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NEWS
Above: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria.
- The lineup for the Cannes 2021 official selection has arrived, featuring new titles from Sean Baker, Julia Ducournau, Bruno Dumont, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Mia Hansen-Løve, and even Sean Penn. This year's festival will also see the French premiere of F9, the latest of the Fast and Furious franchise, at a public screening.
- Cannes has also announced its roster for the Directors' Fortnight (which includes Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir Part II!), Critics' Week, and ACID.
- In collaboration with Kino Lorber, Dedza Films has announced the June 11 release of an international short film omnibus showcasing the works of emerging filmmakers from underrepresented communities. Founded by former Kino Lorber intern Kate Gondwe, Dedza will also be publishing a scrapbook of essays by 10 aspiring film critics on the selection of films.
- Rob Zombie has confirmed his next film, a take on the classic sitcom The Munsters. According to Zombie, a huge Munsters fan, he's been chasing this particular project for the last twenty years.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- A long-awaited teaser for Wong Kar-wai's Blossoms Shanghai, based on the novel Blossoms by Jin Yucheng. Blossoms Shanghai stars Hu Ge (The Wild Goose Lake) as a wealthy, self-made man in Shanghai, and follows "his entanglement with four fabulous women." Wong has directed the pilot of the series, which will premiere in 2022.
- An official trailer for Mia Hansen-Løve's Bergman Island, starring Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth as a filmmaking couple whose writing retreat in Fårö, Sweden yields a blur between reality and fiction.
- Ahead of its premiere at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival, Steven Soderbergh's Detroit heist film No Sudden Move now has an official trailer. The film will be streaming on HBO Max July 1.
- The first trailer for Petrov's Flu, the latest by Russian filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov (The Student). The film (about a city in the hallucinatory throes of a flu epidemic in Soviet Russia) will be competing at Cannes this year. However, Serebrennikov remains placed under a travel ban in Russia that human rights organizations have deemed a "baseless targeting," so he will be unable to attend the festival.
- Takashi Miike continues the saga of his 2005 children's fantasy film The Great Yokai War with The Great Yokai War: Guardians. The film, about a young boy who has the blood of a monster hunter, will also feature the famous kaiju Daimajin.
- New York City's Japan Society has announced the series "Cinema as Struggle: The Films of Kazuo Hara & Sachiko Kobayashi," a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Hara and Kobayashi's Shisso Productions. Films in the series are available to rent here.
RECOMMENDED READING
- You can now pre-order Fireflies Press' Memoria, a book of photographs, notes, sketches, treatment excerpts, email exchanges, and more, gathered from the set of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film of the same name.
- Film Quarterly's newest online dossier is dedicated to the many layers of Steve McQueen's anthology series Small Axe, from its approach to Black joy to its depictions of Black masculinity.
- "Intimacy in Tsai’s films is an elusive possession. The desire for it, however, is constant and concrete: it stings, itches, presses, burns." Max Nelson of the New York Review of Books traces the trajectory of intimacy in Tsai Ming-liang's films.
- The latest batch of entries from the Film Comment Letter include Phuong Le on Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple, Devika Girish on Christian Petzold's Undine, and Kit Duckworth on Alice Rohrwacher's Four Roads (currently streaming on MUBI).
- From The New York Times, a closer look at the Federal Trade Commission's ongoing investigation of the MoviePass subscription service.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Hosted by journalist Rico Gagliano, the first season of the MUBI Podcast spotlights movies that were massive cultural phenomena in their home countries, but nowhere else. The debut episode of the MUBI Podcast is now available, and focuses on the success of Paul Verhoeven's infamous Turkish Delight (1973) in the Netherlands.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Dutch critic Dana Linssen expands on her commentary featured in the first MUBI Podcast episode, sharing her personal connection to Verhoeven's Turkish Delight and diving deep into ideas of toxic love and Dutch culture.
- Leonardo Goi's Notebook Primer is a survey on revolutionary films throughout history, from the Russian Revolution to the Hong Kong protests.
- This year's edition of The Video Essay, a joint project of MUBI and FILMADRID International Film Festival, includes Eva Elcano Fuentes' video essay on the history of CGI, Miguel García Otero's video examination of Franco Piavoli's Il pianeta azzurro, and Carlos Baixauli's exploration of experimental cinema by way of Gaspar Noé.
EXTRAS
- The dreamy poster for this year's Cannes Critics' Week features a still from David Robert Mitchell's horror film It Follows, which the festival states is emblematic of its own adventurous ethos: "Genre films are full of parallel worlds that reflect their generation, playful yet unbelievably sharp harbingers of times to come."
- The poster for Wong Kar-wai's Blossoms Shanghai.
- From publisher Microids and developer Pendulo Studios comes Alfred Hitchcock — Vertigo, a narrative adventure game inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. According to Pendulo Studio, however, the game does not use the film as its "only frame of reference."