A modest flurry of news has come out of the Cannes Film Festival in the run-up to tomorrow morning's announcement of the lineup for the Official Selection. Nick Vivarelli reports that the festival, running May 16 through 27, will screen the "redux cut" of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America on May 18. When in premiered at Cannes in 1984, the film ran 229 minutes but was cut down to 139 minutes for its US release. The full version's been restored by Bologna Cinematheque in collaboration with Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation and Gucci.
Also in Variety, Justin Chang has yet another roundup of likely candidates for the various lineups. And, as Anne Thompson reports, Sony Pictures Classics has picked up North American rights to one of the likeliest of those candidates, Michael Haneke's Amour.
"Bérénice Bejo, co-star of the hit French silent movie The Artist, is to host the Cannes film festival opening and closing ceremonies next month," reports the Telegraph.
One more minor but kind of fun item. The Playlist's got new interactive character posters for the opening night film, Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom.
In other news. "Alfred Hitchcock is to be celebrated like never before this summer, with a retrospective of all his surviving films and the premieres of his newly restored silent films — including Blackmail, which will be shown outside the British Museum." Mark Brown for the Guardian: "The BFI on Tuesday announced details of its biggest ever project: celebrating the genius of a man who, it said, was as important to modern cinema as Picasso to modern art or Le Corbusier to modern architecture. Heather Stewart, the BFI's creative director, said: 'The idea of popular cinema somehow being capable of being great art at the same time as being entertaining is still a problem for some people. Shakespeare is on the national curriculum, Hitchcock is not.'"
William Friedkin's Killer Joe will open the Edinburgh International Film Festival on June 20.
Reading. Catherine Grant presents "links to all the contents of the latest four issues of the very good, Belgium-based, online journal Image [&] Narrative which treats 'visual narratology and word and image studies in the broadest sense.'"
Zach Campbell: "We're toiling in the fields and factories of the attention economy."
Farran Nehme presents a collection of actors criticizing themselves a little too harshly, in her esteemable opinion.
Christopher Bray reviews John Caps's new book, Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music, for the New Republic.
Today's entry in Reverse Shot's ongoing Spielberg issue: Michael Koresky and Eric Hynes's "Shot/Reverse Shot" on Amistad (1997).
In the works. "Darren Aronofsky is aiming to direct a George Washington biopic called The General," reports Henry Barnes for the Guardian.
In a diary entry running in the Financial Times, Irvine Welsh notes that the team behind Jon S Baird's adaptation of Welsh's novel Filth, featuring James McAvoy, Jamie Bell, Jim Broadbent, Imogen Poots and Eddie Marsan, is "frantically" trying to "get it ready for the Toronto International Film Festival in September." Via Joe Cunningham at the Playlist.
Jim Rash and Nat Faxon, who won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Descendants, will make their directorial debut with The Way, Way Back, featuring Steve Carell and Toni Collette, reports Ryan Gowland at the Playlist. Also: James Ponsoldt will direct Shailene Woodley, the breakout star of The Descendants, in the "coming-of-age dramedy" The Spectacular Now.
Santa Monica. From Phaidon: "David Lynch's cult TV drama series Twin Peaks set a tone that, in the 21 years that have passed since it first aired, has not been surpassed in stylish eeriness nor dark, surreal storyline. Last year, Clifton's Brookdale in downtown Los Angeles held an exhibition entitled In The Trees to mark this anniversary; a year on, the Copro gallery in Santa Monica has brought in curator Rob Wilson to put together a sequel exhibition focusing on the (even) darker side of Twin Peaks to coincide with the 20th anniversary of prequel feature film Fire Walk with Me. The group exhibition features artwork that taps into the Lynchain aesthetic and includes work by Lynch himself."
Berlin. The eighth edition of achtung berlin, the festival of new German cinema from Berlin and Brandenburg, opens today and runs through April 25.
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