Edited by Adam Cook
- The 52nd New York Film Festival is shaping up to be an especially high profile event this Fall. Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice is set to premiere there, along with David Fincher's Gone Girl, and Alejandro Iñárritu's bizarre looking Birdman.
- On David Bordwell's blog, he writes on Wes Anderson, and the current state of authorship in cinema:
"Wes Anderson has found a way to make films that project a unique sensibility while also fitting fairly smoothly into the modern American industry. He has his detractors (“I detest these films,” a friend tells me), but there’s no arguing with his distinctiveness. The Grand Budapest Hotel is perhaps the most vivid example of Andersonian whimsy as signature style....I want to look at the auteurish aspects of another Anderson film. Whether you admire him, abominate him, or have mixed feelings, I think that studying this film can show us some interesting things about authorship in today’s film culture."
- The line-up for the Venice International Film Critics Week has been announced.
- Above: via Filmmaker Magazine, Richard Linklater shares an amazing Dennis Hopper anecdote.
- Variety's Scott Foundas has mixed feelings on Woody Allen's latest film, Magic in the Moonlight:
"Whenever Firth and Stone are onscreen together, the movie sings; the rest of the time it’s never less than a breezy divertissement."
- Prepare to get jealous: the Harvard Film Archive is presenting "The Complete Fritz Lang".
- David Lynch Geometric Leggings, anyone?
- From his Movie of the Week column, Richard Brody writes on John Cassavetes' Love Streams:
"Cassavetes was gravely ill (with cirrhosis) at the time, and Love Streams is both a self-revealing look at a liberally alcoholized way of life and a self-conscious farewell to life itself. Born in 1929, Cassavetes was a paradoxical figure—a radically modernistic spearhead of the art of the nineteen-sixties and seventies whose temperament and habits belonged to the brassy and gritty, elegant and hardnosed forties and fifties. The rattle and splash of anticipation in a lowball glass, the purr of mohair from a tuxedo in ballroom glide, and the bruising inflection of the word “man” bespeak a vanished age of forced elegance and rigid distinctions that Cassavetes’s own art simultaneously embodies and shatters."
- The 20th issue of The Seventh Art is now online, and features video interviews with Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez (preview above!), Bruce LaBruce, and more. Subscribe, for Pete's sake!
- David Filipi has filed a report on Il Cinema Ritrovato for Film Comment.
- In J. Hoberman's home video column for The New York Times, he writes on David Cronenberg's Scanners, now available from the Criterion Collection, and Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin.
- Above: the French trailer for Bertrand Bonello's Saint Laurent.
- Sight & Sound's film of the week is Lav Diaz's Norte, the End of History. Adrian Martin is on the case, and is nay too pleased:
"In some of Diaz’s earlier films (such as Evolution of a Filipino Family, 2004), this very Warholian air of emptiness and artlessness seemed to justify itself well enough: the space between the daily reality that he was staging and the means he was using to record it appeared so thin as to be almost non-existent. There was a certain thrill to this – the kind that persuades you to endure eight-hour screenings, in search of a new kind of filmic epiphany. But as the years pass and the Diaz ‘formula’ hardens, it becomes more difficult to excuse the lack of inventiveness and craft in his work in the name of some spurious ‘neo-neorealism’. Diaz’s most vocal fans do him no favours in this regard: he might become a better, more self-critical director if people stopped reassuring him that every new film he makes is a deathless masterpiece."
- Above: via the Criterion Collection, a look (with Agnes Varda!) at the restoration of Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
- For The Dissolve, David Ehrlich writes on "Radiohead's Motion Picture Soundtracks".
- Lastly, via our Tumblr, an amazing poster for Jean-Luc Godard's Les carabiniers:
