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NEWS
Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze, 2024).
- On Criterion’s Daily, David Hudson has shared a useful roundup of films that might be expected to premiere during 2024. Among the inclusions are: Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s first film since Parasite (2019); It’s Not Me, Leos Carax’s latest collaboration with Denis Lavant; and Dry Leaf, the enticing-sounding new film by Alexandre Koberidze (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? [2021]), which is said to be about “a photographer who shoots soccer stadiums [who] goes missing.”
- A list of international filmmakers including Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Costa, Radu Jude, Ira Sachs, Claire Denis, and Abderrahmane Sissako have signed a letter, published during the holiday season in the French newspaper Libération, demanding (as translated by the Film Stage) “an immediate end to the bombings on Gaza, the establishment of humanitarian corridors and material resources demanded by all international organizations and the release of the hostages.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Admirers of Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie, and Emma Stone’s collaboration on The Curse can flock to Fielder’s YouTube channel—he’s posted a rough cut of the pilot for Fliplanthropy, the fictional HGTV show hosted by his and Stone’s characters. It’s very relaxing! Watch below:
RECOMMENDED READING
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949).
- “Growing up and watching his women—seeing them hurry, glance, and pause—I saw that he understood the need to delay before life takes over, knew the breath you must take before a new lap, before you lightly push off the wall and become a new person.” For the New York Review of Books, Moeko Fujii looks in delicate detail at how Yasujiro Ozu portrayed women in his films.
- For Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov surveys all the feature films shot on 35mm in 2023 in a feature now celebrating its tenth anniversary. Among the varied works investigated this time around are Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, and Louis Leterrier’s Fast X—the latter of which was shot almost entirely digitally, save from one key flashback to a moment from 2011’s Fast Five, made before the franchise moved from film to digital.
- “We all belong to a period of Tati’s cinema: the author of these lines belongs to the one that extends from Mon Oncle (1958: one year before the New Wave) to Playtime (1967: one year before the events of May ’68).” The New Left Review has shared an essay on Jacques Tati by French film critic Serge Daney, taken from Daney’s 1983 collection Footlights, newly translated by Nicholas Elliott and published by Semiotext(e).
- “All the crafts that I’ve practiced in my life I’ve done knowing they are either dead or dying.” In an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, screenwriter and projectionist Leah Saint Marie connects poetry and 35mm film projection, both of which involve being a “resurrectionist” of “dying things.”
- “How is it that, let’s say, even now with the situation in the United States there is always a fear that the ultra-right-wing could ultimately achieve horrible things?” For Metrograph’s Journal, Eric Kohn talks to Paul Verhoeven about RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), US politics, the Second World War, the advent of artificial intelligence, and his forthcoming film Young Sinner, his first US production since Hollow Man in 2000.
- “Yorgos Lanthimos has never shot a scene in which people make love. Plenty fuck, no question.” Going long for the Baffler, Kenneth Dillon deconstructs Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023), looking particularly at the film’s “very particular depiction of sex that neither rises to eroticism nor descends to pornography.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962).
- New York, February 1 through 20: “It was in Mexico that Buñuel became a filmmaker, mastering the technical side of the medium and learning to negotiate the conflicting demands of a popular medium.” During February, MoMA is screening 19 of the 21 films that Luis Buñuel made in Mexico, a majority of which were “made for local audiences and created in popular genres, such as the ranchero musical, the folk comedy, the domestic melodrama, and even a marginal horror movie.”
- Berwick-Upon-Tweed, March 7 through 10: Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival returns to the northernmost town in England for their 19th edition. They’ve only shared a small portion of the program so far, but it already offers plentiful highlights: a “discursive event” with Onyeka Igwe, a screening of Heiny Srour’s “often censored and newly restored” The Hour of Liberation has Arrived (1974), and a focus on Palestinian artist Basma al-Sharif.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Gasoline Rainbow (Bill and Turner Ross, 2023).
- Look back on last year with a Spotify playlist of “the songs that soundtracked 2023” compiled by Bill and Turner Ross, directors of Gasoline Rainbow (2023), Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020), and other such boundary-blurring, cross-country adventures.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Shin Kamen Rider (Hideaki Anno, 2023).
- Catch up with our best of 2023 coverage: our annual writers’ poll of Fantasy Double Features, Florence Scott-Anderton’s collage mix of the year in movie soundtracks, and Jonah Jeng’s roundup of the best action scenes of the year (pictured).
- "If we can say The Killer does anything, it’s that it takes the sting out of death." Carlos Valladeres studies David Fincher's latest, which masterfully reflects the fraught relationship between cinema and the "technocapitalist hell-web.”
- Two films epitomizing perceptions of conservative "Frenchness" in fact embrace artisanal labor, ephemeral beauty, and artistic legacy, writes Phuong Le of Frederick Wiseman’s Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros and Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things.
- “I had the desire to write a fairy tale based on the rituals of adolescence and its deeply transformative moments, delving into the euphoric highs and the profound lows; a tale about abandon and escapism through the lens of magic realism.” Christian Avilés introduces his film Daydreaming So Vividly About Our Spanish Holidays, now showing on MUBI.
EXTRAS
Priscilla (Sofia Coppola, 2023).
- “She knew he had a voice that was capable of touching both the divine and, phantom-like, the soul and cunt of every woman in the Western world.” In Screen Shots, her AnOther series of film-inspired pieces of flash fiction, Philippa Snow writes from the perspective of Priscilla Presley, as depicted in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023).
- There are some things we can count on: the changing of the seasons, the sands through the hourglass...the annual January posting of Steven Soderbergh's comprehensive media consumption log. He's shared his list of 2023 viewings, readings, and even in-progress productions on the "Soderblog."