Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in June ahead of it’s North American premiere at the TribecaFestival. Film Independent Presents a theatrical screening of Arzé (Lebanon’s Official Submission to the Academy Awards) which will be followed an in-person conversation with director Mira Shaib on Friday, November 8th.

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A film touching on serious subjects with lightness and humor, Arzé is a unique concoction. Ostensibly about the many different sectarian communities that make up Beirut, it becomes a heartfelt story about the family dynamic between two middle-aged sisters finding company and solace in each other as they raise a young man–son to one, beloved nephew to the other. All of this is wrapped in a timely contemporary comedy springing from a single incident: the theft of a scooter the family relies on to deliver pies they make and sell.

As director Mira Shaib puts it, “We wanted...

While in New York City to celebrate the 10th anniversary of her monster international hit “The Babadook,” Australian writer/director Jennifer Kent took a stop over at the Criterion Closet and proved that she not only enjoys making spooky movies — she likes watching them too. Her first pick of the shelf was one of the first films of the horror genre, the 1922 silent essay piece “Haxän: Witchcraft Through the Ages.” Kent described the film as “a huge inspiration for ‘Babadook.'”

She added, “It’s about the devil and about witchcraft, it’s also about women going nuts. Fantastic.”

Kent’s next selection was from her home country, Peter Weir’s 1977 mystery “The Last Wave,” which she’d initially avoided watching because she misconstrued the title.

“I’m embarrassed to say, I thought it was a film about surfing. It’s not a film about surfing,” said Kent. “It’s...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Museum of Modern Art

As the career-spanning Johnnie To retrospective continues, a Samuel L. Jackson series includes Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Jungle Fever on 35mm.

Bam

A Duras-Akerman double bill plays Sunday.

Film at Lincoln Center

NYFF Revivals continues with films by Robert Bresson, Raymond Depardon, and Clive Barker, Compensation, and more.

Film Forum

A George Stevens retrospective begins; restorations of The Devil, Probably and Lancelot du lac continue; Shane screens on Sunday.

Anthology Film Archives

“Kill Yr Landlords” includes work by John Schlesinger, Hal Ashby, and Nikos Papatakis; films by Dovzhenko and Dreyer play in “Essential Cinema.”

Roxy Cinema

Apocalypse Now: Final Cut plays Friday.

Museum of the Moving Image

A Frank Oz retrospective begins; Burden of Dreams and Fitzcarraldo both screen.

Metrograph

Pulp Fiction, There Will Be Blood, The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, Lolita, and...

Above: Official poster by Yves Tinguely for the 12th New York Film Festival in 1974.The twelfth edition of the New York Film Festival, which took place 50 years ago this week, in September 1974, could have been convincingly called the New York European Film Festival. Out of the seventeen new feature films playing, all but two were European: seven French, three German, two Italian, two Swiss, and one British. Though festival director Richard Roud wrote in the program that “one of the most exciting developments in world cinema these past two years has been the re-emergence of the American film,” there was in fact only one American film in the main lineup (the world premiere of John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence) though there was also a program of four American shorts by Mirra Bank, Martha Coolidge, William Greaves, and an exciting upstart named Martin Scorsese. There was just one...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film at Lincoln Center

NYFF Revivals begins with films by Robert Bresson, Marguerite Duras, Clive Barker, and more.

Film Forum

As The Devil, Probably continues in a new restoration, Lancelot du lac starts; Stand By Me screens on Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art

A career-spanning Johnnie To retrospective continues.

Anthology Film Archives

A Robert Beavers retrospective begins.

Roxy Cinema

Gloria plays Friday and Saturday, while prints of Opening Night and Minnie and Moskowitz also screen; Deep Red shows Friday; experimental shorts and City Dudes play on Saturday; Frederick Wiseman’s High School II screens on 16mm this Sunday, while Puzzle of a Downfall Child plays on 35mm.

Bam

Chantal Akerman’s Toute une nuit continues playing in a 4K restoration; The Long Walk Home screens on Friday.

Museum of the Moving Image

A retrospective of first-person documentaries continues; X: The...

