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NEWS
Ivan Passer by Irfan Khan for the Los Angeles Times
- Filmmaker Ivan Passer, a key figure in the Czech New Wave alongside peers like Miloš Forman, has died. For The Guardian, Andrew Pulver writes of Passer's departure from Prague and entry into Hollywood.
- The latest lineup announcement for this year's Berlinale includes the very exciting world premieres of Charlatan by Agnieszka Holland and Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue by Jia Zhangke.
- The Cannes Film Festival has announced that Spike Lee will preside over its jury, making him the first Black jury head in the festival's history. In a statement, Lee writes: "You could easily say Cannes changed the trajectory of who I became in world cinema.”
- Amid increasing festival buzz, awards season also continues with the release of the Academy Awards nominations, which can be found here.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The official trailer for Angela Schanelec's elliptical I Was at Home, But... Read our review by editor Daniel Kasman, who deems the film a "sharply envisioned picture of human fragility, the binds of family, and individual loneliness."
- Moog Music Inc. has released a short documentary following musician Daniel Lopatin, also known as Oneohtrix Point Never, as he details the production process for the Uncut Gems soundtrack.
RECOMMENDED READING
Kristen Stewart in Certain Women (2016)
- Sheila O'Malley continues her Present Tense column for Film Comment with an examination of Kristen Stewart's acting and its relationship to both transparency and reticence.
- We look forward to reading programmer and writer Herb Shellenberger's newly announced newsletter, Rep Cinema International, which aims to cover "repertory and archival cinema programming around the world."
- Many were mortified and creeped out by Warner Bros.'s recent announcement to incorporate an "AI-driven project management system" that will help guide greenlight decisions. For Quartz, Adam Epstein offers a nuanced investigation of the decision's potential benefits and consequences. Elsewhere, TechRepublic's Veronica Combs writes that the use of AI in the film industry "offers a starring role for explainability and a chance to build trust."
- In memory of Ivan Passer, critic Filipe Furtado provides an overview of Passer's filmography, including Cutter's Way (1981), which illustrates "the fictions we create to deal with our own powerlessness."
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- In her article of Greta Gerwig's Little Women, Moeko Fuji focuses on the line between a romp and a dance and its relation to the restrictions of other boundaries, from gender and race to visibility and invisibility.
- Filmmaker Diana Vidrascu, the subject of a London Short Film Festival retrospective, discusses the form, research, and the personal elements of her boundary-challenging and inquisitive work.
- "No mere glorification of nature’s ambiance, it is instead a distressing dispatch of violent upheaval, capturing the magnitude of the displacement of earth on a massive scale," writes edditor Daniel Kasman in his review of Nikolaus Geyrhalter's epic globetrotting documentary Earth.
EXTRAS
- According to the newly updated technical specs on the IMDb page for Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, the film's runtime will be 241 minutes, or about four hours!
- The official poster for Nobuhiko Obayashi's anti-war fantasy film Labyrinth of Cinema.
Wishing dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi (b. Jan. 9, 1938) a happy 82nd. Official poster for his latest, LABYRINTH OF CINEMA, just released #大林宣彦 pic.twitter.com/ham0hXBrz7
— Japan Society Film (@js_film_nyc) January 9, 2020