Edited by Adam Cook
- We're proud to be partnering up with the Human Rights Watch Film Festival again this year. It opens tonight in London and to celebrate we're currently showing Sara Ishaq's The Mulberry House (pictured above) in the UK—watch it now!
- the 74th issue of Senses of Cinema is online now, and will keep you busy with a dozen feature articles, not counting festival reports. Start with the Editor's Note and work your way to their focus on Michelangelo Antonioni and Paul Thomas Anderson.
- Another online journal we're very fond of, desistfilm, has a new issue as well. Among the highlights, Adrian Martin writes on "The Post-Photographic in 1951: A Secret History."
- The lineup for Hot Docs, the Canadian documentary film festival taking place between April 23rd and May 5th, has been announced and the details can be found here, and trailers for the films (over 80!) can be found here.
- In an exclusive to Hollywood Reporter, Clint Eastwood talks about a near-death experience, and goes on record to say American Sniper is "anti-war."
- Above: the trailer for the restoration of Eric Rohmer's Full Moon in Paris.
- The Cineteca di Bologna is spearheading a major project to restore all of Buster Keaton's films.
- For The Talkhouse, filmmaker Aaron Katz writes on Lisandro Alonso's Jauja:
"On the one hand, the film is an adventure, more akin to Lonesome Dove than, say, Nostalghia. On the other, the film’s silence and pace anchor it distinctly in the tradition of Alonso’s other work, films such as Liverpool and Los Muertos. In one scene early on, set in an otherworldly intertidal zone, Dinesen wraps up his conversation with the commander of the Argentine forces and leaves the frame. In concrete storytelling terms, there is no additional information to be gleaned from this shot, but whereas most filmmakers would see this as high time to cut and move on, Alonso sees it as an opportunity. We linger, listening to the sounds of the ocean, the birds and the elephant seals. We see the Argentine commander thinking about the conversation he’s just had, not in closeup (there aren’t really any in this movie) but in an austerely framed medium wide. We are left to contemplate not just these two characters, and how they bounce off each other, not really understanding what the other wants or why he wants it, but also the world that surrounds them."
- Above: an excerpt from Kent Jones's new video essay on Francois Truffaut's influences produced for the Criterion Collection's release of The Soft Skin.
- For Variety, Patrick Frater reports on "An unusual kiss-and-tell style biography of Zhang Yimou."
- Lastly, via our Tumblr, an incredible image from the set of John Ford's Donovan's Reef, featuring John Wayne and Lee Marvin:
