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NEWS
Betty White in Golden Girls.
- The iconic Betty White, best known for her comedic prowess on television shows like Golden Girls and the Mary Tyler Moore Show, died on New Year's Eve at the age of 99. The first woman to produce a sitcom, White also starred in films from a small part in Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent to Toy Story 4 (as a teething ring named Bitey White), and as Nell Minow writes in her obituary, "she was just as deliriously funny as herself."
- Steven Soderbergh has published his annual list of everything he's seen and read in 2021, ranging from the 2020 Olympic Games to "Magic Mike Live" and multiple viewings of The Maltese Falcon.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Yann Gonzalez (Knife + Heart) has directed a new short film, Fou de Bassan, which is available to view online. The film features music by Jita Sensation and imagines a night of cruising in a foggy city.
- The first trailer for Michel Franco's Sundown, starring Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a wealthy couple on a tense family vacation in Mexico. For more on the film, read Leonardo Goi's Venice review.
- Nicole Brenez's State of Cinema 2021 has now been published on Sabzian. The manifesto, titled "Projections. Provisionals. Provisions," draws a connection between technical images as raw data to the technical upheavals facing cinema today, and investigates Florence Marcie's film A.I. at War. In this accompanying video, filmmaker Othello Vilgard reads from Brenez's text.
RECOMMENDED READING
Maggie Gyllenhaal on the set of The Lost Daughter. (Courtesy of Netflix)
- "I do believe there’s such a thing as women’s writing and women’s filmmaking. [...] I think that when women express themselves honestly, it looks differently than when men express themselves honestly." In a new interview with the New York Times, Maggie Gyllenhaal discusses her debut feature as director and Elena Ferrante adaptation, The Lost Daughter.
- From the Chiseler, Daniel Riccuito's meditation on cinema's attraction to "places of low pleasure": amusement parks, fairs, and shows.
- Also in the New York Times, a new profile by Oscar Lopez features several women filmmakers from Mexico—including Prayers for the Stolen director Tatiana Huezo, whose film is Mexico’s candidate for this year's best international feature Oscar—challenging the sexism of the male-dominated Mexican film industry.
- Benny Safdie talks with former California councilman Joel Wachs about his performance as a fictionalized Joel Wachs in Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza, and the difficulties of being a gay politician in 1973.
- Elena Lazic reviews Croatian director Dalibor Baric's feature debut Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus for Animus Magazine.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- We brought 2021 to an end with several new and old annual traditions: a survey of the year's best action scenes, a list of the many highlights in film criticism published on Notebook this year, our 14th Fantasy Double Features poll, in which our writers pair their favorite new films of 2021 with older films seen in the same year, and our curators' Favorite Films of 2021.
- Michael Sicinski has written an overview of nine experimental films to watch for, that emerged in the year 2021.
- Andreas Fontana's Azor is exclusively showing on MUBI in many countries in the series Debuts. For his Five Inspirations, Fontana shares photographs of lively places and books on film.
- "All at once, the impossible becomes the inevitable." Ryan Meehan reviews Adam McKay's Don't Look Up.
- Sofie Cato Maas writes on the revelatory experimental cinema of the Romanian avant-garde programmed by Andrea Slováková that was showcased at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival.
- For our Just One Film series, which recommends individual films from festivals around the world that deserve to be discovered, Kelli Weston recommends Haya Waseem's exceptional debut Quickening.
- Leonardo Goi sums up the Current Debate on 2021's best films.
- Florence Scott-Anderton concludes 2021 with a Soundtrack Mix that encapsulates the year in movie soundtracks.