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NEWS
Above: Steve McQueen and his installation "Year 3" at Tate Britain.
- Steve McQueen will be unveiling a new installation, “Sunshine State,” at the International film festival Rotterdam as part of its Art Directions section, which is dedicated to "daring films, installations, exhibitions and live performance." This is McQueen's first major commission since "Year 3," which was exhibited at Tate Britain in 2019.
- Martin Scorsese has set his eyes on his next project with Apple: a biopic about the Grateful Dead, starring Jonah Hill as frontman Jerry Garcia. As Variety points out, Scorsese did executive produce a 2017 documentary series about the band entitled Long Strange Trip. For that series, he described the Grateful Dead as "more than just a band." Hill and Scorsese previously worked together on Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and a Coca-Cola ad for last year's Super Bowl.
- Cinelimite is showing an online program of short films by pioneering Brazilian documentary filmmaker Helena Solberg, which were made right before the director left for the United States. Considered to be one of the only women filmmakers of Brazil's Cinema Novo movement, Solberg's shorts exhibit the feminist vision that continues to define her illustrious career.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The latest short by legendary stop motion animators Stephen and Timothy Quay, 11 Preliminary Orbits Around Planet Lem, is dedicated to the science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, in commemoration of Lem's centenary.
- A new trailer lures us deeper into the grim world of Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley, an adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 noir novel. The film will be released in the United States on December 17.
- As part of the ongoing centenary celebrations dedicated to the programmer Amos Vogel, the inaugural Amos Vogel lecture is now free to watch thanks to Film Society at Lincoln Center and the New York Film Festival. This year's lecture was delivered by filmmaker Albert Serra, who wrote the foreword for the French edition of Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Hayao Miyazaki in The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (2013)
- In a wonderful profile at the New York Times, the great Hayao Miyazaki shares his thoughts on coming out of retirement for his new film, an adaptation of the Japanese children's book How Do You Live? (He admits that he doesn't have the answer to that question.)
- "What does an actor lose when their prosthetics become the star?" For Vulture, Alison Wilmore has written an essay on Jared Leto's unrecognizable visage in Ridley Scott's House of Gucci, and the relationship between prosthetics and the illusion of historical accuracy in an actor's performance.
- A new interview with Keanu Reeves for Esquire follows the actor as he shoots The Matrix Resurrections, reflects on his relationship with River Phoenix, and shares a list of movie recommendations.
- Radu Jude's list of favorite films for Le Cinéma Club encompasses a broad range, starting with TikTok videos and ending with the film adaptation of theorist André Malraux's The Voices of Silence.
- Criterion has assembled six texts by women writers on their relationship to serial killer movies and the complications of spectatorship, from Nadine Smith on Bob Clarke's Black Christmas to Beatrice Loayza on James Benning's Landscape Suicide.
- Luke Goodsell writes at Metrograph on Dennis Hopper's recently restored and rereleased punk film, Out of the Blue, which has "come to seem like an elegy for the teenage cinema of its moment."
- At Mononym Mythology, David Fincher: Mind Games author Adam Nayman and critic Sydney Urbanek have an extended conversation about Fincher's commercials and music videos.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Sandra Wollner introduces her film The Trouble with Being Born as "a sort of anti-Pinocchio, a story in which the machine neither wants to become human nor does it want to conquer the world (as the usual tropes of the A.I. genre go)." The film is exclusively showing on MUBI in most countries in the series The New Auteurs.
- In the introduction to her film Autofiction, Laida Lertxundi recounts her experiences living in New Zealand and Los Angeles. Autofiction is showing exclusively on MUBI in most countries in the series Brief Encounters, as well as part of the series Landscape Plus: The Films of Laida Lertxundi.
- Céline Sciamma's Petite maman was recently MUBI GO's Film of the Week in the UK. For our Moviegoing Memories series, Sciamma discusses her memory of the first time she went to the cinema and what film she'd like to see on the big screen.
- Patrick Holzapfel continues his Full Bloom series with an essay on daisies in Robert Bresson's Une femme douce.
- Greg Cwik writes on Abel Ferrara's thriller Zeros and Ones, which signifies something new and exciting for the American renegade.
- Jennifer Lynde Barker's Notebook Primer charts the thrilling history of Hungarian animation from 1915 to 1989.
EXTRAS
- For those wondering whether Jane Campion might one day direct her own superhero movie, the auteur has a simple response: “I hate them. I actually hate them.”