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NEWS
The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998).
- Joana Vicente has resigned from her post at the helm of the Sundance Film Festival after less than three years. Some industry sources have pointed to a contentious relationship with the board on fundraising matters as one possible explanation.
- This year’s Cannes Film Festival will open with Quentin Dupieux’s The Second Act, a surrealist backstage comedy starring Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, and Raphaël Quenard.
- Concerns about copyright, continuity, tech business models, and the uncanny valley lead industry insiders to speculate that generative AI won’t soon be making its big-screen debut, though it will increasingly be a part of pre-production workflows.
- Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) has opened in Japan to mixed reactions from those living in the long aftermath of the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- IATSE contract negotiations are progressing, though the most contentious matters will not likely be broached until June.
IN PRODUCTION
- Austin Butler will star in Darren Aronofsky’s forthcoming thriller, Caught Stealing, as a former baseball slugger who gets mixed up with the Russian mob.
- Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch will star in Jay Roach’s The Roses, a remake of Danny DeVito’s 1989 divorce comedy, The War of the Roses, scripted by Tony McNamara (Poor Things, 2023).
REMEMBERING
An Officer and a Gentleman (Taylor Hackford, 1982).
- Louis Gossett Jr. has died at 87. The actor was the first Black man to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for his performance as Gunnery Sgt. Emil Foley in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982): “I can’t imagine anyone better than him playing that part,” Richard Gere, his co-star, recently said. He appeared in many films, plays, and television series, including Roots (1977) and the original stage production of A Raisin in the Sun in 1959, as well as the 1961 screen adaptation. Colman Domingo, who starred alongside Gossett in The Color Purple (2023), remembers him as “a teacher and a humanitarian.”
- Joe Flaherty has died at 82. The actor was an original cast member on SCTV and stole scenes in Happy Gilmore (1996), Back to the Future Part II (1989), Freaks and Geeks (1999–2000), and many other films and television series. His friend and collaborator Martin Short eulogizes him in this way: “In SCTV we called him the anchor. In life, he was simply the funniest man in the room. I just adored him.”
- Barbara Rush has died at 97. The actor of stage and screen won a Golden Globe Award for most promising female newcomer for her role in It Came from Outer Space (1953) and went on to star in films including Bigger Than Life (1956), The Young Lions (1958), and The Young Philadelphians (1959).
- Tim McGovern has died at 68. The visual-effects artist got his start on Tron (1982) and went on to win an Academy Award for his efforts on Total Recall (1990) before working on such films as Last Action Hero (1993), As Good as It Gets (1997), and Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023).
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- “The most jealous I’ve been in my entire life is when I found out about Odorama.” Comedian and actor Sarah Sherman drops by Posteritati to inspect her favorite film posters, including one inspired by the scratch-and-sniff audience cards distributed at screenings of John Waters’s Polyester (1981).
- Media Asia has released a trailer for Cheang Pou-soi’s hotly anticipated martial arts actioner Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, starring Sammo Hung and hitting Hong Kong theaters May 1.
RECOMMENDED READING
Peppermint Candy (Lee Chang-dong, 1999).
- “Even as Lee’s films are known for their desolation, we see other moods surface as characters attempt to coexist with their despair.” For the Metrograph Journal, Phoebe Chen interviews Lee Chang-dong on the occasion of a retrospective of his work in New York.
- “And so Triet’s women start to play make-believe: to act; to perceive themselves, in essence, as fictional characters, and to perceive others as characters, too, who might be corralled into a grand literary act of self-reconstruction.” For the New York Review of Books, Merve Emre considers Anatomy of a Fall (2023) and the fictions marriage makes manifest.
- “A people that creates to hide their creation is very strange, especially when you compare it to what happens today when we’re not even capable of making a cake without showing the entire world.” For Filmmaker, Elissa Suh interviews Alice Rohrwacher about La chimera (2024).
- “Unlike any [of his contemporaries], Rozier embodies the tradition of French comedy the way Jean Renoir understood it, relying on everyday adventure, mischief, and the charm of the actors.” Lucky Star presents an English translation of an essay by Rodrigo Moreno (The Delinquents) and Alejo Moguillansky (The Middle Ages) on Jacques Rozier in which those leading lights of the New Argentine Cinema take stock of the influence of an oft-forgotten French New Wave auteur.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The Gang of Four (Jacques Rivette, 1989).
- Los Angeles, April 4 through 7: The Los Angeles Festival of Movies, co-presented by MUBI and Mezzanine, will feature West Coast premieres of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow (2024), Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3 (2023), and more, plus a conversation between Kim Gordon and Rachel Kushner.
- London, April 18: Close-Up Film Centre presents a program of small-gauge celluloid work by Helga Fanderl and Nicky Hamlyn with the artists in attendance.
- New York, May 1 through 31: The Museum of Modern Art presents a tribute to Bulle Ogier, “one of the few truly risk-taking actresses to emerge from the last golden age of European cinema,” including films by Marguerite Duras, Jacques Rivette, Luis Buñuel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Claire Denis, and more.
- New York, May 8 through 14: Film at Lincoln Center presents the 31st New York African Film Festival, celebrating work from the continent and the diaspora.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
La chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023).
- Robert Rubsam digs into Alice Rohrwacher's La chimera (2023), finding a film that “insists on the haunting strangeness of a world in which so much, from the cosmology of the Chauvet painters to the heart of one’s beloved, can remain fundamentally unknowable.”
- “Rather than anointing a blockbuster auteur as the ultimate savior of the medium, we should start by questioning how we can all actively shape its course.” In his latest Current Debate column, Leonardo Goi considers the reactions to Christopher Nolan’s big night at the Academy Awards.
- “I began thinking more and more about hybridity and about how mixing stages of production… could yield something resembling a rhizome.” Jordan Cronk interviews Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias about Pepe (2024), in which he follows one of Pablo Escobar’s “cocaine hippos.”
WISH LIST
Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger (Tso Nam Lee, 1976).
- Severin presents the first volume of “The Game of Clones: Bruceploitation Collection,” an eight-disc box set collecting fourteen new restorations of the films of Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Dragon Lee, Bruce Liang, and other glorious pretenders to Bruce Lee’s vacant throne.
- Waxwork Records presents Pino Donaggio’s soundtrack to Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) as a deluxe double-LP on red and blue colored vinyl.
- Eyewash Books presents Larry Gottheim’s The Red Thread, a book presenting the American avant-gardist’s own reflections on his life’s work beside those of critics and peers including Jonas Mekas, Scott MacDonald, and Heinz Emigholz.
EXTRAS
- Letterboxd has released the inaugural edition of its Popcorn List, an annual survey of twenty recent standout films yet to receive distribution in the US.