Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- Michel Brault, one of the great Canadian filmmakers, passed away at the age of 85. Our community has started a couple of threads to commemorate the acclaimed artist in our forum.
- The Mill Valley Film Festival kicks off tomorrow and runs until the 13th. We've written on a few of the highlights: 12 Years a Slave; Gloria; Like Father, Like Son; The Missing Picture; and The Wind Rises. Also make sure to check out the digital restoration of My Neighbor Totoro (one of this author's all-time favorites).
- Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street currently clocks in at three hours, much to the chagrin of Warner Bros. Its slated November release date is reportedly unlikely to hold as the distributors are asking the filmmaker to make some cuts. Rumors say Scorsese may not bend so easily, making a 2013 release uncertain at this point.
- Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof was detained upon arrival back in Iran after living in Hamburg. He was released shortly after in time to attend the Hamburg Film Festival. Vadim Rizov has a brief chronicle of what took place at The Dissolve.
Finds.
- Above: more festival trailers like this one please!
- Paul Schrader has called out Lindsay Lohan publicly, on Facebook.
- In time for the film's premiere at the New York Film Festival. Keith Uhlich has published a blurb on James Gray's The Immigrant for Time Out New York, but here's a link to his glowing full review from Cannes (and keep your eyes pealed for an interview with Gray by yours truly in the Notebook soon!):
"I often found myself second-guessing the film, questioning how, and if, it would all come together, even as all the elements casually, masterfully accumulated and coalesced, building to as pure a powerhouse of a climax as I've ever experienced. I won't soon forget the storm of emotion that overcame me upon the film's sublime final fade-out: The shock of the old made new, a miracle achieved, a great movie rising before me—like a delusion, like a dream."
- Above: the new poster for Denis Villeneuve's Enemy.
- Speaking of the French-Canadian filmmaker, Michael Nordine is not too impressed with his first English-language film, Prisoners. From Cinema Scope Online:
"It’s strange that, for a film with more than one outwardly religious character (especially Keller himself), there’s almost no thought given to the moral weight behind a single action carried out over the film’s 153 minutes. Rather than an intentional show of cynicism, this reads as a simple lack of depth. The what and how of this case are exhaustively detailed by Gyllenhaal’s fastidious detective, but the why is barely even an afterthought—a rushed monologue delivered during the climax that’s tantamount to a comic-book villain gloating over his dastardly deeds. Sadly absent from all this is the evocatively impressionistic approach that Villeneuve brought to Polytechnique (2009), whose fragmented depiction of the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre in Montréal raises more disturbing questions about the nature of violence in 75 minutes than Prisoners does in more than twice the running time."
- Ted Fendt translates Jean Renoir's "The Grandeur of Primitives", orginally published in Ciné-Club in 1948.
- Our friend Fernando F. Croce has a beautiful new piece on Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises for Reverse Shot.
- "Planète Marker" is a new exhibition on Chris Marker coming to the Centre Pompidou and Raymond Bellour has written a lovely introduction.
From the archives.
- Above: via the Criterion Collection, amazing home movie footage by Ingrid Bergman from the set of Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli.