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NEWS
- We announced today in IndieWire the upcoming launch of our new original podcast! Hosted by arts and travel reporter Rico Gagliano, the first season of the MUBI Podcast will focus on films that have great importance in their home country, but are lesser known by international audiences and critics. We begin with Paul Verhoeven's second feature Turkish Delight and its unique significance during the counterculture movement in 1970s Holland. The episode feaures exclusive interviews with Paul Verhoeven, Monique van de Ven, and Jan de Bont. Check out the trailer above and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts here.
- Filmmaker Milton Moses Ginsberg, best known for his debut feature Coming Apart (1969) and the horror comedy film The Werewolf of Washington (1973), has died.
- The Tribeca Film Festival has announced that Steven Soderbergh's latest, the 1950s-set crime drama No Sudden Move, will have its world premiere at this year's festival on June 18.
- No Evil Eye, a "nomadic micro-cinema," has officially launched Film Futura, an alternative and multidisciplinary film school. The program (which is accepting student applicants by June 7) will take place over seven weeks and will include courses and panels led by Yasmina Price, Abby Sun, Devika Girish, and many more.
- Jafar Panahi, Anthony Chen, Malik Vitthal, Laura Poitras, Dominga Sotomayor, David Lowery, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul have each filmed personal segments for NEON's mysterious film The Year Of The Everlasting Storm, described as a "love letter to cinemas."
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Chloé Zhao's Eternals has an official teaser, which depicts its titular group of celestial beings in the mountains, staring into the distance wistfully.
- The teaser for Edgar Wright's Giallo-inspired Last Night in Soho, about a fashion student transported to 1960s London, where she inhabits the body of a famous lounge singer.
- Media City Film Festival is now playing Afro-French playwright and filmmaker Julius-Amédée Laou's 1984 short film Open Mic Solitaire. The film, which received the Short Film Prize at the Venice Film Festival, follows the brother of a Black man murdered by skinheads in Paris. Other key gems on the site include Sergei Eisenstein's Mexican Footage (1930-1932), Raymundo Glazer's fiery If I Don't Work, They Kill Me, And If I Work (1974), and Cauleen Smith's Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1992).
- Julien Faraut's holistic documentary The Witches of the Orient, about Japan's women's volleyball team, opens on July 9 at NYC’s Film Forum. Read our interview with Faraut here.
RECOMMENDED READING
- A new conversation with Thierry Fremaux, the artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival, in Variety details the festival's many changes ahead of its comeback this July. This includes a focus on younger filmmakers for the Un Certain Regard program, more "midnight screenings," and a new multiplex.
- For Criterion, Moeko Fujii examines the performance of Hideko Takamine in Mikio Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.
- GQ's profile of Johnny Knoxville follows Knoxville as he prepares and reflects on decades of body-breaking pranks and bits ahead of the release of his final Jackass film this fall.
- In his report on imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, the largest festival of Indigenous film and media in the world, Girish Shambu delves into what it means to de-emphasize auteurism in the face of other collective, community-based approaches.
Above: Dave Bautista in Army of the Dead (2021).
- Willow Catelyn Maclay celebrates the challenging and charming career of Dave Bautista, who Maclay argues is "wrestling's first character actor."
- "What promise does a feminist artwork that merely reacts to a deficiency truly hold? That takes as its starting point the very male gaze it wants to dismantle?" Beatrice Loayza precisely deconstructs the pitfalls of conflating suffering and empowerment in films about women's trauma, including Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman.
- In an interview with the Guardian, Ayo Akingbade discusses her experiences in film school, and the process behind her films on housing estates and gentrification.
- The new issue of World Records Journal includes an essay by documentary filmmaker Brett Story on "story and the property form", an examination of Netflix documentaries by Joshua Glick, and a call to resist "overnarrativization" by Rick Prelinger.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Notebook has published an excerpt of Erika Balsom's book on James Benning's film Ten Skies (2004), the second release in the series Decadent Editions, devoted to masterpieces of the 2000s. The book is available to order from Fireflies Press.
- Alice Rohrwacher introduces her film Four Roads, now playing exclusively on MUBI in many countries in the series Brief Encounters.
- Molly Fusco brings together the poems of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath in her examination of Sophy Romvari's Still Processing, which is playing exclusively on MUBI.
- In a conversation with Hugo Emmerzael, Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa exchanges views on his monumental archival documentary State Funeral. The film exclusively showing in many countries in MUBI's Luminaries series.
- Flavia Dima interviews Elia Suleiman, who discusses his first film in ten years, It Must Be Heaven, and opens up about his creative process and outlook.
- Dirty Looks founder and director Bradford Nordeen has guest-written this month's Deuce Notebook column to discuss Jerry Douglas’ The Back Row.
- Matthew Barney introduces his film Redoubt, which is playing exclusively on MUBI in the UK. It is also being presented alongside the exhibition "Matthew Barney: Redoubt" at the Hayward Gallery in London.
EXTRAS
- After a seven-year renovation, Moscow's oldest cinema Khudozhestvenny has opened to the public. The cinema is famous for hosting early screenings of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin in 1926.
