RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Paul Thomas Anderson has directed a relaxed, plaintive music video for Radiohead's "The Numbers."
- The teaser trailer for Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart's truly odd-ball psychic thriller-melodrama, Personal Shopper.
- The teaser trailer for the second biopic directed by Pablo Larraín this year, Jackie, starring Natalie Portman.
- Tag Gallagher makes some of the very best video essays around, rich in detailed analysis and poetics. Here is his video dedicated to the silent films of The Blue Angel director, Josef von Sternberg.
- Chinese mega-director Feng Xiaogang (Aftershock) won top prize, the Golden Shell, as well as Best Actress, at the San Sebastien Film Festival last month, and we're super intrigued by this irised (!) trailer.
- We think Jim Jarmusch's Paterson is one of the best films of the year. Amazon has cut an unexpectedly lovely trailer for it, though—warning—it has some minor spoilers throughout.
- Okay, this isn't exactly a film, but we simply cannot wait for the new season of Twin Peaks—and speaking of film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me is one of the greatest of the last 25 years—so this teaser of composer Angelo Badalamenti floating through trees, playing keyboards has got us all kinds of excited.
RECOMMENDED READING
Event Horizon, playing in the New York Film Festival's Projections program.
- Tony Pipolo in Artforum calls the Projections sidebar at this year's New York Film Festival "its most impressive to date." Here he is on Ismaël Bahri's Foyer:
People speak like people everywhere, and their visual absence evokes and precludes efforts to stereotype them. Though its aesthetic is spare, Foyer is as rich a conjuring of off-screen space and the tenors of the human voice that fill it as any movie I’ve seen in years. And in embracing the most elemental of cinematic figures, it obviates the features that separate peoples and cultures, just as it dissolves distinctions between film and digital.
- 2016 is the year of Lav Diaz: three prizes for three different films at three different film festivals—not to mention an extensive online retrospective hosted here on MUBI. At débordements, Michael Guarneri has conducted a rich and extensive interview with the Filipino filmmaker, mostly on his film A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, but very much touching on contemporary life in the Philippines:
You wouldn’t believe how many people think that Marcos is a hero. They don’t realize, or they just forgot, that this guy plundered our National Treasury for about 10 billion dollars. He emptied the banks, man ! He murdered and tortured a lot of people, he put the country on the brink of oblivion during his reign. They just forgot about it. This is the result of revisionism. Come to the Philippines, take a cab and the taxi driver will start telling you all the myths about Marcos. He will tell you that if we have highways in the Philippines we must thank our great man Marcos. This is absolutely false...
The French poster for Jacques Becker's Falbalas
- The New York Times has profiled Karina Longworth, host of our favorite film podcast, You Must Remember This.
- There's plenty of good coverage online for the New York Film Festival, but we particularly enjoyed Reverse Shot's look at filmmaker and critic Bertrand Tavernier's documentary, My Journey Through French Cinema, which is playing at the festival:
Tavernier approaches his subject not only as a film lover but also as a film director who knows his way around a set, a man with an inexhaustible appetite for dish about behind-the-scenes goings on and an insatiable curiosity for what makes movies tick, how certain effects are achieved and how things are actually pulled off. (Too young for the New Wave, he is old enough to have met practically everyone, for the lifespan of cinema is only that of two men.) This, again, is a vital and very frequently ignored part of the duty of the film cultural commentariat, usually elided for less knowledge-intensive and demanding approaches like amateur sociology, adjectival avalanches, or How Did This Movie Make Me Feel?
- Max Nelson at Film Comment explores the terrific cinema of Jacques Becker, once Jean Renoir's assistant but generally an under-known—and very great—filmmaker in his own right:
The films Jacques Becker made in a remarkable run between the mid-Forties and the mid-Fifties—including two melancholic crime dramas (Casque d’Or and Touchez pas au grisbi) and three under-seen, tonally unpredictable comedies (Antoine and Antoinette; Rendez-vous in July; Édouard et Caroline)—tend to ripen in an atmosphere of patient observation, letting their characters make an impression slowly and accumulating local and period detail as they move.
EXTRAS
- The German poster for Jim Jarmusch's Paterson.