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NEWS
Above: Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams on the set of Meek's Cutoff (2010).
- Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams will be working on a fourth project together, entitled Showing Up. The film, which goes into production this summer, follows an artist ahead of a career-changing exhibition.
- The Berlin Film Festival is unveiling its plans for this year's festival, beginning with its selection of six titles to premiere at the Berlinale Series that follow this year's theme: Toxic Antiheroes, Utopias of Freedom.
- Italian director, screenwriter, and producer Alberto Lattatuda will be the subject of the Locarno Film Festival's annual retrospective, to be held August 4-14.
- Following his biopic of Siegfried Sassoon, Terence Davies is set to direct an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s post-WWI-set novel The Post Office Girl.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The official trailer for Beginning, the striking debut feature of Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili. The film, which depicts a Jehovah’s Witness community torn apart by an extremist group, is coming to MUBI on January 29 in North America, UK, Ireland, Germany, India, Turkey & Latin America.
- Janus Film's trailer for the new restoration of Olivier Assayas' 2002 thriller demonlover.
- Tom Noonan's 1994 directorial debut, the dark comedy What Happened Was... (trailer), is being released in a brand new 4K restoration by Oscilloscope on January 29. Janus Films has also announced a release of its new restoration of Andrei Tarkovsky's deeply personal ode to memory, Mirror (trailer), also on January 29.
- At the National Gallery of Art's website, viewers in the U.S. now have the opportunity to watch Brett Story's 2019 film The Hottest August, a portrait of the tension and devastation in New York's outer-borough neighborhoods during August 2017. Read our review of the film by Leonardo Goi here.
- Sentient.Art.Film's online repertory series My Sight is Lined with Visions, which premiered last year, returns for a full year of screening. The series features an array of titles by Asian-American independent and experimental filmmakers from the 1990s, and is available for rental worldwide.
- On February 11, Adam Curtis will be premiering the new six-film series, Can't Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World on BBC iPlayer. The film ambitiously tackles the why and how of our present-day circumstances.
- "Werner has no background in skating. But I believe he is one of us." Recognizing a parallel between Werner Herzog's DIY ethos and that of skaters, skateboarding magazine Jenkem invited Herzog—an "honorary skateboarder"—to discuss how skateboarding "borders the sacred."
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Michel Reilhac's The Good Old Naughty Days (2002).
- In an essay on the artistic value and academic preservation of pornography, Justine Smith of Hyperallergic asks a provocative, but nuanced question in light of recent debates surrounding pornography streaming: "Of the literally tens of millions of videos made in the wake of the digital revolution, is any individual scene worth saving?"
- Reverse Shot editor Michael Koresky has announced the upcoming publication of his memoir, Films of Endearment: A Mother, a Son and the 80s Films That Defined Us. The book focuses on one film for each year of the 1980s, each featuring a woman in the lead role, and the films' role in shaping the author's consciousness as a gay man.
- Last year, Archive Books released an expansive three-part publication dedicated to Mauritanian film pioneer Med Hondo: 1970—2018 Interviews with Med Hondo, On the Run, Perspectives on the Cinema of Med Hondo, and Das Kino von Med Hondo / Le cinéma de Med Hondo.
- BlackStar Film Festival has launched a website for its new film and visual culture journal, Seen, "a twice-annual journal of film and visual culture made for and about Black, Brown, Indigenous and other artists of color."
Above: In Vanda's Room (2000) by Pedro Costa.
- To mark the 20th anniversary of the Portugal premiere of Pedro Costa's In Vanda's Room at the Doc's Kingdom seminar in 2000, Doc's Kingdom has published a discussion with Costa upon its premiere, and a new essay on the film by critic Chris Fujiwara.
- The latest essay at Lawrence Garcia's Substack is on David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return and its connection to Chris Marker's reading of Hitchcock's Vertigo, Fritz Lang, Antonin Artaud, and Michael Snow.
- Giovanni Vimercati's review of Deborah Starr's Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema, provides an overview of Mizrahi's extraordinary life and his vital contributions.
- Filmmaker RaMell Ross interviews the Ross brothers (no relation) for BOMB, in a conversation that covers the athleticism of the Brothers' filmmaking practice, the making of their latest film Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, and coming from an "anti-intellectual, anti-art, anti-everything kind of place."
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- The official video for Danny Elfman's spooky, surprising new prog-rock single.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Carlos Valladares interviews Tyler Taormina, whose illusory coming-of-age drama Ham on Rye is showing exclusively on MUBI starting January 11, 2021 in the Debuts series.
- Our new column Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history. For her entry, critic and programmer Nellie Killian presents a wide-ranging program of double and triple bills that showcase the city of San Francisco on film across the decades and different genres.
- John Smith introduces his film Citadel, which captures the natural lights in the cityscapes of London during a time of lockdown. The film is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on MUBI, is showing starting January 25, 20201 in MUBI's Brief Encounters series.
- "As much as they may try to remain distant from it, America swallows them whole." Matt Turner on Robert Kramer's recently restored Route One/USA, which brings ideas of origin and history to the forefront once again.
- For his Movie Poster of the Week column, Adrian Curry shares a selection of striking Hungarian posters for some lesser known films from the 60s and 70s.
EXTRAS
- From Wyatt Dunkin on Twitter, a choice selection of cursed wax figures from the Hollywood Wax Museum, from the cast of Seinfeld to Jerry Lewis.