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NEWS
Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, 2022).
- Everything Everywhere All at Once swept the 95th Academy Awards this weekend, winning Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Editing, and three of the four acting prizes. Read the full list of winners here, and keep your eyes peeled for commentary from our end soon.
- According to The Hollywood Reporter, Quentin Tarantino is preparing to shoot what could be his final film, The Movie Critic, this autumn. It's set in mid-1970s Los Angeles and will center on a female lead; many are speculating the film could be about Pauline Kael. (Recently on Notebook: read Carlos Valladeres on Tarantino's forays into the written word.)
- Finally, Jacobin reports on VFX-IATSE’s efforts to organize visual effects workers, citing a recent survey that highlights uncompensated overtime and overwork.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Expanding from a conversation published in Notebook, Ukrainian poet Natalka Bilotserkivets and filmmaker Zoya Laktionova talk about life and art during wartime, in the latest of the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination’s regular series of “Library Chats.” Their initial conversation and collage can be found in Issue 2 of Notebook, available now in select stores.
RECOMMENDED READING
Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022).
- “As much as I dislike rote wrap-ups shaded in warm Spielbergian glow, I would rather see the parent-child-hug ending with a working-class Asian family who owns a laundromat and has tax problems than in the usual mid-America, middle-class unit.” An event as anticipated as the ceremony itself, just prior to the Academy Awards, A. S. Hamrah shared his annual Baffler roundup of bite-sized reviews of the films in contention.
- For the New Left Review’s Sidecar, John-Baptiste Oduor examines the work of Alice Diop, a filmmaker who “often refers to her work as an attempt to draw attention to the margins.”
- “Sometimes the way history is recorded produces stories that are as revealing than the historical facts themselves.” For Screen Slate, Clara Miranda Scherffig speaks with Ulises de la Orden about his film The Trial (2023), which details Argentina’s 1985 trial of the military junta that took control of the country during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.
- “Taking in the supersaturated repertory cinema scene of New York, one begins to piece together an alternate narrative to what more general audiences want.” Max Carpenter initiates a new Reverse Shot column on repertory cinema with a survey of New York’s cinemagoing “trends and the audiences that drive them.”
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Swimming in Your Skin Again (Terence Nance, 2015).
- Philadelphia: “Swarm” is Terence Nance’s first solo museum exhibition, which is on display until July 9 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. The interdisciplinary show features a newly commissioned two-channel installation, Can’t Tell These Kids Nothing (2023), starring poet Fred Moten and Nance’s mother Vickie Washington. Interview recently hosted a conversation between Nance and Solange, in which they talk about the show.
- Paris: At the Centre Pompidou from March 16 through 20 is a retrospective of the films of Joanna Hogg. Alongside select screenings is a free master class with the director.
- New York: “Up The Illusion” has been created to celebrate the 90th birthday of legendary avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs. Running at 80WSE Gallery from April 15 through November 26, the exhibition has been curated by Andrew Lampert to feature “a panoramic selection of Jacobs’ nearly 70 years of pioneering films and digital videos.”
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
Milisuthando (Milisuthando Bongela, 2023).
- Recording at the True/False Film Festival, Film Comment’s Devika Girish talks with two filmmakers with work in the festival, Burak Çevik and Milisuthando Bongela, plus festival programmer Jonathan Ali, about the prominence of personal and political films in the program.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Tár (Todd Field, 2022).
- Helen Charman unravels the “analyses of power” in Todd Field’s Tár, drawn specifically to Lydia Tár’s conduct as a professor. “In order to get what she wants from younger women in subordinate positions,” contends Charman, “Lydia utilizes the rhetoric of empowerment, collectivity, and growth, framing manipulation as mentorship and tyranny as pedagogy.”
- “Cinema itself is a somnambulant affair. The cinemagoer is himself a somnambulant, because he is physically present but also absent. He doesn't have a body.” Christian Petzold spoke with Luise Mörke and Tobias Rosen about Afire, his Silver Bear–winning film from the Berlinale.
- “I didn't want a vampire or werewolf. I wanted Perpetrator to feel believable, to ground its logic in reality, even if it had elements that were mythological or allegorical.” Jennifer Reeder tells Sophia Satchell-Baeza about Perpetrator, her new “blood-slicked supernatural noir” (Satchell-Baeza’s words) from Berlin’s Panorama section.
EXTRAS
- Accomplished thespians Jeremy Levick and Rajat Suresh were invited by the very-real publication The Hollywood Recorder to an “acting roundtable” about their craft. All kidding aside, the comedians’ new video is a note-perfect parody of self-serious, awards campaigning. Justin Theroux joins the duo at the (physically) largest roundtable they’ve ever seen, and Suresh reveals the extensive prep work he undertook for a one-line role in Severance.