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NEWS
Hong Sang-soo's The Novelist's Film (2022)
- The competition slate has been announced for this year's Berlinale, featuring the latest by Hong Sang-soo, Claire Denis, Rithy Panh, Phyllis Nagy, Ulrich Seidl, and more. Find the rest of the lineup here. In an interview with Variety, executive Mariette Rissenbeek and artistic director Carlo Chatrian discuss their plans for the festival to be an in-person event.
- Actor Michel Subor has died at the age of 86. Subor captivated audiences with his performances in films like Jean-Luc Godard's Le petit soldat (1960)—he also was the narrator for François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962)—and a number of films by Claire Denis, from Beau travail (1999) and L'intrus (2004) to White Material (2009) and Bastards (2013). We recommend reading Yasmina Price's excellent essay on L'intrus and Subor's distinct historiography as an actor.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The trailer for Dominik Graf's Fabian: Going to the Dogs, an adaptation of Erich Kästner’s classic novel. Read editor Daniel Kasman's review from Berlinale here.
- To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Paramount is re-releasing the film in select theatres on February 25.
- Over at Vdrome, you can watch Amalia Ulman's Sordid Scandal, a performance piece that details the making of her debut feature El Planeta, with some fictitious elements woven in. In an interview with Manuel Segade that accompanies the piece, Ulman discusses her ongoing interest in "fiction, manipulation and propaganda, in taking formats known for their legitimacy and subverting them."
- Jodie Mack has directed the music video for the new song by Matchess, entitled "Through the Wall [Excerpt]."
- Peter Nestler's latest film, Picasso in Vallauris, is streaming for free online at the Museum Ludwig. Commissioned by the museum for an exhibition titled “Picasso Shared and Divided: The Artist and His Image in East and West Germany," Nestler's film is a meditation on the influence of Picasso's stay in Vallauris on his work, as well as those around him. Kino Slang has published an article by Libertad Gills about the film, which Gills describes as "nothing short of perfection." We had the opportunity to speak with Nestler in 2012, for an in-depth conversation on his uncompromising approach to documentary filmmaking.
- DAFilms.com is currently hosting Made in Japan, Yamagata 1989 - 2021, the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival's first online program made available worldwide for free. The series includes Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Ko Sakai’s Storytellers (2013), about survivors of the 311 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Naomi Kawase's The Weald (1997), and Yang Yonghi's Dear Pyongyang (2005). For Screen Slate, Abby Sun provides an overview of the Made in Japan, Yamagata 1989 - 2021, and the power of the festival's pluralist outlook in "its assertion of who and what constitute Japan and Japanese documentary films."
RECOMMENDED READING
John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus (2006)
- John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, the sexually daring NYC comedy that was Mitchell's follow-up to Hedwig and the Angry Inch, is arriving to theaters in a new 4K restoration. In an interview, Mitchell reflects on the impact he thinks the film may have on today's moviegoers.
- For the New Yorker, Richard Brody has written on the pointillistic vision of Miklós Jancsó's cinema, now on display at a Metrograph retrospective. One of the newly restored films is The Red and the White (1967), about the Russian Civil War, which Jeremy Carr describes as "a reserved, unceremonious dance of death upon the landscape" in his essay on the film for Notebook. In their video essay on The Red and the White, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin investigate the film's long takes.
- Reverse Shot has published their list for the top 10 films of 2021, with Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Memoria taking the top spot. Capsules for each film are written by critics including Juan Barquin, Katherine Connell, Caden Mark Gardner, Chloe Lizotte, Beatrice Loayza.
Above: Todd Haynes's The Velvet Underground (2021) (Courtesy of Apple TV+)
- In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine by musician Jim O'Rourke, Todd Haynes shares his process behind the making of the documentary, The Velvet Underground.
- The new issue of Cinema Scope features Michael Sicinski on Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, Adam Nayman on Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza, Beatrice Loayza on Joachim Trier's The Worst Person in the World, and an obituary by Steve Macfarlane dedicated to the late Mexican filmmaker Felipe Cazals.
- A.S. Hamrah looks back on a year of pandemic cinema, with many hits (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Zola, and El Planeta) and plenty of misses (Bergman Island, Don't Look Up, and more).
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Listen to a haunting new Tindersticks song, "Both Sides of the Blade," from the new album Past imperfect : the best of tindersticks ’92 - ‘21. The song was written for Claire Denis's upcoming film of the same name, starring Juliette Binoche.
- From NTS Radio's Sounds on Screen series, an hour of tunes from the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Anthony Hawley's reflection on Pedro Almodóvar's Parallel Mothers uncovers the film's "autopsy [...] on maternity, family, and national politics."
- Kayleigh Donaldson writes on the Hollywood career of the late Joan Didion, specifically Frank Perry's adaptation of her novel Play It as It Lays (1972).
- Adrian Curry of Movie Poster of the Day remembers the life of Peter Bogdanovich with a collection of gorgeous Eastern European posters for his 1970s titles.
- Jeremy Carr's essay on Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation delves into the film's layered and obsessive construction.
EXTRAS
- According to Deadline, Peter Bogdanovich's final project—or rather, his last picture show—will be the posthumously released NFT called LIT Project 2: Flux. The NFT stars Kim Basinger who performs "emotional expressions [that] vary in time with the movement of a token in the market, and it will be released exclusively on the Ethereum blockchain on January 25.
- At BFI, Adam Scovell visits five locations from François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and documents how they are today.