Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
- The first poster for Christian Petzoldt's Undine, which will be competing at this year's Berlinale. The film (based on a fairytale about a water nymph) follows a young graduate compelled to kill a former lover, driven by a mysterious curse.
- Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony, and Warner Bros. have all struck new deals with film manufacturer Kodak, renewing hopes for celluloid's future.
- Cahiers du cinéma, which was placed on sale last year, has been sold to 20 buyers who hope to maintain the publication's position in cinema history with new "diversifications" that include a "Les Cahiers" festival, masterclasses, and podcasts.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The official trailer for Luca Guadagnino's The Staggering Girl, a short film scored by Ryuichi Sakamoto and produced in collaboration with Valentino’s creative director, Pierpaolo Piccioli. The film, which stars Julianne Moore as the daughter of an ailing painter, premieres exclusively on MUBI on February 15.
- Using neural network-powered algorithms, YouTube user Denis Shiyarev has upscaled the Lumière brothers' Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) to 4K, with a frame rate of 60 fps. The resulting film is a smartphone-quality wonder that will leave you as alarmed and awed as the film's first audiences.
- Netflix has released another behind-the-scenes look at The Irishman, this time focusing on Martin Scorsese's passionate and meticulous (and endearing!) directing style on set.
- The Matchbox Factory's international trailer for Abel Ferrara's Tommaso, about an ex-pat artist in Rome. Editor Daniel Kasman writes that the film "struggles to balance the fantastic possibilities of filmmaking with the day-to-day mania involved in living a fulfilled family and creative life."
RECOMMENDED READING
- "It feels worthwhile to return [...] to Cronenberg’s self-imposed question: can a medium critique itself?" For Fanbyte, Vrai Kaiser argues that David Cronenberg's eXistenZ is the best video game movie ever made.
- The latest edition of USC's Annenberg Inclusivity Institute takes a look at diversity in cinema. The study concludes that 2019 saw strides made in popular films for women and people of color, but the data itself is richly nuanced—Disney, for instance, leads the way for representation of minorities.
- Wesley Morris takes on the Academy Award's Best Picture nominees, considering how each film (in comparison to those not nominated) operates as an "x-ray [...] of the Academy and the movie business."
- In a new interview with Artforum, Sky Hopinka discusses his feature-length debut małni—towards the ocean, towards the shore, Indigenous language revitalization, and "where belonging and its tensions come from." Hopinka's short film Fainting Spells (2018) is currently showing on MUBI in the United States.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Leonardo Goi investigates the uncluttered and subversive cinema of Takeshi Kitano. MUBI's retrospective Takeshi Kitano: Destroy All Yakuza is showing January 18 - March 28, 2020 in the United States.
- Goi also continues our Sundance coverage with an overview of the current discussion regarding the most exciting works shown at the festival, many of which were about women and by women including Eliza Hittman, Miranda July, and Kitty Green.
- "Eastwood is presenting something monstrous, unthinkable: a white man who, with a Freudian longing for authority, is forcibly shorn off the straightjacket of white privilege—the elevated “hero” who becomes the downcast “victim.” Richard Jewell as white melodrama, as reviewed by Uncas Blythe.
- What is revealed through the women behind (or next to) the stars of Alfred Hitchcock's psychosexual thrillers? Joe Brennan considers the supporting women of Hitchcock's Vertigo and Marnie.