Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July, 2005).
- The Writers Guild of America reached a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, and have voted to end the strike as of 12:01 a.m. PT this morning. A summary of the agreement is available here. Before the details were released, the WGA negotiating committee had this to say in a statement: "We can say, with great pride, that this deal is exceptional – with meaningful gains and protections for writers in every sector of the membership." The WGA has also encouraged their members to support SAG-AFTRA's ongoing picket line.
- A new novel from Miranda July is due out in May of next year: All Fours follows an artist in the throes of a midlife crisis and a messy divorce. While driving cross-country from Los Angeles to New York, she takes a sudden detour to Monrovia, CA, where she feels, per Vogue, "inexplicably drawn to a young man who works at a local branch of Hertz—and his interior decorator girlfriend."
- Joachim Trier's next film, Sentimental Value, will reunite him with Renate Reinsve of The Worst Person in the World (2021). Reinsve's character, Nora, is an actress grieving the loss of her mother while negotiating tensions with her father, an acclaimed filmmaker on the verge of a comeback. Filming is scheduled to start in August.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Todd Haynes's May December now has a trailer; it opens the New York Film Festival this Friday, comes to select theaters in November, and arrives on Netflix on December 1. Reporting from Cannes earlier this year, Lawrence Garcia wrote that May December exemplifies "Haynes’s tendency to use camp artifice to get at emotional truth [and] his belief that authenticity can emerge in the process of holding the pose."
- Bruno Dumont’s next film The Empire now has a trailer. It seems to be his largest-scale project yet, a lightsaber-filled science fiction film featuring key cast members from the P’tit Quinquin films; it's also been the subject of some controversy after French actress Adèle Haenel announced her departure from the project, arguing that Dumont’s script defended a “dark, sexist, and racist world” it attempted to satirize. The film has no premiere date announced yet, but will likely appear sometime in 2024.
RECOMMENDED READING
Man in Black (Wang Bing, 2023).
- “Every time I see one of Wang Bing’s films, I feel that I should probably have more confidence, or I should trust a little more some things that I don’t trust.” Metrograph’s Annabel Brady Brown brings together two titans of cinema, Pedro Costa and Wang Bing, for a conversation about each other's work.
- Reverse Shot are celebrating their twentieth anniversary by publishing a book, an anthology of essays called Reverse Shot: Twenty Years of Criticism in Four Movements, and launching a symposium that lets their writers take a second stab at a film they’ve written about before. In the introduction, editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert note that “so much film criticism is done in the heat of the moment, and all of it is always, usually unbeknownst to the writer, connected to the circumstance, age, and ever-shifting experience of the time of life in which it is written.” The first two pieces in the series are by Imogen Sara Smith, on Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987), and Jordan Cronk, on Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent (2014).
- “In its monumental implacability, 33 Thomas Street seems to herald a posthuman regime, run by algorithm for the sole purpose of perpetuating its own system.” Design critic Zach Mortice provides the online journal Places with a lengthy and fascinating essay exploring the cinematic role of New York’s 33 Thomas Street, a 45-story, windowless building originally built in 1974 for the purpose of connecting long-distance telephone calls. Since then, it’s had a variety of other uses that have made it an ideal set for conspiracy thrillers.
- “‘Be careful,’ a friend warned when I said I’d be spending the weekend at Crossroads, [...] ‘Sitting in the dark that long isn’t good for you. You’ll, like, forget you have a body.’ For Screen Slate, Jadie Stillwell reports on the 14th iteration of Crossroads, San Francisco Cinematheque’s annual experimental film festival.
- “Did it feel the same, at 80, that it did at 25 or 35? No, said Scorsese.” Continuing the press tour for Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese is profiled by Zach Baron for GQ, focusing particularly on the challenges (and still-to-be fulfilled promises) of late life.
- Leo Goldsmith reviews The Trial, Ulises de la Orden’s archival documentary about Argentina’s 1985 “Trial of the Juntas,” for Artforum, finding it to be a film “both comprehensive and (relatively) concise, and which summons an image of the trial that is both ghostly and hyperreal.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- New York, through October 15: Running at an outdoor space in Long Island City, “The World’s UnFair” (above) is an exhibition organized by New Red Order, a “public secret society facilitated by core contributors Jackson Polys, Adam Khalil, and Zack Khalil.” Through its combination of animatronics, large-scale sculptures, video installations, and powwow grounds, the project invites visitors to “play a part in a decolonized future.”
- London (and other UK cities), October through December: Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell + Pressburger is a UK-wide season of films and events celebrating Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Highlights include a screening of Black Narcissus (1947) on 35mm nitrate, introduced by editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and screenings of both Gone to Earth (1950), and The Wild Heart (1950), the version that producer David Selznick re-edited and resequenced for the U.S release.
- Amsterdam, November 8 through 19: Wang Bing is one of the guests of honor at this year’s IDFA, and his excellent “top 10” selection offers a “contemplative journey into contemporary Chinese cinema, with ten titles dating 1999 and later.” Other highlights include focus programs looking at documentaries shot on 16mm, and at documentaries that mix reality and fiction.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Laberint Sequences (Blake Williams, 2023).
- We're wrapping up our Toronto coverage with a pair of dispatches from the editors. Danny Kasman covers festival premieres from festival favorites Hayao Miyazaki and Ryusuke Hamaguchi, as well as firebrands Shin'ya Tsukamoto and Harmony Korine. Elsewhere, Chloe Lizotte unpacks world premieres from Alexander Payne and Atom Egoyan, gets lost in new films from Blake Williams and Eduardo Williams (no relation), and visits a very special art exhibition.
- Drawn in by Rebecca Hall's performance in Resurrection (2022), Philippa Snow writes an appreciation of the "Modigliani-elegant" actress and her talent for playing women on the verge—learn how she's uniquely able to put forth "the air of an apex predator and a shivering prey animal simultaneously."
EXTRAS
Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966).
- "In a move that many people may describe as provocative," begins Deadline, "the Göteborg Film Festival has set Ingmar Bergman’s landmark arthouse drama Persona for an AI-assisted restoration." Called Another Persona, the film will reportedly be made using face-swap-style technology, which will replace Liv Ullmann's face with that of Fallen Leaves (2023) star Alma Pöysti. Aside from clickbait-y headlines, there does seem to be an academic slant to the presentation; it will screen only once for an audience, and will be followed by a discussion of acting and technology.