Edited by Adam Cook
- Above: there is no news this week more monumental than that of the return of Twin Peaks. In 2016, we'll have nine new episodes, all directed by David Lynch.
- The 72nd issue of Senses of Cinema is now online, and amidst a plethora of content, features an amazing dossier on "one of the true legends of Australian screen culture," John Flaus. Also included is a piece by Tony McKibbin on a new Alain Robbe-Grillet box set—and in MUBI US, we're currently hosting a retrospective on the Robbe-Grillet featuring Trans-Europ-Express, L'immortelle, Eden and After, and Successive Slidings of Pleasure.
- Writing for Reverse Shot, Adam Nayman offers his two cents on Mia Hansen-Love's Eden:
"Time is a weapon in the movies of Mia Hansen-Løve. The gaping narrative holes in the middles of All Is Forgiven, The Father of My Children, and Goodbye First Love are exit wounds, portals through which key characters suddenly escape (or are forcibly taken), leaving the protagonists who’ve previously leaned on them in varying states of limbo and loneliness. As a narrative strategy, it’s devastatingly effective, if also at this point a little bit familiar. It’s the go-to move of a writer-director whose gift for creating fleeting sensations could also be taken as a sign of discomfort with traditional dramatic presentation. Faced with the sorts of pivotal moments that are usually placed at the center of other movies, Hansen-Love excuses herself from the action, as if she can only truly find her bearings—if not her comfort zone—amidst a bad situation’s aftermath."
- Speaking of Hansen-Løve, details about her next feature, which will star Isabelle Huppert in a role inspired by the director's mother, have come out.
- It sounds like the great Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov's next film is bound for Berlin or Cannes, according to Screen Daily.
- Above: William Friedkin stops by the Criterion Closet!
- Over at his blog, Girish Shambu shares his thoughts on two films he caught at TIFF, the Dardennes' Two Days, One Night, and Jessica Hausner's Amour Fou—as well as rounding up his "recent reading".
- In his latest blog entry, Richard Brody argues that David Fincher's Gone Girl is his Eyes Wide Shut:
"As Stanley Kubrick did in his final film, Fincher lifts the lid off the black box of marriage. He reveals the core of unredressed resentment, unfulfilled desire, inescapable duplicity, unrelieved anger, unresolved doubts, unrevealed secrets, and relentless self-abnegation on which the life of a couple depends. But Gone Girl goes a step beyond Kubrick’s film, by rooting the action in the particulars of the digital age. The new public realm—the intentional representation of private life in public view and the way that those representations quickly get out of hand—is at the center of Fincher’s movie. And it’s from here that the movie’s modernity, immediacy, and urgency arise."
- Above: in case you missed it, watch Tony Zhou's video essay on David Fincher, "And the Other Way is Wrong".
- Thanks to David Phelps for passing this incredible piece along: in The White Review, poet & art critic Raphael Rubinstein recounts his experiences with the mysterious filmmaker Yves de Laurot (who founded Film Culture with Jonas Mekas) in a 15-year old piece, now revised with new developments involving fated actress-screenwriter Zoë Lund (Ms. 45, Bad Lieutenant) in what is a fascinating personal saga.
- Above: a 'vinyl homage' to Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter from "A Very Large Evil Corporation".
- At RogerEbert.com, Dan Callahan eulogizes Marian Seldes:
"It was only when she reached her sixties that Marian Seldes finally started to become appreciated for what she was: a rare and sensitive actress who was a beacon and example for everyone who worked in the theater. She approached the theater like a nun approaches Christ, with reverence, awe, wonder. 'The theater is my utopia,' she once told me. There she would be at every opening, resplendent in her purple velvet outfit, as excited as a schoolgirl over what she might see that night. Quite often, I would stop watching the play we were seeing and start watching her vibrating reactions to it in the audience. She had a way of taking everything in that was so sweet, and nearly comic, but saved from that by her romantic intensity, her laser-like focus, her concentration, which would not waver. Her story is the story of someone who was made to wait, and wait. It is a story of drudgery, of ruined hopes, and of abiding patience that was finally and amply rewarded."
- Kudos to The Film Stage for assembling the soundtrack for Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice here.
- Speaking of Vice, Max Nelson writes on the film for Film Comment in the third of his NYFF diaries.
- Above: via Criterion, Toshiro Mifune poses for a production photo for Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.