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NEWS
Above: Joan Micklin Silver on the set of Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979).
- Trailblazing filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver, best known for films Hester Street (1975) and Crossing Delancey (1988), has died. In an interview with Film Comment in 2017, Silver described the will she possessed as a woman filmmaker who wished to spotlight stories about female relationships and women's labor: "I didn’t want to feel like the woman director. I wanted to feel like one of many women directors."
- The 71st edition of the Berlin Film Festival will be replacing this year's physical event with a virtual European Film Market in March, and a "mini-festival with a series of onsite world premieres" in June.
- The International Film Festival Rotterdam has also announced the lineup for this year's hybrid multi-part 50th edition, to be presented between February 1-7 and June 2-6.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
Above: Warren Sonbert's Hall of Mirrors (1966).
- A belated but essential, exciting find: Gartenberg Media has made avant-garde filmmaker (and protégé of Gregory J. Markopoulos) Warren Sonbert's 1966 Hall of Mirrors available for online viewing. In an overview of Sonbert's sprawling career, Max Goldberg writes: "Bursting with personality in their spectacular stagings of everyday life, his films [are] fundamentally impersonal in their deep-seated irony."
- Sony Pictures has released its first trailer for Pedro Almodóvar's The Human Voice, an adaptation of the play by Jean Cocteau starring Tilda Swinton as a woman who "watches time passing."
- A new film written and directed by Ramin Bahrani (and produced by Ava Duvernay!) makes its way to Netflix this month. Based on the novel of the same name by Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger follows an ambitious, vengeful driver who works for a wealthy couple.
- The official trailer for One Night in Miami..., Regina King's feature film debut. Adapted from the play by Kemp Powers (who recently co-directed Pixar's Soul), the film imagines a fictional meeting between Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke.
- Grasshopper Films presents Valentyn Vasyanovych's dystopian film Atlantis, which won Best Film in the Horzions section at the 2019 Venice Film Festival. The film, which takes place in 2025 Ukraine, opens in virtual cinemas this month.
RECOMMENDED READING
- In a new profile by The New York Times, Vanessa Kirby discusses her preparations to act as a pregnant woman for Kornél Mundruczó's Pieces of a Woman, her season of "training" at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and her pursuit of roles that "scare her."
- Two off-kilter approaches to the annual list-making tradition: Steven Soderbergh has published his end-of-the-year "seen, read" of 2020 (which includes Rick and Morty, L'Avventura, and Written on the Wind), and Kristen Thompson and David Bordwell offer their top picks of 1930.
- Lawrence Garcia reviews Steven Soderbergh's latest, Let Them All Talk, "a film that finds recourse in silence and eloquence in the unsaid, understanding that one often says—and does—more by saying nothing at all."
- For the BFI, So Mayer investigates the queerness of Marlene Dietrich's on and off-screen persona (from her trousers to photographs with fluffy cats) and association with the overt sexuality of Weimar.
- Critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis look back on the "disaster" that was 2020, and wonder what the repercussions and shifts brought about by the pandemic will mean for film culture and the industry—from blockbusters to "small and midsize movies"—moving forward.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- All of our 2020 tributes: Our curators' choices of favorite home viewings and premieres, the best movie posters of the year, a selection of sounds and songs from 2020 movie soundtracks, and our annual Fantasy Double Features!
- Wilfred Okiche also provides a round-up of the best African documentary films of 2020, which "responded to not one, but several crises speaking to the disruptions in real time."
- Jon Jost introduces his gentle, "un-literary" film All the Vermeers in New York. The film is exclusively showing on MUBI in the series Rediscovered.
- One of our newest series, Just One Film, features recommendations of individual films from festivals around the world—the movies you otherwise might have missed that deserve to be discovered. From Mostra de Cinema de Tiradentes and Olhar de Cinema, Ela Bittencourt praises Geraldo Sarno's rapturous odyssey Sertânia, which mines the historical wounds of Brazil's northeastern backlands.
- Noah Fusco's exploration of the "transatlantic controversies of Ireland's cinematic existence" examines Irish representation in films by John Ford, Sidney Olcott, and Brian Desmond Hurst.
- We're also happy to present Full Bloom, a series by Patrick Holzapfel and illustrated by Ivana Miloš, that reconsiders plants in cinema. First up are the brightly yellow sunflowers of Agnès Varda's Le Bonheur, both an industrial crop and an image of happiness.
- Mia Hansen-Løve's All Is Forgiven (2007) is showing on MUBI starting January 7, 2021 in most countries in the series First Films First. For the film's Close-Up, Ross McDonnell points to the film's deft touch upon the indifference and irreversibility of the passing of time.
EXTRAS
- This year's Göteborg Film Festival will host physical screenings for only one attendant. On the lighthouse island of Pater Noster in Sweden, one lucky cinephile will have the opportunity to enjoy exclusive screenings at the film festival for one week.