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NEWS
Above: Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)
- The Cannes Film Festival has announced that this year's edition will celebrate the 40-year career of Tom Cruise (whose Top Gun: Maverick is premiering at the festival) with a full career retrospective.
- Ahead of the reveal for this year's lineup on April 14, Cannes has also confirmed that one of the titles set to premiere will be George Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing, his first film since 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. Described by Miller as being "anti-Mad Max," Three Thousand Years of Longing is a fantasy romance drama starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton.
- New York City's iconic video store, Kim's Video and Music, will be reopening this month inside the new Alamo Drafthouse location on Liberty Street.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- A24 has released a trailer for Alex Garland's Men, which stars Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear. The film follows Buckley's character as she vacations in the English countryside after the death of her husband, only to find herself stalked by something (or someone) from the woods.
- A trailer for Jacques Audiard's Paris, 13th District, a black-and-white assemblage of love stories set in Paris. Written by Audiard, Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius, the film is a loose adaptation of stories by cartoonist Adrian Tomine.
- Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa's satirical film Donbass is finally getting a US release. The 2018 film takes place in the titular region, the site of conflict between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists of the Donetsk People's Republic. Read our review of the film by editor Daniel Kasman here.
- Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos reunite for the short film Bleat, commissioned as part of the Greek National Opera and nonprofit NEON program “The Artist on the Composer.” The film's plot has yet to be shared, but it will be premiering May 6 with live orchestral accompaniment at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Kallithea, Greece.
- The trailer for Janus Films' restoration of David Lynch's 2006 Inland Empire, which was shot in digital video and looks to be even crisper than before. Read an excerpt from critic Melissa Anderson's book on Inland Empire here.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: The Worst Person in the World (2021)
- For Vice, programmer Chris Osborn outlines his attempt to define a "millennial film canon" that accurately and fully captures the struggles of a generation, from Thirteen (2003) to The Worst Person in the World (2021).
- To commemorate the Pasolini centenary, Metrograph has published an excerpt from novelist Gary Indiana's forthcoming book Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984 -2021, about Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film Salò: The 120 Days of Sodom and Pasolini's Sadean vision.
- "It’s curious how the best films can make us feel out of breath, out of shape." For Orion Magazine, Moeko Fuji revisits the aches, shapes, and splits, of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century.
- An insightful report by the Hollywood Reporter lays out the details of and existential questions raised by Amazon’s $8.45 billion acquisition of MGM, including the uncertain future of MGM's intellectual properties.
Above: Top of the Heap (1972)
- For the L.A. Times, Nicolas Rapold interviews actor and director Christopher St. John, whose underappreciated and newly rediscovered 1972 debut feature Top of the Heap is a "wild, fearless mix of genres and tones: race commentary, Afro-Futurist satire, cop-on-the-beat melodrama and fantasy sequences that start trippy and end with gut-punching grief."
- A new profile in GQ finds Nicolas Cage at his eccentric Las Vegas residence, where he discusses his love for Bruce Lee, his plans to be buried in a pyramid, the loss of his father, and his distinct acting style.
- Another Gaze has published Born in Flames and Working Girls director Lizzie Borden's essay on her time spent with the painter Agnes Martin during the seventies.
- "Tellingly, the vast majority of digital films that Hollywood produces bear little resemblance to the guerrilla, made-for-nothing filmmaking that digital cinema once promised." Over at N+1, Will Talvin has written an essay on "how Hollywood killed celluloid" through the industry's push for digital filming technologies and exhibition.
- In an op-ed, critic Justin Chang outlines several changes made to this year's Oscars ceremony, including a Twitter poll for #OscarsFanFavorite, and how the Academy is again "desperate to correct its perceived irrelevance, which apparently means ensuring that Spider-Man: No Way Home gets some sort of recognition during the telecast."
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- From A24, an incredibly gorgeous 5 year anniversary limited edition box set of the soundtrack for Barry Jenkins' Moonlight. The box set includes "11 previously unreleased tracks, over 100 pages of never-before published photography, handwritten sheet music from Nicholas Britell, and an essay by Barry Jenkins."
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- "What I’m seeing now, after all these years when I look at this movie, is the spectacular healing power of narrative, of art, of humor." Patricia Rozema introduces her 1987 film I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, which is now showing exclusively on MUBI in the series Rediscovered.
- Patrick Holzapfel continues his Full Bloom column with an investigation of the troubled symbolism of feminized flowers in Charlie Chaplin's City Lights.
- Wilfred Okiche provides an overview of the Chadian filmmaking great Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. The series Tales from the Fatherland: Films by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, including Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, is showing on MUBI in many countries.
- Leonardo Goi writes on two archival documentaries by Sergei Loznitsa, Babi Yar. Context and Mr. Landsbergis, which offer timely and form-bending history lessons.
- Kelley Dong appraises the films directed by legendary actress Kinuyo Tanaka, the subject of an ongoing retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
- Lawrence Garcia delves into the cinema of Israeli director Nadav Lapid's abrasive films, which push beyond politics into the paradoxical relationship between us and the surrounding world.
EXTRAS
- John Woo's daughter Kim has started an official Instagram for the director, sharing photographs and anecdotes from his storied life, including his love for George Miller's Happy Feet and the posters on his wall.