Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.
NEWS
- The Academy has released its shortlist of nominees for nine categories, including Best Foreign-Language Film, Best Documentary Feature, and Best Original Score. Let the speculating, predicting, and betting begin!
- The latest issue of short story journal Zoetrope features a cover by guest designer David Lynch. His artist bio: "Born Missoula, Montana. Eagle Scout."
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- The USC Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive has uncovered and identified a 1898 silent film entitled Something Good—Negro Kiss, including possibly the earliest known depiction of "affection between a Black couple."
- The splendid U.S. trailer of Jean-Luc Godard's fierce new film, The Image Book, courtesy of Kino Lorber.
- Annapurna Pictures's first trailer for Richard Linklater's Where'd You Go, Bernadette contains quirky family fun, suburban dinner parties, and a fair share of criminal hijinks.
RECOMMENDED READING
- Alongside the overabundance of streaming services, Wired reports on a growing number of Blu-ray enthusiasts, whose hunts for rare and specialty titles—like Criterion's now-sold out Ingmar Bergman box set—are driven by a desire to keep films alive.
- Feminist film journal cléo turns to Canada for their latest issue, entitled #CanCon (slang for Canadian content), featuring a roundtable on women in the Canadian film industry, and essays on the works of Anne Émond, Marie-Hélène Cousineau, and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu.
- K. Austin Collin's nuanced, thoughtful review of Green Book finds the writer taken aback by the film's reliance on shaky biographical facts informed by the "limited, very 1960s, very white understanding of race."
- Speaking of The Image Book, Fabrice Aragno, the long-term collaborator of Jean-Luc Godard, sits with The Brooklyn Rail for an illuminating interview that reviews his working relationship with the auteur, and his stunning visual work as editor of Godard's latest film.
- Sometime during Marvel's search for a female filmmaker to helm the forthcoming Black Widow film, the studio approached Argentine legend Lucrecia Martel. Unimpressed, Martel tells Daily Pioneer about her frustrations with the hiring process, and why "it's really hard to watch a Marvel film."
- This year's edition of Variety's Directors on Directors series includes words by Guillermo del Toro on Roma, Ava DuVernay on Widows, and Josh Safdie on The Favourite.
RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK
- X-rated movie posters? Nearly: the outré posters for x-rated films.
- An overview of contemporary Chinese cinema in "a remarkably strong year for Chinese language cinema, [during which] perhaps China [found] a way out of the blockbusteritis that has been afflicting it in recent years."
- A Close-Up on Alejo Moguillansky's The Little Match Girl, showing exclusively on MUBI, and its inspired suggestion that "art is valuable for the kind of people it inspires us to be."
- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky reviews Clint Eastwood's second film of the year, The Mule: "The theme is Eastwood’s oldest: the question of whether wrongs can ever make a right."
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
- This is our last Rushes entry of the 2018. Happy holidays and see you in 2019!