Gone are the days when cinephiles could just expect “Cannes on the Hudson” from the New York Film Festival. In his fifth year since assuming leadership of the selection committee from Kent Jones, artistic director Dennis Lim continues to bring both vitality and variety to the festival. If there’s a near-constant among the changes, it’s Hong Sang-soo having two movies in the main slate. (This year it’s By the Stream and A Traveler’s Needs.)

Elder statesmen like David Cronenberg, Mike Leigh, and Paul Schrader return with their latest films. But this 62nd edition of the festival, which runs from September 27 to October 24, doesn’t belong to the veterans. If any streak runs through the main slate, it’s the prominence of second features, including RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys (this year’s opening-night selection), Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, and Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light.

Following their intial announcements, the 62nd New York Film Festival has now unveiled its final film section: Revivals, featuring significant works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners. Highlights include World premieres of restorations of Ardak Amirkulov’s The Fall of Otrar, Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation, Raymond Depardon’s Reporters, John Hanson and Rob Nilsson’s Northern Lights, and Robina Rose’s Nightshift as well as works by Chantal Akerman, Clive Barker, Robert Bresson, Lino Brocka, Marguerite Duras and Paul Seban, Marva Nabili, Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow, and Frederick Wiseman.

Check out the the lineup below.

Bona

Lino Brocka, 1980, Philippines, 85m

Filipino and Tagalog with English subtitles

U.S. Premiere of 4K Restoration

A fierce work of quasi-neorealist melodrama that melds pop cinema instincts and political indignation, Lino Brocka’s 1980 feature endures as a lively, searing parable...

Illustrations by Nicole Pavlov.In the opening scene of Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo (2022), harsh red lights pulsate across a woman’s face as she bends to caress a shape on the ground. It’s hard to make out through the strobes, but the camera lingers long enough for the viewer to discern two hooves and the visage of a donkey. The woman’s voice, faint and out of breath, cuts across the high-pitched orchestral score, “Eo! Eo!”Eo, bucking wildly, breaks the rose-tinted reverie as the crowd cheers, revealing the woman and the donkey in a Polish circus act as physically and emotionally intimate as making love. Skolimowski’s film turned heads by centering a nonhuman subject both narratively and visually, following Eo as he wanders through the world while humans variously try to imprison, abuse, or care for him. Skolimowski drew inspiration from Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar...

In a recent interview with IndieWire, master of suspense M. Night Shyamalan admitted to not having seen French filmmaker Robert Bresson’s WWII prison thriller “A Man Escaped” until his daughter, Ishana Night Shyamalan, suggested it to him.

“I remember how profoundly, when Ishana told me to watch that, it affected me,” Shyamalan said of the film. When told that his most recent film, the concert-set “Trap,” may be his version of “A Man Escaped,” Shyamalan also said, “Probably, by the way. That’s so funny you say that. Probably.”

So how do the two confined-space thrillers stand against one another? Let’s break it down starting with “Trap.” Starring Josh Hartnett as girl-dad Cooper, who escorts his pre-teen daughter to a pop concert for her favorite superstar, Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan), the film quickly becomes a cat-and-mouse game as it’s revealed that Cooper is actually a serial...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Roxy Cinema

Fidelio, our four-film program with Chapo Trap House’s Movie Mindset, begins this Saturday with Eyes Wide Shut on 35mm, which plays again on Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

70mm prints of 2001 and Lawrence of Arabia screen.

Film at Lincoln Center

A retrospective of Mexican popular cinema from the 1940s to the 1960s continues and a new restoration of Shinji Sōmai’s Moving opens.

Film Forum

A career-spanning Jean-Pierre Melville retrospective continues, as do restorations of Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams and Seven Samurai.

Anthology Film Archives

Films by James Benning, Robert Bresson, and Jean Eustache screen in “Verbatim“; films by James Broughton play in “Essential Cinema.”

Bam

Claire Denis’ monumental No Fear, No Die and Mapantsula continue screening in new restorations.

Museum of Modern Art

“Silent Movie Week 2024” begins

IFC Center

“Defamed to Acclaimed” brings films by the Wachowskis,...

