Rushes: Melvin Van Peebles, Paul Walter Hauser, "Licorice Pizza" Trailer

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NEWS

Above: Melvin Van Peebles. (Courtesy of Shadow & Act)

• We're deeply saddened by the news that the great Melvin Van Peebles has died. A filmmaker, director, novelist, playwright, and composer, Van Peebles was a pioneer of independent cinema, best known for his films Watermelon Man (1970) and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971). In an official statement, Van Peebles' son, filmmaker Mario Van Peebles, states: "He was a pioneer, a maverick and one cool cat."
• Exiled Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi has published an open letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, discussing the struggles faced by refugees whose films are censored, banned, and restricted from being shown to the Academy. Ghobadi proposes "a refugee team of filmmakers; they can have their works viewed by a jury and eventually one movie can be chosen from the refugee team."
• Somalia has hosted its very first movie screening in 30 years, at the National Theatre of Somalia. The screening consisted of two short films by Somali director IBrahim CM, Hoos and Date from Hell.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• MUBI's trailer for Dash Shaw's dazzling animated fantasy Cryptozoo. The film comes exclusively to MUBI in the UK, Ireland, Germany and Turkey on October 22.

• A24 has released an official trailer for Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir: Part II, in theaters October 29. Read our review of the film by Leonardo Goi here.

• The trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza is now out. The film follows a young teenage actor (played by Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) in the 1970s as he comes of age in the San Fernando Valley. The film also stars Alana Haim, Cooper Hoffman, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Bradley Cooper, and Benny Safdie.

• NEON's trailer for Pablo Larraín's Spencer, in US theaters on November 5.

• A new trailer for The Beta Test, a satirical thriller written and directed by, and starring independent multi-hyphenate Jim Cummings. Read our interview with Cummings by Jordan Cronk here.

• Khalik Allah has directed "Rest Your," a special performance project for Moncler MONDOGENIUS featuring Solange.

• Le Cinéma Club is celebrating the opening weekend of the 59th New York Film Festival with an online screening of Kiro Russo’s debut feature Dark Skull (2016), a hybrid narrative set in the mines of Bolivia.
• The New York Museum of Modern Art will be showing six new films by Nathaniel Dorsky, made over the last two years.
• For their first UK solo exhibition at Gasworks, Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer are premiering a new commissioned film entitled Nosferasta, a "Rastafarian vampire film" starring and co-written by Brooklyn-based artist and musician Oba. "Nosferasta examines the guilt of being complicit in imperial conquest, while acknowledging the extreme difficulty of unlearning centuries of vampiric conditioning."

RECOMMENDED READING

Above: Paul Walter Hauser in Richard Jewell (2019).

• "He is always someone I feel like I’ve met before, not a product I’ve decided to buy." From Jen Vafidis for Gawker, a love letter to the excellent character actor Paul Walter Hauser, who should be in more movies.

• Criterion has published four essays on the essential films of the late Melvin Van Peebles: Michael B. Gillespie on Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song, Lisa B. Thompson on Don’t Play Us Cheap, Racquel J. Gates on Watermelon Man, and Allyson Nadia Field on The Story of a Three Day Pass.
• Over at Cinema Scope, Jordan Cronk interviews Apichatpong Weerasethakul about the making of his latest film, Memoria.  
• The New Yorker’s archive editor Erin Overbey considers the resemblance between the periodical and its fictional counterpart in Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch.
• In an interview with the Guardian, Mike Leigh—the subject of a new retrospective at the BFI—shares his thoughts on being a scrabbly outsider, casting as a radical act, and how his films are likely to be interpreted today.
• "Any worthwhile movie is more than a script, and much of what Eastwood has to express here is between the lines." Nick Pinkerton reviews Clint Eastwood's Cry Macho for 4Columns.
• Giovanni Marchini Camia provides a thorough overview of this year's Venice Film Festival for the Film Comment blog.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

• For the Film Comment podcast, Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish speaks with Terence Davies, who discusses his new film Benediction. A biopic of the English anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon, Benediction recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK

• Olaf Möller reports from the 2021 Venice Film Festival, which absorbed the challenges of a pandemic-era festival.
• The latest entry in the Movie Poster of the Week column is the 11th annual round-up of the posters for films in the main slate of NYFF.
• In conjunction with the ongoing MUBI series Youssef Chahine: Son of the Nile (which is showing in most countries), we've published for the first time a 1978 interview between Youssef Chahine and Tom Luddy that took place at the Pacific Film Archive.
• In an interview with Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal, Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes discuss shooting The Tsugua Diaries during a pandemic and how the circumstances helped to shape their film.
• Shiv Kotecha introduces the political and poetic work of India's Mrinal Sen. The series Voice of the Unheard: A Mrinal Sen Retrospective is playing on MUBI in many countries.

• On the occasion of the New York Film Festival's retrospective, Jessica Boyall looks back at the influential work of film programmer, critic, and educator Amos Vogel, founder of Cinema 16 and author of "Film as a Subversive Art."
• For the Deuce Notebook, Screen Slate contributor Madelyn Sutton takes a dark and deep dive into the secretive, sexual and seductive world of Nunsploitation.