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NEWS
Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960).
- The MUBI Podcast returns on January 25. Titled “Tailor Made,” the fifth season will consider landmark movies that captured major fashions of their times—from Jean Seberg in Breathless to Sofia Coppola’s body of work to date—with insights from leading costume designers, fashion designers, cinematographers, and directors.
- Alongside the announcement of the Competition and Encounters sections, with the addition of new films by Abderrahmane Sissako, Mati Diop, Hong Sang-soo, Ruth Beckermann, and more, we’ve updated our Berlinale lineup post ahead of the festival’s commencement on February 15.
- June Givanni, a writer on and curator of African and African diasporic cinema and the founder of the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive, is to be recognized by BAFTA with an Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema Award at the ceremony on February 18.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The winner of the main prize in the Encounters competition at the 2023 Berlinale, Bas Devos’s Here has a trailer ahead of a US release from Cinema Guild starting February 9. A serene and gentle film, Here follows a Romanian construction worker who meets a Chinese Belgian bryologist while wandering Brussels, sparking a slowly unfolding series of tentative shared encounters, with great attention paid to sensorial details and the beauty of ordinary moments.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Beekeeper (David Ayer, 2024).
- “One thing you’ll never catch Statham doing is condescending to his material. Whether he’s laid-back or amped up, his acting is never in quotes.” For The Ringer, Adam Nayman profiles the British-born action hero Jason Statham, tying in to the latest “piece of Stathamology,” The Beekeeper (2024), directed by the “Hollywood journeyman” David Ayer.
- “For me the interval is that space between, it’s really an emphasis on between.” On Sabzian, Stoffel Debuysere talks at length with Trinh T. Minh-ha, an artist who “seeks the in-between spaces where established boundaries can be rearranged and shifted, including those of the ‘I’.”
- “We’re seeing, in many ways, people have these shifts, these ideas about themselves, these different definitions and changes over time.” On Screen Slate, Elizabeth Purchell talks with Caden Mark Gardner and Jenni Olson about “Masc: Trans Men, Butch Dykes, and Other Gender Nonconforming Heroes in Cinema,” a film series the pair first curated for the Criterion Channel that is currently running at BAMPFA in Berkeley, California.
- “But are we moved to sorrow and pity, sitting in a darkened cinema with our faces lifted rapturously to the light of battle flickering across the screen?” In The Guardian, novelist John Banville reviews David Thomson’s new book, The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film, in which the renowned film critic writes, in “compelling and often limpidly beautiful prose,” about “war itself and our ambiguous relation to it, or at least to its representation in moving images.”
- “Adults understand that while satire will almost certainly lack the power to meaningfully afflict the powerful, it might nonetheless comfort the powerless through bluntly expressed anger, analytical wit or some precisely calibrated combination of the two.” Those wanting to stay looped into what is happening at the Sundance Film Festival should look to Vadim Rizov’s always essential Filmmaker dispatches, which begin with notes on Theda Hammel’s Stress Positions and Daniel Hoesl’s Veni Vidi Vici.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Ceddo (Ousmane Sembène, 1977).
- New York: Ongoing, through February 4: Currently on at Film at Lincoln Center is a series celebrating French film critic Serge Daney, focusing on films he featured in his 1983 book Footlights, newly translated and released by Semiotext(e), which we recently excerpted. Among the varied inclusions are Ousmane Sembène’s Ceddo (1977), Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975), and Charles Belmont and Marielle Issartel’s Histoires d’A (1973).
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- On a recent episode of the Writers on Film podcast, Sam Wasson, author of The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story, talks to host John Bleasdale about the grand dreams and ambitions of the visionary American director.
- Distribution Advocates has a new podcast launching on January 31, with episodes covering all aspects of film distribution and exhibition, touching on everything from festivals to awards to film school. “The stories featured in our podcast are usually whispered in dark corners at industry cocktail parties,” they write, “but for the industry to shift, we must openly question some of our deepest-held beliefs about how independent films get made and released, and who profits from them.”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Pham Thien An, 2023).
- Speaking with Lukasz Mankowski, Pham Thien An discusses the notions of spirituality that underpin his hypnotic new feature, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, which won the Caméra d’Or for best first feature film at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
- “Even when not dealing with history directly, McQueen is often interested in collapsing past and present, with an intense focus on people.” Corey Atad looks at Steve McQueen’s Occupied City (2023), in which the artist and filmmaker makes the past feel vividly present in a portrait of Amsterdam, combining contemporary images of city life with descriptions of World War II–era atrocities and resistance.
EXTRAS
America (Garrett Bradley, 2019).