Rotten Tomatoes is a truly fascinating thing. Though it simply works by aggregating other critics' reviews, the site itself has become, whether we like it or not, somewhat of a tastemaker for the masses. It's odd to think that a site which doesn't actually review movies itself has taken on this role as a kind of cultural arbiter, yet here we are in 2024 when AI movies will soon be a thing and Kevin Hart's "Lift" tops the Netflix most-watched charts. But before we start lamenting the cultural landscape of the moment, here's a question for you — do you know how Rotten Tomatoes works?

Everyone pretty much knows that Rt collects reviews for a film or TV show and spits out a percentage score based on how many of those reviews are positive. But how does Rotten Tomatoes judge a review to be positive? What is a "good" review? Does...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film at Lincoln Center

A retrospective of Mexican popular cinema from the 1940s to the 1960s is underway.

Film Forum

A career-spanning Jean-Pierre Melville retrospective has begun; restorations of Ann Hui’s July Rhapsody (watch our exclusive trailer debut), Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, Fitzcarraldo and Seven Samurai continue.

Museum of the Moving Image

A 70mm print of Playtime screens this weekend; The Color of Pomegranates and Speed Racer play.

Anthology Film Archives

Robert Bresson plays in “Essential Cinema.”

Bam

Claire Denis’ monumental No Fear, No Die continues screening in a new restoration; Mapantsula begins playing.

Museum of Modern Art

A career-spanning Powell and Pressburger retrospective continues.

IFC Center

The Time Masters, Amadeus, and In the Mood for Love play daily; Fritz the Cat, Friday the 13th, The Last House on the Left, and The Matrix play late.

Metrograph...

It’s my distinct pleasure to announce Gentle Creatures: Robert Bresson and Mani Kaul, a Dostoevsky double-header comprising adaptations of the short story “A Gentle Creature”––Bresson’s Une femme douce and Kaul’s Nazar––that I’ve programmed and which comes to Bam on Monday, August 5.

This event offers Une femme douce‘s first New York showing since 2017; searches yielding nothing, I’m plainly unsure when Nazar last played locally. Either are exemplary visions of their director’s genius. As a pairing, this program presents some study in contrasts: making his first color film, Une femme douce finds Bresson adding new layers to his oft-imitated, never-surpassed style, while Nazar allows Kaul to turn a narrative more linear than earlier triumphs into a formalist playground, tracing characters’ emotions with drifting cameras, spatial disorientation, reflections, and startling soundscapes.

Official description of both films below:

Nazar

Two decades after Robert Bresson made Une femme douce,...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Aftersun (Charlotte Wells)

One of the 2022’s most resonant films, Aftersun looks at the scratchy dynamics between a father and daughter while on vacation. It’s about memory, the finite nature of the relationships in our lives, and the difficulties of a parent’s diminishing mental health. Charlotte Wells knows where to put the camera in her debut—undeterred from taking risks, from placing her characters outside of the frame, from looking at shadows instead of the people themselves. Aftersun is a rare, tremendous first film, full of heart and focused melancholy; it breaks you down and fills you up simultaneously. The consistent inclusion of camcorder footage, and the fact that it enhances the story rather than becoming a distraction, further proclaims...

Editor’s Note: After its stunning World Premiere at the Beijing International Film Festival in April, Film Independent connected Lebanese filmmakers and Global Media Makers Fellows Mira Shaib and Zeina Badran for an intimate conversation with writer and critic Murtada Elfadl ahead of its North American premiere at the Tribeca Festival.

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A film touching on serious subjects with lightness and humor, Arzé is a unique concoction. Ostensibly about the many different sectarian communities that make up Beirut, it becomes a heartfelt story about the family dynamic between two middle-aged sisters finding company and solace in each other as they raise a young man–son to one, beloved nephew to the other. All of this is wrapped in a timely contemporary comedy springing from a single incident: the theft of a scooter the family relies on to deliver pies they make and sell.

As director Mira Shaib puts it, “We wanted...

