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NEWS
Rip Torn
- The great American actor and comedian Rip Torn has died. The New York Times gathers his eclectic accomplishments as a performer with his many personal and artistic eccentricities in their obit.
- The first poster for Hirokazu Kore-eda's The Truth, starring Catherine Deneuve as a pioneering French actress, set to publish her confessional memoir, and Juliette Binoche as her screenwriter daughter.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- An ominous teaser for Akira director Katsuhiro Otomo's forthcoming third feature, Orbital Era. The film follows a group of young boys surviving in a space colony as it undergoes construction.
- The Royal Ocean Film Society analyzes the design philosophy of filmmaker and graphic designer Saul Bass in this guided visual tour of his landmark film posters.
- The divisive, baroque Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino is back with a crime epic concerning the inner circle of the tycoon politician Silvio Berlusconi.
RECOMMENDED READING
Ernest Dickerson's Juice (1992)
- The New York Times has provided a crucial roundtable of black filmmakers (including Ernest R. Dickerson and Julie Dash) who rose to success in the 1990s, only to face marginalization and blacklisting in a harsh studio system.
- An eight-second clip of New Orleans filmed in 1915 appears to show a teenaged Louis Armstrong, the oldest footage of the musician. For 64 Parishes, James Karst delves into the research behind identifying Armstrong as the star of this mysterious film.
- To commemorate the birthday of Barbara Loden, we return to Criterion's compilation of reflections on Loden's feminist masterpiece, Wanda.
- Upon the release of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, Phuong Le investigates the film's "canonical idolization" and Coppola's depiction of a "primitive" Vietnam, in comparison to Oliver Stone's Heaven & Earth and The Vietnam War by Ken Burns.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Our series of essays covering each episode of Hideaki Anno's landmark mecha-anime Neon Genesis Evangelion continues.
- Nicolas Winding Refn's Too Old to Die Young is "braggadocio filmmaking, stupid and sublime." Greg Cwik reviews Refn's new Amazon show.
- Henri de Corinth considers the exploitation of sound in Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio and The Duke of Burgundy, which both "evolve the language [...] of the Eurohorror genre." Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and The Duke of Burgundy (2014) are showing in June and July, 2019 on MUBI in the United Kingdom.
EXTRAS
- From Variety's recent interview with John Carpenter, an image from the filmmaker's scrapped 1990s remake of Creature From The Black Lagoon, which features an updated design for the beloved fish monster.