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NEWS
- Tiny, a Canadian technology holding company, has completed a majority acquisition of the film-oriented social networking platform Letterboxd, Business Wire reports. Letterboxd’s founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow will continue to lead the business independently as the company scales up.
REMEMBERING
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989).
- Michael Gambon has died aged 82. A notable stage actor, Gambon appeared in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) before taking on memorable roles in Michael Mann's The Insider (1999), Robert Altman's Gosford Park (2001), and the Harry Potter films, in which he took over the role of Albus Dumbledore from Richard Harris. "Gambon left school aged 15 and, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not receive any formal training at drama school," writes Chris Wiegand in his Guardian obituary. "He bluffed his way into his first professional roles by fibbing about his experience, making his debut in Dublin in a small role in Othello. Aged 22, he had his West End debut as an understudy in The Bed-Sitting Room."
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The first trailer has arrived for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Venice award-winner Evil Does Not Exist, his first since his Oscar-winning Drive My Car (2021). Writing about the film from TIFF, Daniel Kasman described it as “pleasurably chill with a laid-back pace, accented by Eiko Ishibashi’s ensconcing score”—audible in this trailer.
- Also new is A24’s US trailer for Priscilla, Sofia Coppola’s new film based on Elvis and Me, the 1985 memoir that Priscilla Presley co-wrote with Sandra Harmon. In our Venice dispatch, Leonardo Goi called it “a portrait that keeps spilling and growing well beyond its borders.”
- Lastly, in a new episode of MUBI’s “In Conversation” series, Chilean director Sebastián Silva and influencer-comedian Jordan Firstman talk about their collaboration on Rotting in the Sun.
RECOMMENDED READING
May December (Todd Haynes, 2023).
- “The response to May December, so far, has made me feel like people want to be—are there to be—confused and disturbed and uncertain about what they think about movies again. And I love that, because that’s always what movies should do to you.” Vulture’s Madeline Leung Coleman talks to Todd Haynes about Karen Carpenter, the New Queer Cinema movement, recurring themes in his work, and the reception to his latest film May December, the first he has premiered at a festival without having already secured a distributor.
- For the film’s twentieth anniversary, Adam Nayman dissects Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) for the Ringer. Despite its various problems, he finds the film to be a “deceptively airy movie” that is “substantial enough to support any number of interpretations without being defined or undone by them.”
- “If an artist today conceives of themselves as avant-garde, it’s generally not a good sign; the few who do tend to be merchants of various stripes of reaction.” For Artforum, Phil Coldiron overviews NYFF’s Currents strand, the festival’s “designated home for films made ‘at the vanguard of the medium.’”
- In 4Columns, Melissa Anderson writes about her changing relationship to Stop Making Sense (1984), Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert documentary, noting how, when revisiting the new restoration 30 years after her last viewing, her “evolving antipathy toward the group’s front man” means that where before she only saw the cohesion of the group, she now perceives “atomization, its extremely talented members forced to orbit its proprietary lead singer.”
- “It becomes clear within a few pages that this is not primarily a book about Fassbinder. Or rather, it is not primarily interesting as a book about Fassbinder.” In the latest issue of Bookforum, Dennis Lim reviews Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, “a work of biographical criticism with strong views on the genre’s pitfalls and limitations.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Antigone (Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub, 1992).
- Copenhagen, October 1 through 31: The Danish Film Institute will present a retrospective of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub's films, titled (in translation) "Volcanic Love and Fiery Images." They will contextualize the screenings with a series of lectures, as well as a newly published dossier assembled by the film journal Balthazar.
- London, October through December: Programmed parallel to his exhibition at ICA London, Gray Wielebinski’s Film Club is a series in which the artist has selected a number of science-fiction-inflected films that foreground paranoia. Among them are Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), Akira Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear (1955), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982).
- New York, October 20 through 26: BAM hosts the first ever U.S retrospective of the French-Martinican playwright and filmmaker Julius-Amédée Laou. The series includes new restorations of his early short films, plus a screening of his debut feature The Old Sorceress and the Valet (1987).
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- In a new episode of the MUBI podcast, Ken Loach reflects on a long career spent telling the stories of working people upon the UK release of his film The Old Oak, a call for solidarity in a northern industrial town.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Knock Off (Tsui Hark, 1998).
- Counterfeit designer jeans and scalar whiplash: Tsui Hark’s Knock Off channels the flux of a globalized world on the edge of Y2K. To mark the film’s 25th anniversary, Jonah Jeng writes about the Hong Kong action film’s hyper-kinetic pleasures.
- "NYFF Main Slates give us a fascinating snapshot of a certain time in film history, and remind us how some films endure while others disappear." As this year’s New York Film Festival kicks off, Adrian Curry’s Movie Poster of the Week column looks back half a century, reviving the posters of the 1973 lineup.
- “You Hurt My Feelings makes a strong case for the idea that ‘entertainment’ doesn't have to stand in opposition to art that reveals a deeper despair about navigating the world”: Rafaela Bassili explores the everyday dramas of Nicole Holofcener, whose body of work epitomizes the vitality of the mid-range drama.
EXTRAS
- Covering everything from “a 1948 report on Hollywood’s reaction to HUAC through a 2001 visit to the set of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums,” The Film Desk have published Film Business, a collection of film writings by Lillian Ross, a staff writer at the New Yorker for seven decades.
- Jordan Peele and the science-fiction and fantasy editor John Joseph Adams have co-edited an anthology of stories of Black horror, “exploring not only the terrors of the supernatural but the chilling reality of injustice that haunts our nation.” The collection is titled Out There Screaming and is out now.
- Or, if either of these two volumes don’t catch your fancy, Sabzian have shared their always handy roundup of the season’s film-related books. Included are new translations of Shigehiko Hasumi’s book about Yasujirô Ozu and of various works by Nicole Brenez.