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NEWS
- The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is one of the latest film festivals to announce its cancellation, as it will be moving its edition to July 2021.
- The Oscars have announced changes to the rules of next year's Awards ceremony, including "temporarily" eased restrictions on films debuting through streaming or VOD.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Sofia Bohdanowicz's new short, The Hardest Working Cat in Showbiz, adapts the essay of the same name by critic and filmmaker Dan Salitt. The film, which explores the filmography of the prolific cat actor Orangey, also stars Salitt and his cat Jasper.
- You can now watch parts of Ilya Khrzhanovsky's controversial Dau online. The massive project, which is divided into twelve chapters that follow residents of a scientific community in Soviet Russia, can be viewed with an online ticket. Read our review of two Dau chapters, Natasha and Degeneration, here.
- There is now an English subtitled version of Jean-Luc Godard's Instagram live chat presented by the University of Art and Design Lausanne (ECAL).
- Jia Zhang-ke has released a new short, commissioned by the Thessaloniki International Film Festival as part of a series inspired by "the days of quarantine" and restricted to indoor living spaces.
RECOMMENDED READINGS
Above: Claire Denis in Paris. (Courtesy of Vulture)
- Claire Denis relays her daily life in quarantine to Vulture, mentioning delayed projects with both The Weeknd and Robert Pattinson, and making her own hummus.
- From The India Times comes the delightful news that Satyajit Ray's son, filmmaker Sandip Ray, recently uncovered "a treasure trove of [his father's] memorabilia," including thousands of photographs and letters from filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa.
- "We could all use some laughs, as well as beauty, joy, another reality." Manohla Dargis takes us on a delightful journey through the world of 1930s musicals.
- Whatever happened to the promise of the NC-17 rating? Critic Keith Phipps investigates the history of the NC-17 rating and its effects on art house movies and the stigma against a "new era of films filled with mature content."
- The latest edition of Senses of Cinema is out, and includes a conversation with Joanna Hogg, an overview of this year's True/False Fest in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a look at Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom as Pier Paolo Pasolini's probing of the cinematic medium.
- For his Queer & Now & Then column, Michael Koresky reappraises Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, which he describes as "one of the most beautiful and radical of all experimental films, a devil-may-care spectacle of intense queer desire."
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Toronto-based DJ and producer Ciel has made a "healing" mix of selections from Studio Ghibli soundtracks.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- A collection of movie posters that feature social distancing, compiled by Adrian Curry.
- In a Close-Up on Shyam Benegal's Ankur, Bedatri D.Choudhury writes that the film is "a rupture within the fabric of Hindi cinema."
- Lorcan Finnegan, director of the sinister new film Vivarium, discusses the influence of color theory and Rene Magritte, existential dread, and "creepy child" films.
- Kelley Dong examines the "geometric patterns and spatial depth" in the compositions of Kenji Mizoguchi's late period.
EXTRAS
- Zoom meetings with the family, Ozu style.
Zoom東京物語 pic.twitter.com/sAIOBpBgws
— 森翔太 Shota Mori (@ShotaM0ri) April 28, 2020