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NEWS
Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader in 1973.
- Martin Scorsese will be executive producing Paul Schrader's upcoming The Card Counter, a casino-set thriller starring Tiffany Haddish, Oscar Isaac, and Willem Dafoe, marking the pair's fifth collaboration.
- Though we're a little late, we're thrilled by news that the Safdie Brothers have teamed up with comedian Nathan Fielder to pen a half-hour pilot for Showtime. The story reportedly stars Fielder and Benny Safdie in the tale of a curse that threatens the marriage of a couple on a HGTV show.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Metrograph's official trailer for the 4K restoration of Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong, a portrait of nihilistic youth in the city.
- Abel Ferrara's surreal Siberia stars Willem Dafoe as an isolated man who ventures into "dreams, memory and imagination in an attempt to find his true nature."
RECOMMENDED READING
- In an in-depth interview with Vox, Céline Sciamma discusses the "manifesto about the female gaze" in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the queerness of Titanic, and the "strong choice" to shoot in digital.
- Bong Joon-ho, the guest editor of Sight & Sound's latest issue, offers his choice of 20 upcoming filmmakers—from Ari Aster and Jordan Peele to Francis Lee and Alice Rohrwacher—whose work he "believes will be pivotal to the next 20 years."
- Sabzian has published a 1973 letter sent from Hollis Frampton to the Museum of Modern Art, in which he considers the compensation of artists for their work and provides his requests for a planned retrospective.
- Swagato Chakravorty's investigation of Ritwik Ghatak's "cinema of partition" considers how the auteur's films resist "the construction of categories such as 'global art cinema' in the first place."
- "It’s rare to see Kirk Douglas in love, to even suspect that love is a possibility for him." Michael Almereyda appraises Douglas's moving performance as a trapeze artist in The Story of Three Loves.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- Pedro Costa provides Film Comment with a playlist of songs that inspired Vitalina Varela, which is now in theatres in the United States, along with a short introduction: "I can’t see a film before I start filming. I can’t imagine or dream or sketch a film. And music won’t help. These songs relate to Vitalina or to the other films because they are songs I like."
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- "It is a film that feels like a respite and release from the status quo that transcends the dialogues and conversations that so often box in other contemporary trans films." Caden Mark Gardner examines Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli's So Pretty as a step forward for trans cinema. The film is showing February 24 - March 24, 2020 on MUBI as part of the series Direct from the Berlinale.
- Reporting from this year's Berlinale, editor Daniel Kasman reviews Christian Petzold's Undine, a "romance that layers the legend of an aquatic nymph over the history of modern Berlin."
- Pere Portabella's Warsaw Bridge (1989) is showing February 11 - March 11, 2020 on MUBI in the United States. Jonathan Rosenbaum considers seven ways of viewing the film, whether as a drama, a documentary, or an essay film.