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NEWS
- Sian Heder's Coda took home the Best Picture award at the 94th Academy Awards, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car took Best International Feature, and Jane Campion won Best Director for The Power of the Dog. Find more of this year's Oscars winners here.
- We're saddened by the loss of Japanese filmmaker Shinji Aoyama, who recently died at the age of 57. Most revered for his 2000 film Eureka, about a trio who embark on a road trip after surviving a bus hijacking, Aoyama continued his humanist exploration of violence, family, and generation gaps in films like Desert Moon (2001) and Sad Vacation (2007), the loose sequel to Eureka. He was also a prolific novelist and critic, with his novelization of Eureka awarded the Yukio Mishima prize in 2001.
- Il Cinema Ritrovato has announced the programs of this year's festivities, which includes series dedicated to Sophia Loren, German musical comedies from 1930-1932, Japanese filmmaker Kenji Misumi, Swedish experimental artist Peter Weiss, and costume designer/director Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The trailer for the restoration of Ang Lee's feature debut, the 1991 film Pushing Hands. The first of Lee's "Father Knows Best" trilogy, the film stars Sihung Lung as an elderly Tai Chi master who moves in with his son in New York City.
- Electronic Arts Intermix has made a number of exquisite selections from the 1973-1975 Computer Arts Festival available online, including works by Nam June Paik, Lillian Schwartz, and Stan VanDerBeek.
- Mati Diop has directed a campaign video for French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, entitled La Culture.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Robert Eggers' The Northman (2022)
- For the New Yorker, Sam Knight has written a profile of Robert Eggers and his journey of making his ambitious historical epic The Northman, which Knight describes as "the most accurate Viking movie ever made."
- It's also been reported that Robert Eggers has long wanted to remake F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, which turns 100 this year. Roisin Kiberd of the New York Times charts the rise of Murnau's villain in the popular imagination, from television and film to music and fashion. Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin's video essay on Nosferatu explores Murnau's use of editing to create a space driven by both dread and desire.
- In a new interview with the Film Stage, David Cronenberg discusses his recent NFT films, including one based on his bout with kidney stones, and the making of his latest feature Crimes of the Future, which he hopes will be at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
- In memory of the late Shinji Aoyama, we're returning to his 1997 "Nouvelle Vague Manifesto," originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma Japon and republished by Lola Journal in 2015.
- For Film Comment, Jordan Cronk interviews James Benning, whose new film The United States of America presents "a series of 52 static shots of every state in the country."
Above: S.S. Rajamouli's RRR (2022)
- Sagar Tetali of Film Companion has written an expansive essay on the audacious films of S.S. Rajamouli, whose latest epic RRR is a "marriage of gargantuan scale, Telugu star power, and Cecil B. Demille style historical mythmaking."
- Over at the New York Times is the full story of how Peter Bogdanovich's once lost and now newly recovered film, Squirrel to the Nuts, was serendipitously found in a storage locker and is now playing at the MoMA.
- GQ speaks with the president of the Saab Club of North America about the reception of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car—which features a red Saab 900—among Saab fans.
- Yasmina Price interviews Cameroonian documentarian Rosine Mbakam about the "thoughtful, careful assault on the colonial gaze" found in her filmmaking.
- Nick Pinkerton takes a closer look at the strange career of director Robert Siodmak, the subject of a recent retrospective at Metrograph in New York. On the occasion of the series, we also recommend Christina Newland's appraisal of Siodmak and his
- Ultra Dogme presents a special dossier on cinema in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, including essays by Srikanth Srinivasan, Aswathy Gopalakrishnan, Mahesh S, and Anuj Malhotra.
- In an interview with Screen Slate's Joshua Bogatin, Ted Fendt talks about the rhythm, visual language, and sense of immediacy of his new film Outside Noise.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- The Spanish-language MUBI Podcast: Encuentros returns for a second season, starting with a sincere conversation between Chilean actor Antonia Zegers and award-winning production designer Eugenio Caballero about their respective experiences in the complementary professions of acting and production design.
- Arbelos Films has announced the first-ever vinyl release of Mihály Víg’s score for Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Emmanuel Marre and Julie Lecoustre introduce their film Zero Fucks Given, which is showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries in the series Viewfinder.
- Florence Scott-Anderton's latest Soundtrack Mix is a tribute to early pioneers in electronic music for movie soundtracks.
- Emerson Goo explores the theme of disability in Ryusuke Hamaguchi's films.
- Leonardo Goi interviews Nadav Lapid about the genesis and production of his latest film, Ahed's Knee.
- Kat Sachs' Notebook Primer on New Zealand-born, Australia-based writer-director Jane Campion celebrates her unique and utterly audacious career.