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NEWS
- The poster for Hong Sang-soo's latest, Introduction, which will compete at this year's Berlinale. The competition slate for the 71st Berlin International Film Festival features a wide range of heavy hitters, from Hong and Radu Jude to Aleksandre Koberidze and Céline Sciamma. The competing titles, as well as the rest of the lineup, can be found here.
- The lineup for this year's SXSW Film Festival has been announced. The roster includes the directorial debut of House of Psychotic Women author Kier-La Janisse, a documentary on musician William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, and a restoration of Les Blank's I Went to the Dance.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- From February 17 to February 23, the National Gallery of Art is screening the series "The Voice and Vision of Billy Woodberry." The series includes Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts, a landmark work of the L.A. Rebellion.
- The official trailer for Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which will have its world premiere at Berlinale. The film contains three tales of "coincidence and imagination" that occur in the lives of three different women. In a statement given to Variety, Hamaguchi said: “Please enjoy being surprised by the unexpectedness of the world.”
- A clip from Hong Sang-soo's Introduction, about a young man's "introduction to life." The film stars Shin Seok-ho, Park Mi-so, and Kim Min-hee.
- Éric Baudelaire's Un film dramatique will be opening to virtual cinemas on February 26. The film documents the four-year-long journey of 21 middle schoolers who film the drama of their everyday lives.
- The official trailer for Julian Radlmaier's Bloodsuckers features vampire bites, chickens, and Marxists.
- Ahead of its premiere at Berlin, a trailer for Swiss filmmakers Ramon and Silvan Zücher's thriller The Girl and the Spider, their follow-up to The Strange Little Cat.
- Shudder's trailer for Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli's revenge horror film, Violation, which premieres on March 25.
- Social Hygiene, Denis Côté's new film, will be premiering in the Encounters section at Berlin. The comedy follows a man urged by five women to "get his life back on track."
- Co-director of Il Cinema Ritrovato Ehsan Khoshbakht's debut film Filmfarsi gathers footage from more than 100 Iranian films from before the revolution to formulate a "secret history of an Iranian cinema" between 1953 and 1979.
RECOMMENDED READING
(Above: Shelley Duvall by Eric Ryan Anderson.)
- For Hollywood Reporter, Seth Abramovitch has written a wonderful profile of the elusive legend Shelley Duvall, who left Hollywood for Texas Hill Country 27 years ago.
- "The best streaming platforms, such as the Criterion Channel and MUBI and traditional outlets such as TCM, are based on curating—they’re actually curated.) Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else." Martin Scorsese's tribute to Federico Fellini in Harper's is also a moving tribute to the treasures of film history and the value of curation.
- In a new interview with SSENSE, Janicza Bravo, director of the long-anticipated Zola, discusses the influence of Kathleen Collins and her penchant for "stress comedy."
- A roundtable assembled by the New York Times gathers the perspectives of Lulu Wang, Lee Isaac Chung, Bing Liu, Alan Yang, Justin Chon, Sandi Tan and Mira Nair on the difficulties of navigating Hollywood and staying true to oneself as an Asian-American filmmaker.
- Ian Wang reflects on Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together, a raw gay romance that speaks to Wong's wider fascination with Hong Kong migrant cinema.
- Notebook contributor Steffanie Ling's essay on Isiah Medina's Inventing the Future considers the film in relation to Soviet montage, Canadian social policies implemented during the pandemic, and a deconstruction of the temporal order.
- In memory of the late Tunisian filmmaker Moufida Tlatli, Sight and Sound has published a 1995 conversation between Laura Mulvey and the filmmaker on the legacies of colonialism and patriarchy in her debut feature The Silences of the Palace.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett's previously unreleased soundtrack for Spike Jonze's Her (2013) is now available for pre-order at Milan Records. Though the vinyl is sold out, you can still order a cassette!
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Cathy Yan introduces her prescient film Dead Pigs, which is exclusively showing on MUBI in the Debuts series. For her Close-Up on Dead Pigs, Elizabeth Horkley explores the multifaceted and carefully developed humans at the film's center.
- Sophia Satchell-Baeza's Close-Up on John Smith's Citadel places the film in the avant-garde lineage of the city symphony.
- "The resultant film is an unbridled surrealist epic, an insurgent attack upon the biopic form and a lament for 21st Century nihilism." Matthew Rankin introduces his debut feature, The Twentieth Century. The film is showing exclusively on MUBI as part of the series Festival Focus: Berlinale.
- For the Current Debate, Leonardo Goi reports several highlights from this year's COVID-era Sundance Film Festival.
- Jonah Jeng's latest entry in the Action is on the near-parodic exaggeration of violence in Scene Shigehiro Ozawa’s grindhouse classic, The Street Fighter (1974).
- In his introduction to his film Digger, Georgis Grigorakis discusses the "two-fold dimension of human nature and nature itself" that lies within every truth, and that serves as the center of his film. The film is showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries in the series Festival Focus: Berlinale.