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NEWS
An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006).
- Participant, the socially conscious production company, has closed, which filmmaker Julie Cohen called “devastating news to anyone who cares about documentaries.” Their twenty-year track record includes many nonfiction films, such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), but also narrative features like Spotlight (2015) and Roma (2018).
- New data suggests that Hollywood production has gradually rebounded after last year’s WGA and SAG strikes, though not to the levels of the “peak TV” streaming bubble.
- The Archival Producers Alliance has drafted best practices for the use of generative AI in documentary, cautioning against the “danger of forever muddying the historical record.”
IN PRODUCTION
- Martin Scorsese is reportedly developing a Frank Sinatra biopic, to star Leonardo DiCaprio as the crooner and Jennifer Lawrence as Ava Gardner.
- Park Chan-wook plans to produce an English-language television adaptation of Oldboy (2003).
- Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Honey Don’t! will star Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Margaret Qualley, Charlie Day, Billy Eichner, and Talia Ryder. The comedy, apparently set around a cult leader, is now filming in New Mexico.
REMEMBERING
The Devil Never Sleeps (Lourdes Portillo, 1994).
- Lourdes Portillo has died at 80. The documentarian—director of The Mothers of Mayo de Plazo (1986), The Devil Never Sleeps (1994), and many others—was a lifelong advocate for Chicano and LGBTQ communities.
- Terry Carter has died at 95. The actor is known for supporting roles in McCloud (1970–77), Foxy Brown (1974), and Battlestar Galactica (1978–79). He later became a producer of educational documentaries, including the much-lauded A Duke Named Ellington (1988).
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- “At Shaw Brothers, Chang Cheh found the perfect formula for success, merging millennia of Chinese folklore and fantasy with his love for spaghetti westerns, Japanese samurai films, and American genre cinema.” In a new Video Essay feature, we provide an introduction to the Shaw Brothers Studio’s unmistakable house style.
- The Match Factory has released a trailer for Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour (2024), in which a man gets cold feet and hightails it to Asia, pursued by his would-be bride. The film will premiere in competition at Cannes.
- Arbelos has released a trailer for a new restoration of Peter Kass’s long-lost Time of the Heathen (1961), an Atomic-age wrong-man thriller lensed by the renowned avant-gardist Ed Emshwiller, soon opening for the first time in New York.
- Factory 25 has released a trailer for This Closeness (2023), Kit Zauhar’s follow-up to the acclaimed Actual People (2021).
RECOMMENDED READING
The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow, 2023).
- “I rarely watch films on the tablet. I can’t afford to. I earn 40¢ a day as a dorm janitor.” For Film Comment, Philip Vance Smith, II, reports on the state of streaming in US prisons.
- “Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it.” In Granta, Miranda July offers an excerpt from her forthcoming second novel, All Fours.
- “Arnow, with her Daria demeanor, has created an almost Chaplinesque persona from the parts no lady should care to show.” For 4Columns, Beatrice Loayza reviews The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2023), Joanna Arnow’s wild and dry sex comedy.
- “It is a series of invitations to storylines that flicker and fade, reminders that we are often a bit too practical in our need to know what happens.” For the London Review of Books, Michael Wood traces the perambulations of Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents (2023).
- “He knew it was wrong, but he was going to do it anyway, and laugh until you were laughing too. And then do it again, until you weren’t laughing, because we Hoffmans are not good at knowing how to stop.” For the Paris Review, Emily Barr memorializes her brother, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Aubade (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2010).
- Leeds, April 30: Hyde Park Picture House presents “An Evening with Eve Heller,” including eight films from throughout her career, programmed in collaboration with Sonic Cinema and Pavilion.
- Los Angeles, May 6: The Academy Museum presents a double-bill of Peter Bogdonavich’s What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and Jonathan Lynn’s Clue (1985), both on 35mm.
- New York, May 9 through 16: The Museum of Modern Art presents “Illuminated Hours: The Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler,” a rare opportunity to see the results of their lifelong creative exchange in the same programs, featuring discussions with the artists.
- Berlin, through June 22: The Haubrok Foundation presents “The Sky and Elsewhere,” an installation of twelve films by James Benning, and in another gallery, a group exhibition simply called “Film,” including conceptual and structural works by nine artists, including Marcel Broodthaers, Tony Conrad, and Carolyn Lazard.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Man's Castle (Frank Borzage, 1933).
- “No one should watch them who is not prepared to be enraptured.” On the occasion of a new restoration of Man’s Castle (1933), Imogen Sara Smith finds the films of Frank Borzage “out of step with the bitterness and disillusionment of the times.”
- “Between the monastic lifestyle of its central character and its poetic depiction of a world at peace, Wenders manages to eschew any sense of moralism in his reflections on the divine.” Sam Sodomsky considers Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days (2023), the German director’s latest Japanese picture
- “I thought we wouldn’t be able to make the film I’d been promising everybody, but I kept that to myself.” Faris Alrjoob introduces The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry (2023), the short film that stunned audiences at last year’s Director’s Fortnight.
- “Sequences unspool from the center and flow outward, and yet the center itself appears to be constantly shifting.” Vedant Srinivas remembers Kumar Shahani, a maestro of Indian cinema and a devotee to the epic form.
WISH LIST
- Neil Hornick’s The Magic Eye: The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick, a critical assessment of the director’s work that Kubrick vowed to fight “tooth and nail” to suppress, will finally be published by Sticking Place Books, 25 years after its subject’s death and nearly 55 years after its completion.
EXTRAS
- The BBC’s Tom Brook plumbs the depths of New York’s microcinemas for “Talking Movies.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the location of Hyde Park Picture House. It is in Leeds, not London.