Illustration by Stephanie Monohan.In 1980, the writer and film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum published Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. His first book, in its novelistic way, theorizes the author’s own relation to the movies that accompanied him throughout his life. Rosenbaum’s childhood in Alabama as the son of movie exhibitors in the 1940s and ’50s is placed alongside his life in the late ’70s as a working film critic (sometimes literally; the book occasionally is formatted with double-columned pages). What served as the go-between, the time-machine, the weft thread of memory was the movies themselves; movies seen became movies forgotten, then later recalled and reencountered. What then surfaces in Rosenbaum’s writing is more than the films themselves, but the context in which he saw them: a summer camp, a town scandal, memories from the family living room—the routine events that color and are colored by the films we see.

It is an ongoing mystery why so many artists’ biopics, though undoubtedly coming from a place of deep admiration, choose to ignore the very thing that makes their subjects extraordinary — their art — in favor of outlining the less extraordinary (however torrid) circumstances of their private lives and loves. The latest example: the attractive but slight directorial debut of French actress Céline Sallette. Her feature “Niki” is a portrait of pioneering French-American painter, sculptor and illustrator Niki de Saint Phalle, in which the closest we ever get to any of her actual pieces is seeing the back of a canvas or two, as Niki (Charlotte Le Bon), bespeckled with paint splatter that highlights her delicate elf-princess beauty, frowns at her efforts in dissatisfaction. What exactly is she looking at? Unless you’re already intimately acquainted with every phase of her multivalent career and can navigate the film’s rather haphazard chronology,...

Revisiting the murder mysteries of his award-winning 2013 feature, Stranger by the Lake, but with a more darkly comic tone found in much of his other work, French writer-director Alain Guiraudie’s latest, Misericordia (Miséricorde), plays like two films at once: The first is a sinister, small-town homicide story in the vein of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, in which a man shows up to wreak havoc on the seemingly innocent. The second is a twisted variation on Pasolini’s Teorema, in which a family is torn apart by a visitor’s pervasive sexuality and refusal to leave them alone.

The two movies don’t always crystallize into one, and if you’re looking for a credible crime thriller in which everyone behaves logically, Misericordia may not be for you. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an exploration of repressed sexual desire and religious hypocrisy in backwoods France,...

Terry Gilliam has been to Cannes with three of his own films since 1983, but one of his favorite memories of the festival takes him back to that very first time, at the 36th edition, as the co-writer and co-star of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Along with Graham Chapman and the film’s director Terry Jones, he’d emerged from the Carlton hotel’s iconic entrance, then bedecked with promotion for the upcoming Bond movie Octopussy, to encounter a camera crew. Jones started grabbing people at random, shouting, “Who Ees Monty Python???” in a ridiculous foreign accent, and got so carried away that, when they reached the hotel’s famous terrace, he accidentally did it to Gilliam too.

The crowd loved it, and the day only grew stranger. Out on the Carlton’s jetty, they gave an interview to British news channel ITN, with Jones hiding behind Graham...

As Cannes Film Festival kicks off, the Paris-based international sales company MK2 Films has revealed it has acquired three films and made substantial investments in new restorations, set against the backdrop of a strong presence at Cannes Classics.

MK2 Films has entered into a collaboration with the Niki Charitable Art Foundation on the global rights (excluding the U.S.) for two films directed by artist Niki de Saint Phalle: “Un Rêve plus long que la nuit” (1976) and “Daddy” (1973). “Un Rêve plus long que la nuit” has been restored in 4K by L’Immagine Ritrovata (Bologna-Paris) under the supervision of Arielle de Saint Phalle and with funding from Dior. It was presented at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, New York Film Festival and the new Los Angeles Festival of Movies. “Daddy” will soon be available in a restored version. MK2 Films described it as a “unique feminist work by one of...

Though Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is about to debut in theaters and on Netflix––just after his under-the-radar documentary God Save Texas: Hometown Prison came to Max––the ever-prolific American was recently in Paris for Nouvelle Vague, his chronicle of the making of Godard’s Breathless. (If not more: casting notices for Jean-Pierre Léaud around the time of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Martin Lassale around the time of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket popped up.) With filming recently wrapped, one might expect a fall premiere––expectations bolstered by today’s unveiling of our first real look, courtesy (who else!) Cahiers du cinéma.

