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NEWS
- The official poster for the the 54th Directors' Fortnight is by multidisciplinary artist Cecilia Paredes. In a statement, the festival points out that Paredes' photo-performance is "both visible and invisible, the artist blends into the image she creates, much like filmmakers do in their films."
- Following the release of Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth, Ethan Coen is setting out to make his own solo directorial debut with a still-untitled "lesbian road trip project that Coen and [his wife, Tricia Cooke] initially wrote in the mid-2000s."
- Gus Van Sant is set to direct the second season of Ryan Murphy's anthology series Feud, which will be based on Laurence Leamer's book Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era. Playing one such woman will be Naomi Watts, who will star as the socialite Barbara “Babe” Paley.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- A24's trailer for Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, Dean Fleischer-Camp's feature-length expansion of the viral 2010 short starring Jenny Slate as an anthropomorphic shell. In addition to Slate, the film stars Lesley Stahl and Isabella Rossellini (!).
- The trailer for Isiah Medina's new feature Night Is Limpid, which follows a group of artists, critics, and collectors who "experience a short holiday from employment through Canada's various emergency response benefits (CERB, CRB)."
- Gaspar Noé's Lux Aeterna has a trailer. The film features Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beatrice Dalle as fictional versions of themselves, making a movie about witches on a set besieged by "technical problems and psychotic outbreaks."
- A stunning restoration of Hungarian filmmaker Michael Curtiz's long-lost 1914 silent film The Exile (or A tolonc) is currently streaming on Henri with English subtitles. The film tells the story of a young woman who learns that her mother has been in prison for years. She leaves for the city to become a maid, and her mother is then released from prison.
- Until April 14, Ultra Dogme is showing five films by American avant-garde filmmaker Larry Gottheim, including The Red Thread (1987), ALA (1969), Natural Selection (1983), Sorry/Hear Us (1984), and Mnemosyne, Mother of Muses (1986).
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Deep Water (2022)
- It's Erotic Thriller Week at Vulture! Bilge Ebiri does a deep dive into Michael Douglas' roles in erotic thrillers as "the ultimate boomer avatar," Chris Lee explores why today's Hollywood is nervous to reboot the genre, and Katie Rife considers the differences between Patricia Highsmith's novel Deep Water and Adrian Lyne's steamy adaptation.
- For Indiewire, Pedro Almodóvar takes us through his adventures at the Oscars, where he considers the cast for his next film and meets Zendaya, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Thomas Anderson, and more.
- Issue #90 of Cinema Scope features an interview with Canadian filmmaker Ashley McKenzie on her film Queens of the Qing Dynasty, critic Angelo Muredda on the evolution of Adam McKay, and editor Mark Peranson on the magazine's top films of 2021.
- The New York Times has published a profile of casting director Jennifer Venditti, whose instinctual eye for faces can be seen in films like Uncut Gems and American Honey.
- Critic Uday Bhatia writes on three recent Indian non-fiction films—Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh's Writing With Fire, Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes, and Payal Kapadia's A Night of Knowing Nothing—that demonstrate an increasing willingness among Indian independent directors to experiment with form.
Above: Videodrome (1983)
- Alissa Wilkinson's essay on Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and Schoenbrun's series for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, “Photographing the Ether: The Internet on Film, 1983-2022," tracks how the story of the internet has evolved over the years, starting with David Cronenberg's Videodrome.
- Yasmina Price writes for Film Comment on video art pioneer Ulysses Jenkins, whose oeuvre "mischievously and unceasingly assaults visual monopolies in popular culture."
- A new issue of Caligari Press is out now, and it includes scholar Patrick Keating on Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, filmmaker and archivist Ross Lipman on home viewing conditions, an interview with Hungarian director László Nemes, and more!
- From the New York Times, an article on Kim's Video, the video store that has been newly revived by Alamo Drafthouse's lower Manhattan theater. In an interview with Indiewire, Kim's Video founder, filmmaker Youngman Kim, discusses the legacy of his collection: "[...] the connection between East to West, underground to the mainstream, and independent filmmakers to Hollywood."
- In his essay on Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider for Artforum, critic and programmer James Quandt reflects on the film's "tenuous web of ambiguities."
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Above: The African Desperate (2022)
- The 51st edition of New Directors/New Films (ND/NF) will take place from April 20-May 1. The lineup includes Audrey Diwan's Happening, Martine Syms' The African Desperate, Nikyatu Jusu's Nanny, and more.
- Conceived around the theme of Communality, the 2022 edition of Frames of Representation will take place May 5-12 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
- On April 12, the University of Pittsburgh will be hosting the first-ever public (and virtual) screening of George Romero's 1994 short Jacaranda Joe. The film—which is about a "swamp-dwelling bigfoot called Jacaranda Joe"—was made with students of Valencia Community College in Florida. Several Valencia alumni will be in attendance for a post-screening discussion.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- In a special episode of the MUBI podcast, host Rico Gagliano interviews Joachim Trier, whose film The Worst Person in the World is now showing in select UK cinemas. The film will exclusively stream on MUBI in the UK, Ireland, India, and Turkey starting May 13, 2022.
- Our Spanish-language podcast, MUBI Podcast: Encuentros, returns with an exciting conversation between Paraguayan filmmaker Paz Encina and Bolivian filmmaker Kiro Russo.
- To mark the return of the You Must Remember This podcast, host Karina Longsworth has made a Spotify playlist to accompany the new season, which is titled "Erotic 80s."
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- "At that very moment I realized that was exactly the thing I was missing: laughter." Yelyzaveta Pysmak introduces her film My Fat Arse and I, which is showing exclusively on MUBI in the series Brief Encounters.
- Greg Cwik reviews Adrian Lyne's Deep Water, which is "salacious and silly, licentious without being totally lurid, a fun horny movie with a few murders thrown in for good measure."
- Adam Nayman provides an overview of the directing, producing, and acting career of Larry Fessenden, the subject of an essential retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
- Lukasz Mankowski interviews Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, the sound designer of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films, on his work in films like Tropical Malady and Memoria.
- Divy Tripathi meditates on One Shot from Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 Army of Shadows.