Edited by Adam Cook
News.
- The Best-of-the-Year lists keep rolling in, so here's a batch of worthwhile entries unveiled in the past week:
- Film Comment - 50 Best Films | 20 Best Undistributed Films
- Indiewire - Critics Survey
- Glenn Kenny
- Scott Foundas
- Slant Magazine
- Michael Sicinski's "The Best of the Rest"
- Village Voice Film Poll
- The latest issue of Cineaste is on shelves now and includes, among other pieces, an article on rom-coms today by Adrian Martin, and a feature by David Sterritt on "Beats, Beatniks, and Beat Movies." Also make sure to look online for exclusive content from Aaron Cutler and Celluloid Liberation Front.
- Above: one of our favorite journals, La Furia Umana, is now shipping its fourth print edition, featuring multiple pieces on Nicholas Ray and Brian De Palma. The 18th online edition is due out by the end of the month, so we'll be checking up on LFU again soon.
- On digital shelves is issue #69 of Senses of Cinema with a wealth of features, festival reports, book reviews, and other various articles deserving your perusal.
- The Museum of the Moving Image has announced it's 2014 First Look series, "the Museum’s annual showcase for inventive, groundbreaking new international cinema." The lineup includes films by Denis Côté, by and about Eric Rohmer, and—most exciting for us—David Cairns and Paul Duane's Natan.
Finds.
- Above: "The Sixth Year is an art world drama series in five episodes, which re-interprets the format of the TV series. Set in the New York art world, it stages the backstage and theatricalizes the social interactions and power games, the aspirations, passions, and everyday realities of the field. The screenplay is based on interviews with artists, curators, gallerists, collectors, and art advisors, whose opinions, anecdotes, and gossip it abstracts and extrapolates into a fictional narrative." The five episodes are directed by Rick Alverson, Loretta Fahrenholz, Alex Ross Perry (whose "Episode 3" is pictured above), Nick Mauss & Ken Okiishi, and Dustin Guy Defa, respectively.
- Fernando F. Croce writes on Stanley Cortez's cinematography for The Night of the Hunter for Moving Image Source:
"Stanley Cortez’s cinematography is the glow of unbalance and neurosis, of fissures widening across psyches. A highlight reel of his oeuvre would play like a montage of classic American cinema’s most vivid meltdowns: Think of Agnes Moorehead’s Aunt Fanny as she cries in the bare living room of The Magnificent Ambersons, Joanne Woodward convulsing as her multiple personalities churn within her in The Three Faces of Eve, or Peter Breck’s frenzy in the asylum ward reaching a literally electric pitch in Shock Corridor."
- The folks over at The A.V. Club round up their favorite film scenes of 2013.
- Above: it may not contain any footage from the actual film, but here's the charming teaser trailer—one of our faves of the year!—for Nathan Silver's Soft in the Head (check out our interview with Silver in case you missed it).
- Part of a series on John Carpenter over at The Vulgar Cinema, Gina Telaroli has a new video essay on Elvis.
- The reviews have begun to pour in for The Wolf of Wall Street, and Max Nelson of Film Comment has some of the first words on the new Martin Scorsese picture:
"That turns out to be especially liberating for Scorsese, who, at 71, has made his noisiest, busiest, wildest movie in years, maybe ever. Nearly everything about The Wolf of Wall Street is giddily excessive: its three-hour runtime, its freeze-frames, its jump cuts, its incessant use of voiceover, its elaborate tracking shots, its FBI raid set to a pop-punk cover of “Mrs. Robinson,” its fetishistic slo-mo shots of vodka-drenched Quaaludes arcing through the air like lemon juice in a Red Lobster ad. But Scorsese has always been a deft pacer of action, and even at his most manic, he knows how to inject space into a film without killing the buzz. In an extended setpiece midway through Wolf, the film slows to a literal crawl: reduced to a quivering mass by a Quaalude overdose, Jordan struggles agonizingly to roll down the four steps of a country club entrance—to reach the car he’ll then use to drive home. (After which point the action spirals into a full-blown slapstick routine involving a stubborn phone cord, a glass table, a Popeye cartoon, and an ill-timed choking fit.)"
From the archives.
- Above: via du jour agnès b. (where other gorgeous works await), Pier Paolo Pasolini, photographed in his home in Rome by Jonas Mekas.