Therein one can find Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard (previously unveiled in a cast-and-crew portrait) and filming of a scene on the Champs-Elysees. Meanwhile, Jean-Louis Fernandez shared a set photo suggesting the production design team should be paid handsomely.

Find them below:

View this post...

Laurent Cantet's Palme d'Or winner The Class Photo: UniFrance The French director Laurent Cantet who struck gold at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008 with the Palme d’Or winner, The Class, has died at the age of 63.

Laurent Cantet Photo: Veeren Ramsamy for UniFrance The film was based on the novel Entre les murs which was a semi-autobiographical account of the author François Bégaudeau's own experiences in the school system in Paris - and featured him in the lead role of the teacher confronting “problem children.”

Beside the Palme d’Or the film also was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film.

Cantet was a filmmaker who showed a lively interest in social issues and themes, often used non professional actors and took a naturalistic approach to his subjects. His kindred spirits would be Ken Loach and the Dardenne Brothers as well as the traditions of Roberto Rossellini and Robert Bresson.

The red carpet will soon roll out for the 77th Festival de Cannes. The international film festival, playing out May 14-25, has a distinct American voice this year. “Barbie” filmmaker Greta Gerwig is the first U.S. female director name jury president. Many veteran American helmers are heading to the French Rivera resort town. George Lucas, who turns 80 on May 14, will receive an honorary Palme d’Or. Francis Ford Coppola’s much-anticipated “Megalopolis” is screening in competition, as is Paul Schrader’s “Oh Canada.” Kevin Costner’s new Western “Horizon, An American Saga” will premiere out of competition and Oliver Stone’s “Lula” is part of the special screening showcase.

Fifty years ago, Coppola was the toast of the 27th Cannes Film Festival. His brilliant psychological thriller “The Conversation” starring Gene Hackman won the Palme D’Or and well as a Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury. The film would earn three Oscar nominations: picture,...

There are many dozens of classic prison movies, everything from “The Shawshank Redemption” to Robert Bresson’s “A Man Escaped” to several Clint Eastwood movies, and many of them revolve around the human spirit, the will to live beyond the psychological claustrophobia of incarceration. But perhaps there’s been no prison movie like “Sing Sing,” a new A24 drama starring Colman Domingo, about a theatre troupe that finds escape from the realities of incarceration through the creativity of putting on a play.

Continue reading ‘Sing Sing’ Trailer: Colman Domingo Stars In A24’s Acclaimed Prison Drama at The Playlist.

Between last week’s release of his under-the-radar documentary God Save Texas: Hometown Prison and the June release of his wildly entertaining crowdpleaser Hit Man Trailer: Glen Powell Shapeshifts for Richard Linklater’s Comedy, Arriving in June”>Hit Man, Richard Linklater is embarking on his next film. Set to shoot this month and April in Paris, his new feature will capture the beginnings of the French New Wave, centered on the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut masterpiece Breathless.

We now have our first piece of casting as our new Jean Seberg has been unveiled. Zoey Deutch has revealed her Seberg look on Instagram, with hair colorist Tracey Cunningham confirming it’s for the role of the French New Wave Icon, who made her breakout in Godard’s debut. The film will mark a reunion following Everybody Wants Some!! for Linklater and Deutch, who will deliver the latest portrayal of...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSHard Truths.Mike Leigh’s forthcoming Hard Truths will reunite him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, star of Secrets and Lies (1996). It will be the British director’s first film set in the present day since Another Year (2010).Jia Zhangke has divulged some details of We Shall Be All, now in the early stages of post-production. In production off and on since 2001, the film will be his first feature since Ash Is Purest White (2018). “I travelled with actors and a cameraman to shoot, without a script, without any obvious story,” the director told Variety. “This is a work of fiction, but I have applied many documentary methods.”Robert Bresson’s rarely seen Four Nights of a Dreamer is being restored by MK2 Films, set for a spring release.

