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NEWS
Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024).
- The 2025 Oscar nominations were announced late last week following multiple delays due to the Los Angeles fires. Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez (all films 2024) received the most nominations (thirteen) followed closely by Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and Jon Chu’s Wicked (ten each). The New Yorker’s Richard Brody unpacks the assumptions underlying the Academy’s choices and posits an alternate list of nominees for five categories.
- London’s Prince Charles Cinema, a mainstay in the West End since the early 1960s, is facing a serious threat of closure after their landlords have demanded “a rent increase significantly above market rates” in their new lease. Zedwell LSQ Ltd and their ultimate parent company Criterion Capital have also insisted upon a break clause that would “require the cinema to vacate the premises at six months’ notice should the company receive planning permission to redevelop the site.” The cinema, whose supporters include Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, is gathering signatures on a petition to be delivered to their landlords.
- Sony announced that it will cease production of recordable Blu-ray discs in February after a nearly twenty-year run. They also intend to end production of MiniDiscs for recording, MD data for recording, and MiniDV cassettes. As the general public has made clear their preference for streaming services over physical media, the demand for optical media products has declined, though it is an ideal medium for long-term storage.
- President Trump announced on Truth Social that actors Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, and Jon Voight—all avowed supporters of the president—were to be “special ambassadors” to Hollywood (“a great, but very troubled place”). They are tasked with bringing Hollywood “BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE” after apparently “losing much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries.” Gibson was reportedly surprised by the call to service but said that his “duty as a citizen is to give any help and insight I can.”
REMEMBERING
New Jack City (Mario Van Peebles, 1991).
- Barry Michael Cooper has died at 66. The American screenwriter and journalist is known for penning the screenplays for Harlem-set dramas New Jack City (1991), Sugar Hill (1994), and Above the Rim (1994). Cooper began his career as a journalist for the Village Voice where he began writing music journalism under the tutelage of critic Robert Christgau, to whom he reportedly introduced rap music just as it was growing popular in the Bronx. He also coined the term “new jack swing,” a genre that fused the sounds and production techniques of hip-hop and R&B, after profiling producer and singer Teddy Riley in 1987. He gained more notoriety when he reported on the growing crack epidemic and the corporatization of the drug trade in Harlem, where he grew up. He is also known for directing Blood On The Wall$ (2005) and as a producer and writer on Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It series for Netflix (2017–19).
- Bertrand Blier has died at 85. The controversial French director is known for Going Places (1974), a dark buddy comedy about two men on a rape-and-plunder rampage across working-class French suburbs, and the Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978), about a man who tries to fix his wife’s depression by finding her a lover only for her to embark on an affair with a 13-year-old boy. He is also known for other films like Beau-père (1981) and Too Beautiful for You (1989), which won the Grand Prix award at Cannes. Blier also launched the career of actor Gerard Depardieu, with whom he made nine films. (He recently joined many members of the French film industry to came to the actor’s defense in the face of numerous sexual harassment and assault accusations.) In an interview, when asked about his supposed preoccupation with sex, he replied, “What else do you want to talk about? Sports? There is death, sex, women.”
RECOMMENDED READING
The Big Mouth (Jerry Lewis, 1967).
- “Jerry Lewis could be a character in a Philip Roth novel, a middle-aged Jewish man and a huge success in Hollywood, frolicking at a water park in San Diego as his hometown burns in a riot.” For The Theater of the Matters, A. S. Hamrah and Chris Fujiwara talk about The Big Mouth (1967).
- “Presence, starkly depicting the torments Chloe must confront, can fruitfully be thought of as an exemplar of the female gothic for Gen Z.” For 4Columns, Melissa Anderson reviews Steven Soderbergh’s latest supernatural thriller.
- “I like to think that what I write is socially useful, but in a way that people can take my writing to other places. It doesn’t have to be my place, in other words.” For the Film Stage, Samuel Brodsky interviews film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum on his latest autobiographical collection, his decision to sell his personal DVD collection, and the role of the critic.
- The tributes to David Lynch continue to pour in: we can recommend Philippa Snow’s in ArtReview, Vikram Murthi’s in The Nation, Max Nelson’s in Sidecar, Alex Greenberger’s in ArtNews, and Dennis Lim’s in Film Comment (the last of which ran in yesterday’s newsletter, and will be available online this coming Monday).
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Far from Home (Sohrab Shahid Saless, 1975).
- New York, January 31 through February 9: MoMA presents a comprehensive retrospective of Jerry Schatzberg, the photographer-turned-filmmaker whose work includes Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970), The Panic in Needle Park (1971), and Scarecrow (1973).
- Toronto, January 31 through February 23: TIFF presents “Compassionate Light: Stories of Tibet by Pema Tseden,” a series dedicated to the work of the late Tibetan director who revolutionized representations of his people within so-called “Chinese minority cinema.”
- London, February 1 and 2: The Institute of Contemporary Arts presents “In Focus: Michael Snow,” a two-day program dedicated to the distinguished avant-garde filmmaker, including the landmark works Wavelength (1967) and La région centrale (1971), all screened on celluloid.
- London, February 4 through 25: The Barbican Center presents “Masterpieces of the Iranian New Wave,” a showcase of some of the best films from the country’s grassroots film movement prior to the 1979 revolution.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997).
- On The Last Thing I Saw, Nicolas Rapold speaks with Mark Asch about the potency of the images David Lynch created: “There are so many motifs in his movies that are both his and ours.”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005).
- “The sender is a proxy for the audience, implicating us in the culture of surveillance and alienation.” Celia Mattison compares the camera-wielding stalker of Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) to that of Yeo Siew Hua’s recent festival favorite, Stranger Eyes (2024).
- “Hura views glitches as ‘fault lines of doubt,’ spaces that allow new layers of understanding to emerge.” Katie Tobin surveys the film work of Sohab Hura on the occasion of an exhibition at MoMA PS1.
- “Christina Hornisher’s film crystallizes an overlooked period of film labor history, in which many hopefuls arrived either too early or too late to strike gold.” Adam Piron contemplates what a new restoration of Hollywood 90028 (1973) has to say about the state of Los Angeles today.
WISH LIST
Trás-os-Montes (Margarida Cordeiro, 1976).
- Courtisane has published In the Midst of the End of the World: António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, a selection of texts and interviews with the two Portuguese filmmakers, many of which are available in English for the first time.
- Bloomsbury has launched a new book series Timecodes, dedicated to exploring one film minute-by-minute, with upcoming volumes on Gerry (2002), BlacKkKlansman (2018), and episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) available to preorder now.
EXTRAS
- Actor Walton Goggins has launched a new line of “stylish sunglasses that expressed and integrated with my inward and outward journey” called Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses. A promotional video explains how he “uses his eyes to tell stories.”