagnino, 2024).
- MUBI has canceled its annual Turkish film festival—MUBI Fest Istanbul—after the Kadıköy District Governorate of Istanbul barred a screening of the opening film, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer (2024), citing its “provocative content.”
- During Warner Bros. Discovery’s quarterly earnings call, CEO David Zaslav waxes optimistic about Donald Trump’s reelection, arguing that it “may offer a pace of change and an opportunity for consolidation that…would provide a real positive and accelerated impact on this industry that’s needed.” Meanwhile, other industry execs share concerns about the impact of high tariffs on the international film market.
- Multiple cinematography organizations have condemned an op-ed penned by Marek Żydowicz, the founder and CEO of Camerimage, the Polish film festival. Days before the festival opens, on November 16, he argued that “growing recognition of female cinematographers” could potentially “sacrifice works and artists with outstanding artistic achievements solely to make room for mediocre film production.” In response to Żydowicz’s comments, director Steve McQueen will no longer attend a festival screening of Blitz (2024).
- Reporting from Lisbon’s Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn (THU) digital arts festival, The Guardian’s Steve Rose interviews artists and executives about the ongoing debates surrounding AI, including a brewing class-action lawsuit against a group of companies from fine artist Karla Ortiz for widespread copyright infringement.
DEVELOPING
- Hiro Murai (Atlanta, 2016–22) is poised to make his feature debut with Bushido, an original samurai film.
- Lena Dunham is at work on a film about FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, based on Michael Lewis’s 2023 book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon.
- James Gray’s new film, Paper Tiger, will star Adam Driver, Jeremy Strong, and Anne Hathaway in a story of two brothers who run afoul of the Russian mob. Strong and Hathaway previously starred in Gray’s last film, Armageddon Time (2022).
- On the heels of Gladiator II (2024), Paul Mescal is set to star in Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Peter Heller’s postapocalyptic novel The Dog Stars.
REMEMBERING
Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992).
- Tony Todd has died at 69. The American actor was best known for playing Candyman in the eponymous supernatural horror series (1992–2021), and also appeared in Platoon (1986), The Crow (1994), The Rock (1996), and the Final Destination (2000–25) franchise. He was also a prolific voice actor across film, television, and video games, including turns as Fallen in Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and Zoom in The Flash (2014–23) series. Virginia Madsen, who also appeared in Candyman (1992), remembers her costar as “an angel” and “a gentle soul with a deep knowledge of the arts.”
- Jonathan Haze has died at 95. The American actor was best known for starring in Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) as Seymour Krelboined, a floral assistant who cultivates a vicious plant. Haze was a member of Corman’s repertory company from 1954 to 1967 and appeared in numerous films he directed, including Apache Woman (1955), Naked Paradise (1957), and The Terror (1963). He also starred in Irvin Kershner’s Stakeout on Dope Street (1958) and Charles B. Griffith’s Forbidden Island (1959) before beginning to work in other areas of film production.
- Greg Hildebrandt has died at 85. The American artist and illustrator, who frequently worked with his late brother, Tim, was responsible for creating iconic movie posters for Star Wars (1977) and Clash of the Titans (1981). He also illustrated covers for DC Comics, painted characters for Marvel, and designed album covers for Black Sabbath and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
- Paul Engelen has died at 75. The British makeup designer’s work appears in Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017). He made up three different James Bonds, worked with Steven Spielberg twice and Blake Edwards thrice, and netted two Emmy wins on the first three seasons of Game of Thrones (2011-19). His latest work can be seen in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II (2024).
RECOMMENDED READING
Here (Robert Zemeckis, 2024).
- “I had always had in my head that criticism becomes criticism once it’s published. Once it enters the magazine, once it enters the book. And the fact of the matter is that I had been practicing it, but in very, very casual spaces.” For November, critic Doreen St. Felix discusses her practice with artist and writer Emmanuel Olunkwa. Other artists interviewed in the magazine’s “On Narrative” issue include Mary Gaitskill, Garrett Bradley, and Ben Lerner.
- “A great filmmaker is often haunted by several figures about whom he never ceases to flit, who impose themselves on him and on his cinema as the fundamental matrices of his representation and of his philosophy of the world.” For Sabzian, Clodagh Kinsella translates Alain Bergala’s 2004 analysis of Abbas Kiarostami as a “filmmaker of alignment.”
- “Close-knit in its personnel and interlinked in its themes, the Portuguese film industry seems remarkably coherent compared to that of larger countries—linked more by a deeply cinephilic community and network of artists, producers, and festivals than by top-down nation-building initiatives or concessions to the European or global film markets.” For 4Columns, Leo Goldsmith reviews “The Ongoing Revolution of Portuguese Cinema,” a series at the Museum of Modern Art organized by Francisco Valente.
- “The more I thought about Here and the various fleeting but piercingly specific narrative and character details we’re asked to sift through in order to give its impressionistic presentation meaning—and meaning-making, which is to say semiotics, is very much Zemeckis’s game, no matter how unpretentiously he frames his own practice—the more I felt mocked and brutalized.” In Reverse Shot, Adam Nayman examines Robert Zemeckis’s latest feature, the experimental drama Here (2024).
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980).
- New York, through Spring 2025: The Museum of Modern Art presents Christian Marclay’s 24-hour montage film, The Clock (2010). On December 21, the museum will host a “special after-hours viewing” of the film in its entirety.
- Knoxville, through November 17: Visit Knoxville presents the second edition of Film Fest Knox, featuring work by Tennessee filmmakers alongside a Revival section and a selection of international films.
- London, November 16: The Close-Up Film Center presents “The Early Films of Peter Greenaway,” including a collection of shorts and the first half of The Falls (1980).
- New York, through November 17: Metrograph presents “Retro-Futurism: The Films of Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn,” a retrospective of the duo’s unruly, deadpan work, including their latest, Dream Team (2024).
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Resurfacing: a 2020 conversation between Kiyoshi Kurosawa and his former student Ryusuke Hamaguchi about Cure (1997). (With thanks to Leonardo Goi.)
- Kino Lorber has released a trailer for Paul Schrader’s fragmented memory film Oh, Canada (2024), in theaters December 5.
- Paramount has released the first teaser for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025), in which Tom Cruise implores you to trust him one last time.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- This week’s episode of the Film Comment Podcast dives into the work of New Left filmmaker Robert Kramer, who’s currently the subject of a retrospective at the Austrian Film Museum.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Bird (Andrea Arnold, 2024).
- “Faced with crises in every direction, art institutions across the globe now justify their existence as sites of urgent response.” Responding to this year’s Currents slate at the New York Film Festival, Phil Coldiron queries the state of the powerful image in our time.
- “Wang endeavors to exhibit the vast range of experience which fills a life, even when certain material possibilities are foreclosed (as they always are, except in our fictions).” Maxwell Paparella extols the hardline humanism of Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy (2023–24).
- “I wanted to do something that wasn't linear so much as circular.” Leonardo Goi interviews Alexandra Simpson about her debut feature, No Sleep Till (2024), a Floridian dreamscape verging on nightmare.
- “The magical, making a breach in that reality, forces us to see our stifled, stymied lives for what they are, setting the imagined alternative front and center.” Nathalie Olah considers the class politics of Andrea Arnold’s Bird (2024).
WISH LIST
- Later this month, Gallimard will publish an annotated version of Justine Triet and Arthur Harari’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Anatomy of a Fall (2023), featuring cover art by David Lynch.
EXTRAS
- Friends of the experimental filmmaker and educator Tomonari Nishikawa are raising funds to defray the expense of his cancer treatment.