Mubi Picks at Posteritati is a series in which we invite our favorite artists to the prestigious movie art gallery in New York City to discuss their favorite movie posters of all time.We met with celebrated cinematographer Sean Price Williams and prolific film critic Nick Pinkerton, now making waves for their first film as a writing-directing team in The Sweet East. As the film plays in theaters nationwide, they stopped by Posteritati to share their selection of the best movie posters of all time, including Raymond Savignac's cartoonish designs for Robert Bresson, Walerian Borowczyk's handwritten erotica, and more.

Kumar Shahani, one of the pioneers of India’s arthouse parallel cinema movement, died at a hospital in Kolkata on Feb. 24 after a period of illness. He was 83.

Shahani studied screenwriting and direction at the Film and Television of India, where he was tutored by Indian master Ritwik Ghatak. He won a French government scholarship for higher studies in France, where he studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques and assisted Robert Bresson on “Une Femme Douce” (1969).

He returned to India and directed his first feature “Maya Darpan” in 1972. Shahani was known for his formalist style of filmmaking and his landmark films include “Tarang” (1984), “Khayal Gatha” (1989) and “Kasba” (1990).

Internationally, Shahani’s work was particularly appreciated at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which programmed several of his films including “Maya Darpan,” the short “Var Var Vari,” “Tarang,” “Kasba,” the documentary “Bhavantarana” and “Char Adhyay.” “Khayal Gatha” won the Fipresci prize...

The world of Indian cinema mourns the loss of Kumar Shahani, a visionary filmmaker whose contributions have left an indelible mark on the landscape of parallel cinema. Shahani, who breathed his last on Sunday at the age of 83, leaves behind a legacy rich with artistic brilliance and innovation.

Born into a world enamored with the magic of storytelling, Kumar Shahani embarked on a journey that would redefine the contours of Indian cinema. His alma mater, the Film and Television Institute of India (Ftii) in Pune, served as the crucible where his cinematic sensibilities were honed. It was here that he found himself under the mentorship of the legendary director Ritwik Ghatak, who recognized in Shahani a spark of genius.

Following in the footsteps of his mentor, Kumar Shahani ventured into the realm of filmmaking with a thirst for experimentation and a keen eye for detail. His sojourn to France, where...

Mk2 Films, the Paris-based outfit behind Justine Triet’s Oscar-nominated “Anatomy of a Fall,” is set to restore Robert Bresson’s “Four Nights of a Dreamer,” a romantic drama which competed at the Berlinale in 1971 and disappeared from screens in 1985.

MK2 Films, the division of a major arthouse cinema chain in France, will digitize “Four Nights of a Dreamer” in 4K and will bring it to global theatres in 2024.

“Four Nights of a Dreamer” is the 10th film directed by Bresson and the only one which wasn’t restored. His other credits include “Mouchette,” “Au Hasard Balthazar” and “Pickpocket.”

Inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel “White Nights,” “Four Nights of a Dreamer” revolves around a meeting on the Pont Neuf between a dreamy young man and a distraught young woman who will confide in each other over four nights. It stars Guillaume des Forêts, Isabelle Weingarten, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer. The film...

Andrei Tarkovsky’s penultimate film, 1983’s gorgeously haunting Nostalghia, also marked new territory for the director. His first film made outside the Ussr, the Cannes Best Director winner (a prize he shared with Robert Bresson for L’Argent), was also a unique collaboration with writer Tonino Guerra, frequent collaborator of Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Francesco Rosi. Now restored in 4K in 2022 by Csc – Cinetecanazionale in collaboration with Rai Cinema at Augustus Color laboratory, from the original negatives and the original soundtrack preserved at Rai Cinema, the restoration will begin rolling out on February 21 at NYC’s Film Forum via Kino Lorber and we’re pleased to exclusively unveil the trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Andrei Tarkovsky explained that in Russian the word ‘nostalghia’ conveys ‘the love for your homeland and the melancholy that arises from being far away.’ This debilitating form of homesickness is embodied in the film by Andrei,...

The question of how to get the most authenticity possible out of actors has been riling up filmmakers for as long as the film medium has existed. William Wyler ("Ben-Hur") did 40 takes; Robert Bresson ("Pickpocket") insisted on simple movements and monotone line deliveries; Italian Neorealists cast people off the street; Robert Altman ("Nashville") let actors improvise; Andrei Tarkovsky ("Solaris") kept them in the dark about how the story would end.

