Edited by Adam Cook
- Above: Senses of Cinema has a new issue—and a new look!
- The Locarno Film Festival has announced their juries & lineup. We've a separate post with all the details here.
- The good folks at The Brooklyn Rail have assembled a very impressive Critics Page, with various contributors offering their takes on the state of film art. Well worth browsing every piece here.
- The Venice Film Festival has announced its selection of 21 restored Classics for this year's edition.
- Above: Criterion's slate for October is one of their best in a while. John Ford's My Darling Clementine, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, a Complete Jacques Tati box set (!), and more.
- At the Jerusalem Film Festival, a group of Israeli filmmakers, including Keren Yedaya, Tali Shalom, Nadav Lapid, Efrat Corem, Shira Geffen, Shlomi and Ronit Elkabetz, and Bozi Gete, have called for a ceasefire.
- For Interview Magazine, Matthew McConaughey talks to Richard Linklater:
"MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY: Yo, K-A-T! Yo, man.
RICHARD LINKLATER: We could be really cryptic and boring. People wouldn't even understand what we're talking about. So I guess we should try to communicate here.
McCONAUGHEY: Well, you know what, it's all right if they have to figure it out. I'm not telling anyone why I call you K-A-T. I can't or I'd go to jail. [laughs] Let's talk Boyhood ... It's great! All your stories are personal for you in some way—a time, a place, a season. What was personal about this one? Was there anything about your childhood that inspired this film or influenced it?
LINKLATER: I was hitting 40. I had been a dad for about seven or eight years, and I wanted to express something about childhood. You know this now: when you have a kid, it puts you so much in the present tense with their lives, but you can't help but churn through your own life at that age. It's such an interesting refraction. So I was thinking a lot about development and childhood. I wanted to do something from a kid's point of view, but all the ideas that I wanted to express from my own life were so spread out. I couldn't pick one year, one moment. I was going to maybe write a novel—some little weird, experimental novel. And it hit me, this film idea: What if I filmed a little bit every year and just saw everybody, this family, age? The kids would grow up, the parents would age. In a way, it's a simple idea, but so damn impractical."
- Werner Herzog has completed his epic film, The Queen of the Desert (pictured above), and it's on track to premiere at a festival this Fall. Speaking of Herzog, the BFI posted a timely clip of Herzog talking football:
- On the latest episode of The Cinephiliacs, Peter Labuza chats with renowned film critic J. Hoberman.
- Outlaw Vern shares his thoughts on Matt Reeves' Dawn of the Planet of the Apes:
"My favorite scene in the whole thing is a quiet conversation early on, before the humans even come. Caesar and Maurice look at what used to be San Francisco and talk about “them” and if they’re really gone. In the spaces between their thoughts is the heaviness of what they’re discussing: the potential extinction of the planet’s dominant species in favor of their own."
- Via Filmap, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead on Google Maps:
- For The Front Row, Richard Brody writes on Nothing Lasts Forever, which he argues is "a lost comedic masterpiece":
"The hardest thing about pastiche is to duplicate the style and tone of the original without falling into parody—without the self-satisfying notion of superiority to an earlier age of artifice, as if only the past had style whereas the present day has a neutral, natural universality. Schiller’s film is a brilliant pastiche, based on confident youth-on-the-rise films of the forties, of which M-G-M was a major purveyor. It’s a sort of cosmo-romantic science-fantasy that borrows cinematic styles of the forties to tell a story of the early sixties that’s anchored by icons of the fifties—and, in so doing, to reveal something crucial about the eighties."
- Above: a lucky fellow in Vancouver has discovered a bunch of old movie posters underneath his floor.
- I have given up on trying to keep up with Takashi Miike. Here's a trailer from one movie, and a still from another, apparently:
