NEWS
- Most exciting for us this week is the news that the Cannes Un Certain Regard prizewinner this year, Juho Kuosmanen's wonderful debut film The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, will be having its North American premiere in the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival. MUBI is distributing the film theatrically and digitally in the United States and United Kingdom.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Courtesy of the Criterion Collection, excerpts of Ingrid Bergman's home movies, which include Alfred Hitchcock, made around the time of their collaboration on Spellbound.
- With the full lineup of the Toronto International Film Festival announced and the autumn film season nearly upon us, wonderful trailers have been released in an overwhelming deluge. Here are some of the highlights:
- The much-anticipated restoration and re-release of Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust.
- Hong Sang-soo's Yourself and Yours, which gets a typically wacky trailer.
- Bertrand Bonello's Nocturama, the French director's controversial (though yet to be seen) follow-up to Saint Laurent.
- Sergei Loznitsa's documentary Austerlitz, his next after the tremendous found footage doc The Event.
- Terence Davies' masterful Emily Dickinson biopic, A Quiet Passion. We saw it in Berlin and it is definitely one of the year's best.
- Oliver Laxe's Sufi Western Mimosas, which we saw in Cannes, and after which we interviewed the director.
- Another trailer for another version of Terrence Malick's documentary, Voyage of Time: Life's Journey, this one narrated by Cate Blanchett, who co-starred in his audacious Knight of Cups.
- Kirsten Johnson's acclaimed documentary Cameraperson.
RECOMMENDED READING
- What makes Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight the best Elmore Leonard adaptation? The Moviegoer digs in.
- A new issue of feminist film journal cléo is out, themed around laughter.
- n+1 has a bright and often funny (if not cutting) series of micro-reviews of some of the year's most talked about films, including praise for Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship:
The film is meticulous and quiet, giving each actor a moment to play against the shining perfection of Kate Beckinsale’s scheming Lady Susan, the title character of Austen’s novel. Beckinsale’s performance is as great as any lead’s in any period piece ever made, worthy of Bette Davis in a 1930s Warner Bros. costume drama, but sexier and more subtle.
- We rarely link to writings on television here, but it proved impossible to resist Matt Zoller Seitz's intriguing analysis on the waning quality of dramatic television:
There’s nothing wrong with any of these elements in and of themselves, but when you see them repeated in different guises over the course of almost 20 years, they lose their luster... The questions that these shows once tantalized us with become a matter of housekeeping. When will the main character’s secret — the illness, the murder, the hidden identity — be revealed, and will he or she ever come to terms with the Traumatic Events that made them who they are? How long do we want to stick around until that happens, especially when the show is good but not revelatory, and when every episode runs 45 minutes or an hour, adding up to a story that could ultimately take 60 or 70 hours to consume in its entirety, if it keeps going for six or more seasons?
- Filmmaker and critic Dan Sallitt has released his unpublished 1985 monograph on under-appreciated American director—and Robert Altman protege—Alan Rudolph. Essential reading to catch up on what makes this filmmaker special—and in anticipation of his new film, Ray Meets Helen.
- Jonathan Rosenbaum has posted online his in-depth article on critic and artist Manny Farber's "movie paintings":
If Farber has generally commanded more attention as a movie critic than as a painter, this may have less to do with his grasp of the vernacular in each realm than with the deposits of time and place which locate his verbal pizzazz and iconographic slang in widely dissimilar modes of address and reception, where they register with distinctly different impacts.
- We always recommend reading critic Fernando F. Croce, and his "Movie of the Day" blurb this week, for Jacques Tourneur's great noir Out of the Past, proves why:
The runaway couple's affair is launched beneath sailboat nets and exalted by tropical monsoons, it passes through a tangle of blackmail and murder before the final hail of bullets. "Well, build my gallows high, baby." The apex of film noir is an extension of Val Lewton's lambent death-drive—the uncanny calm with which Jacques Tourneur lays his grids turns the chump's fall into a perverse three-way dance, crystalline to the point of obscurity.
RECOMMENDED LISTENS
- Legendary musician Scott Walker's soundtrack to Brady Corbet's The Childhood of a Leader is now streaming.
EXTRAS
- Michael Mann's photograph storyboards for the heist sequence in Heat. Via @mccrabb_will.