When it comes to horror, the quest becomes even more daunting: How do you convince viewers that the people they're seeing on screen are genuinely disturbed and terrified, while also securing enough distance between actors and characters to keep the shoot sustainable? Some films have attempted to split the difference by instilling genuine scares, discomfort, and emotional distress on their actors. Others assembled their respective violent scenarios to within an inch of their lives, placing performers into circumstances that were...

Rodrigo Moreno's The Delinquents is screening exclusively on Mubi in many countries.The Delinquents.Words have no owner. They simply are. They live in the speakers of a language, but no one has possession of a verb or a noun. If anyone can come close to such ownership, it is an artist, who puts the word in a complex combination that is theirs alone. A filmmaker's material is not words—though some might say a shot is its equivalent—but rather the world. Through framing, cutting, and duration, the director makes a movie their own, yet what is shot does not obey the will of the filmmaker. The material of the world is the filmmaker's lyrics, and the world does not belong to them.The arrangement and rearrangement of material—whether of words or of the world when it is filmed—into new works of art can be linked...

Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things is almost halfway done before it even hints that there’s something going on within its fin-de-siècle setting besides the creation and consumption of beautiful meals. The film’s first half hour is in fact just that, with Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), a veteran cook in the manor home of Dodin (Benoît Magimel), the epicure for whom she’s been working for over 20 years, making an extravagant, multi-course meal for him and his friends. The men eat the food, then compliment Eugénie on her cooking.

Given the close yet unfussy attention paid to the choreography of cooking, with Jonathan Ricquebourg’s camera flowing sinuously through the kitchen and peeking into pots as ingredients are added and steam billows out, it would have been satisfying if Hung had just concluded the film with well-fed Frenchmen chatting over a digestif. Fortunately, he’s interested not...

When Martin Scorsese finally won the directing Oscar for 2006’s The Departed, he inspired a handful of film buffs to point out the supposed travesty implied by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences long ignoring the landmark titles on the filmmaker’s resume in favor of a remake. Few pointed out, or seemed to recall, that America’s most beloved living auteur, was not only no stranger to remakes, but took up the business of remaking, rebooting, and paying homage as a more than honorable foundation for a now-legendary body of work.

New York, New York was essentially a ticker-tape parade for old Hollywood’s Technicolor musical legacy, while Taxi Driver was a tribute either to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket or John Ford’s The Searchers, depending on which auteur lens (Paul Schrader or Martin Scorsese) you look at it through. And 1973’s Mean Streets, the director’s third feature,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSStranger by the Lake.Production has begun on Alain Guiraudie’s next noir-esque feature, Miséricorde, with Dp Claire Mathon—their third collaboration after Stranger by the Lake (2013) and Staying Vertical (2016). The plot centers on a 30-year-old man named Jérémie who returns to a village in southern France, his prior home, for an old friend’s funeral, only to find himself at the center of a police investigation.Recommended VIEWINGJanus Films have shared a trailer for a new 4K restoration of Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1964). A virtuosic, formally experimental work of militant cinema, it tells the story of Manoel, a cowherd who, after murdering a ranch owner, flees to join a religious cult headed by a self-proclaimed saint, only to find himself back among violence. A landmark of Brazil’s Cinema Novo...

The Movie Orgy.The title is a kind of ontological dare: can an assemblage of movies all lay on top of each other, swap positions, feel each other? Surely humans love, as they say, “to watch,” to raise voyeurism up as art. But when left to its own devices, does cinema also experience such base urges? Asked another way: when we say “the movie orgy,” don’t we mean “editing”? Disparate parts colliding with and enveloping one another, penetrating and being penetrated, and finally mutating after coming together? Cinema is transformed by—and transforms (us) through—the spaces between the images. A classier writer might cite Robert Bresson, speaking to Cahiers du cinéma at Cannes in 1957: “The cinema must express itself not with images, but with relationships between images, which is not at all the same thing.” A happy vulgarian—I betray that I am one, as I suspect Joe Dante,...

