Rushes: "The Northman" Trailer, IFFR Moves Online, Director Fits on Notebook

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NEWS

Above: Drive My Car (2021)

List-making season has fully started. Film Comment released both the top twenty films as well as the top twenty undistributed films of the year, and IndieWire published the results of a massive poll of 187 critics. Vulture's critics have each written about their top tens, and Drive My Car tops both Barack Obama and Screen Slate's annual list. Screen Slate has also included individual ballots from "contributors, friends, critics, and filmmakers," which gave Paul Schrader the opportunity to rank The Card Counter as his pick for the best film of the year.
Due to a nationwide lockdown in the Netherlands, the International Film Festival Rotterdam will be taking place online, cancelling its previous plans for an in-person event.
There are two weeks left to submit to the Sundance Film Festival's 2022 Native Lab, a fellowship that supports emerging Indigenous filmmakers and episodic creators. Per the program's interim director Adam Piron, the program provides funding, mentorship, and a trip to the 2023 Sundance Film Fest.
MoMA has announced the lineup for the 18th To Save and Project, a festival of film preservation that includes Haile Gerima’s Wilmington 10 – USA 10,000, Jean Renoir’s The Lower Depths, Lee Man-hee’s The Road to Sampo, and Orson Welles’s F for Fake.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Robert Eggers' highly-anticipated viking epic The Northman, which follows Alexander Skarsgård as a prince who sets out to avenge his father. Also starring in the Iceland-set film are Björk (!), Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, and Willem Dafoe.

Noomi Rapace continues her folk horror run with Goran Stolevski's You Won't Be Alone, which takes place in 19th century Macedonia and will be premiering at Sundance in January.

In a video message commemorating the 50th anniversary of Anthology Film Archives, Martin Scorsese remembers the "shared love for the art of cinema" that led to the founding of the AFA.

RECOMMENDED READING

Above: Licorice Pizza (2021)

For Cinema Scope, Adam Nayman interviews Paul Thomas Anderson, who discusses the creeping anxieties, elliptical cutting, and waterbeds in his new film Licorice Pizza. We also recommend Jordan Raup's conversation with the film's editor Andy Jurgensen, who's worked with Anderson on his music videos for HAIM and Radiohead.
"To me, it was always obvious that technology is us. It’s an extension of the human body, to begin with. You have a rock, you have a club—it’s an extension of your fist—and then it goes on from there." In a new conversation for Document Journal, Kristen Stewart and David Cronenberg discuss working together on his upcoming film Crimes of the Future.
Sergei Loznitsa's State Funeral, The Event, and Maidan are screening at Metrograph this month. To mark the occasion, Loznitsa has provided his top 10 nonfiction films, from Chantal Akerman's From The East to Peter Watkins' The War Game.

Above: West Side Story (2021)

Steven Spielberg's adaptation of West Side Story is even worse than the original, declares Richard Brody in his razor-sharp review of the film.
"At once mesmerizing and nearly unwatchable, a head rush of digital psychedelia whose formal inventiveness is matched only by its unrelenting obnoxiousness, there has never been anything quite like it—for which we should all take a moment to be grateful." For Metrograph, Nathan Lee on the Wachowskis' singular Speed Racer.
From the Village Voice archives, an interview with Julie Dash about Daughters of the Dust by the great music and cultural critic Greg Tate, who died earlier this month.
A new profile at the New Yorker follows Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood's rise as a film composer, and the creative process behind his most recent film scores for Spencer, The Power of the Dog, and Licorice Pizza.

A24 has published an interview with Hagop Kourounian, whose "Director Fits" account on Instagram curates images of filmmakers in their coolest fits.

RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK

Itonje Søimer Guttormsen introduces her film Gritt, which is showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries in the series Debuts.
"Wife of a Spy is a film that, in much the same way as Hitchcock’s classic, uses the espionage genre as a pretext to interrogate the notions of duplicity and loyalty in the context of marriage." Kohei Usuda gives Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Wife of a Spy its Close-Up. The film is exclusively showing on MUBI in many countries.
Su Friedrich interviews Mary Stephen, an essential artist who has edited Éric Rohmer's final films and numerous award-winning narratives and documentaries from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Turkey, Canada, and South Africa.
Our movie poster columnist Adrian Curry shares his favorite designs of the year.
For Patrick Holzapfel and Ivana Miloš' Full Bloom column, an entry on the presence of quinces in Víctor Erice's Dream of Light.
Paul Attard reflects on Mark McElhatten's ambitious carte blanche program at MoMA.
Patrick Preziozi's Notebook Primer is an overview of the rare film collective, including directors Paul Vecchiali and Jean-Claude Biette, that formed around the French company Diagonale et Co.
For their Under Childhood column, Kelley Dong writes on Dennis Hopper's newly restored punk epic Out of the Blue.

EXTRAS

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of BlackStar, a number of limited edition prints are for sale by artists like Arthur Jafa, Kevin Jerome Everson, Cauleen Smith, and Garrett Bardley.
As we approach the end of the year, let's look back to five years ago, when "Universal accidentally uploaded the IMAX trailer for The Mummy with no sound effects apart from Tom Cruise screaming." (From Isaac Feldberg on Twitter.)

Notebook News