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NEWS
- Cineuropa reports on an open letter of protest by "500 Portuguese and international personalities from the film industry" over "a new amendment to the [Portuguese] film law, which relieves national film body the ICA of the responsibility of choosing the juries for the institution’s financial support schemes." The proposed shift in approval power is a significant one, and the protest has drawn signatures from such figures as Leos Garax, Pedro Almodóvar, Aki Kaurismäki.
- The lineup for New Directors/New Films, New York's annual collaboration between the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, is announced and looks great, including Notebook favorites Person to Person (Dustin Guy Defa), Arábia (João Dumans & Affonso Uchoa), The Dreamed Path (Angela Schenelac), The Future Perfect (Nele Wohlatz), and The Summer Is Gone (Dalei Zhang).
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The trailer for It Comes At Night, Trey Edward Shults's follow-up to Krisha.
RECOMMENDED READING
I was an artist. I was not yet thirty. I lived alone most of the time, in a messy room. My films did not do well. I wrote screenplays for films I produced with nothing. I met Jean, a movie actress who was no longer making films. She chose to kill herself. A woman with Jean’s face appeared to me in a dream.
- Such are the opening lines of French director Philippe Garrel's 1984 text, "I Made a Film with Jean Seberg," generously translated by the Metrograph, about his experience with early film made with Seberg, Les hautes solitudes (1974).
- Alongside our own coverage of the on-going Berlin International Film Festival, we've been checking and cross-checking critic.de's jury grid gathering the ratings (and links to reviews) of many prominent critics, as well as avidly following David Hudson's diaries at Keyframe:
The danger inherent in overrating a good film like A Fantastic Woman is that it raises expectations to an unwarranted degree. The danger in underrating a very good film like Thomas Arslan’s Bright Lights—and many critics so far have been outright dismissive, though the scores on Critic.de‘s Berlinale jury grid are, on average, encouraging—is that a major work in an undeservedly overlooked oeuvre will be reduced to a footnote. For the time being; I have a hunch that, in the long run, Bright Lights will come in for the recognition it deserves.
- Designer Christian Annyas has made a fun survey of typography in Stanley Kubrick's films.
- At Vanity Fair, Lily Anolik investigates Pauline Kael's foray into a Hollywood career under the wing of Warren Beatty:
"It was a classic story of sexual suspense, Kael and Beatty the lover-adversaries. She was from the New Yorker family, a publishing-world institution, and revered, but also middle-class, priggish, and convinced of its own virtue. As the rebellious daughter, she was forever threatening to send daddy Shawn to an early grave. Yet she was wild only to a point, and still very much in the fold. Beatty was the dark prince of Hollywood, an aristocrat-rake living a life of excess and indulgence."
EXTRAS
- The first image from Terrence Malick's upcoming WWII film, Radegund.
- From our Tumblr, Korean posters for Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, with drawings by Kim Seongjin and designs by bitnaneun.