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NEWS
Above: Shiva Baby (2020)
- Emma Seligman's Bottoms now has a cast, which includes Shiva Baby star Rachel Sennott, Havana Rose Liu, Ayo Edebiri, and former NFL player Marshawn Lynch. Written by Seligman and Sennott, the film is a high school sex comedy about "two unpopular queer girls in their senior year who start a fight club to try to impress and hook up with cheerleaders."
- Michel Bouquet, the prolific French film and theater actor, has died at 96. Early in his film career, Bouquet narrated Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955), then went on to appear in films by François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Deray, and many more. Among his later performances was the role of the tiular painter in Gilles Bourdos's Renoir (2013).
- Submissions are now open for "The Video Essay," the annual collaborative section of video essays organized by FILMADRID International Film Festival and MUBI Notebook. Selected video essays will be released between June 6-12 on Notebook.
- The application process for the Locarno Critics Academy, an initiative for young film critics, is now open. Critics Academy participants will have the opportunity to provide coverage for the festival and meet with critics, programmers, and filmmakers.
- You can still apply for the Playlab Films workshop, Apichatpong Weerasethakul Lab: filming in the Amazon, which invites fifty filmmakers to create fifty short films, alongside Weerasethakul in the Peruvian Amazon.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Le Cinéma Club is currently streaming the 2009 short film Reinhardtstrasse, directed by Swiss filmmaker Ramon Zürcher (who recently directed The Girl and the Spider with his twin brother Silvan). The film closely observes the movements and energies of several people in a small apartment.
- The official trailer for Terence Davies' Benediction, which follows the life of British poet Siegfried Sassoon as he publicly speaks out against World War I and privately grapples with his own sexuality. Read our review of the film by Kelley Dong here.
- Another trailer for Robert Eggers' viking epic The Northman, a loose adaptation of the medieval Scandinavian legend of Amleth that stars Alexander Skarsgård as a Viking king set on avenging his father.
- Cinema Guild's trailer for Hong Sang-soo's In Front of Your Face showcases the film's bright colors, and the performance of Lee Hyeyoung as a melancholy former actress who returns to Seoul after years living abroad.
RECOMMENDED READING
Above: Inland Empire (2006)
- "Rather than attempt to recreate the film’s original appearance 1:1, Lynch has seemingly embraced the idea of the film being a continually evolving composition, one that doggedly resists categorization, interpretation, and polish." For Hyperallergic, Cole Kronman writes on the 4K remastering of David Lynch's Inland Empire.
- And in a new interview, David Lynch shares his thoughts on the "big, big, big beautiful change" seen in the Inland Empire remaster, expresses his love for the aroma of wood, and squashes rumors claiming a new feature of his will premiere at the festival.
- Melissa Anderson's review of Adrian Lyne's Patricia Highsmith adaptation, Deep Water, takes apart the film's incomprehensibility and its central couple's lack of erotic chemistry.
- The Baffler's Ian Wang delves into the treatment of Asian identity as a metaphor and a myth in Kogonada's After Yang.
- Richard Brody reviews Michael Bay's latest blockbuster, Ambulance, in which "Bay sacrifices his modicum of directorial originality in order to whip up a frenzy of mechanized excitement with a story that could have been generated by Automatext."
- In a conversation with Slant, the directing duo Daniels discuss the wacky online inspirations for their martial arts multiverse movie Everything Everywhere All at Once.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
- This year's edition of the Play-Doc International Film Festival Tui, which takes place in Spain, will feature four retrospectives dedicated to figures whose works were never before screened in Spain: German filmmaker Helke Misselwitz, photographer Danny Lyon, American filmmaker Richard P. Rogers, and Portuguese filmmaker António Campos.
- Two events dedicated to avant-garde filmmaker Jordan Belson will be taking place in New York City this month. On April 16, Anthology Film Archives presents a night of "film, audio, and visual rarities" by Belson. At Matthew Marks Gallery, there is an ongoing exhibit of Belson's untitled landscape collages, made between 1970 and 1973.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- In the third episode of the MUBI Podcast: Encuentros, director and author Martín Rejtman speaks with Argentinian rock vocalist and composer Santiago Motorizado about the relationship between cinema and music.
- On the Film Comment podcast, co-deputy editor Clinton Krute speaks with directors Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer about the continuing relevance of their recently-restored 1979 documentary, The Wobblies, a portrait of the Industrial Workers of the World.
- Alex G has shared the haunting end credits theme for Jane Schoenbrun's We're All Going to the World's Fair, entitled "End Song." Composed by Alex G, the soundtrack for the film will be released April 22.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- Prayers for the Stolen director Tatiana Huezo shares her Moviegoing Memories of the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico and the Berlinale Forum.
- The Girl and the Spider filmmakers Ramon Zürcher & Silvan Zürcher also share their Moviegoing Memories of the LIDO Cinema and the Rex Cinema in Biel, and a frightening screening of Takashi Miike's Audition.
- Arun A.K. encapsulates the oeuvre of the contentious Indian director Anurag Kashyap in One Shot from his 2009 film Gulaal.
- Caitlin Quinlan writes on the films of Nina Menkes, who was the subject of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music earlier this month.
- Rachel Pronger's Notebook Primer is on the feminist film collectives that simultaneously emerged around the world in the 1960s and 1970s.
- Sean Gilman celebrates Michelle Yeoh's vast diversity of roles, which come to a climax in the Daniels' Everything Everywhere All At Once.
EXTRAS
- The Northman is not yet in theaters, but in the meantime you can play the free RPG experience inspired by the film on Fortnite.
- The poster for Hirokazu Kore-eda's Korean language debut, Broker, which stars Song Kang-ho, Kang Dong-won, Doona Bae, and IU. Song and Kang play a pair of brokers who find new parents for the babies dropped off by desperate parents in South Korea's "baby boxes."