Among the myriad reasons we could call the Criterion Channel the single greatest streaming service is its leveling of cinematic snobbery. Where a new World Cinema Project restoration plays, so too does Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight. I think about this looking at November’s lineup and being happiest about two new additions: a nine-film Robert Bresson retro including L’argent and The Devil, Probably; and a one-film Hype Williams retro including Belly and only Belly, but bringing as a bonus the direct-to-video Belly 2: Millionaire Boyz Club. Until recently such curation seemed impossible.

November will also feature a 20-film noir series boasting the obvious and the not. Maybe the single tightest collection is “Women of the West,” with Johnny Guitar and The Beguiled and Rancho Notorious and The Furies only half of it. Lynch/Oz, Irradiated, and My Two Voices make streaming premieres; Drylongso gets a Criterion Edition; and joining...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Roxy Cinema

Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives, Chinatown, The Third Man, and Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond all show on 35mm.

Anthology Film Archives

Five films by Robert Bresson screen in Essential Cinema this weekend.

Lincoln Center

NYFF Revivals closes with Un rêve plus long que la nuit on Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

Reverse Shot celebrates its 20th anniversary with a months-long programming run, continuing this weekend with Inside Llewyn Davis and Lake Mungo.

IFC Center

sex, lies, and videotape, The Holy Mountain, Being John Malkovich, Friday the 13th: Part VI, and Gregg Araki’s Nowhere play while Oldboy screens in a new restoration.

The post NYC Weekend Watch: Chinatown, Robert Bresson, Inside Llewyn Davis & More first appeared on The Film Stage.

Playwright Annie Baker has developed a distinctive style in which silences often speak louder than words, the words themselves mean more than what’s actually said, and routine conversations and events have the power of earth-shattering revelations. It’s an approach to drama that demands us to pay close attention to every line of dialogue and every flicker of emotion on an actor’s face, lest we miss crucial details. In some ways, that’s a deeply cinematic approach to dramaturgy, recalling the economy of Robert Bresson and Harold Pinter’s work, except that Baker’s is far more emotionally immediate.

The plot of Baker’s quiet and often moving feature directorial debut, Janet Planet, details the bond between 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) and her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), in rural Western Massachusetts in the summer of 1991 just before Lacy enters the sixth grade. The closest that the film...

The first image in writer-director Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt—a close-up of a hand squeezing a freshly caught fish, its reflective scales mirrored by the twinkling, gauzy light captured on 35mm by cinematographer Jomo Fray—quickly immerses us in the film’s world. The relationship between bodies and the natural world that surrounds them, mediated by the physical properties of film, is central to Jackson’s work. As the scene progresses, the camera’s focus remains resolutely on what may seem like its incidental textures, tracking the interplay of skin, earth, and water as if they were brushstrokes on a canvas.

The elemental poeticism of these images is clear evidence of Jackson’s promise as a filmmaker, and yet this opening sequence also points to why All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt amounts to a limited showcase for her talents. Essentially all of the film’s aesthetic,...

These last few years the Criterion Channel have made October viewing much easier to prioritize, and in the spirit of their ’70s and ’80s horror series we’ve graduated to––you guessed it––”’90s Horror.” A couple of obvious classics stand with cult favorites and more unknown entities (When a Stranger Calls Back and Def By Temptation are new to me). Three more series continue the trend: “Technothrillers” does what it says on the tin, courtesy the likes of eXistenZ and Demonlover; “Art-House Horror” is precisely the kind of place to host Cure, Suspiria, Onibaba; and “Pre-Code Horror” is a black-and-white dream. Phantom of the Paradise, Unfriended, and John Brahm’s The Lodger are added elsewhere.

James Gray is the latest with an “Adventures in Moviegoing” series populated by deep cuts and straight classics. Stonewalling and restorations of Trouble Every Day and The Devil, Probably make streaming debuts, while Flesh for Frankenstein,...

There are literally hundreds of films and TV shows about or featuring King Arthur going back well over a century – there are silent films, musicals, animated films, comedies, dramas. You name it, there is a King-Arthur-themed version of it. There are not a small number of “Best of…” lists floating around the internet as well. But how do you know which of the recommendations is really going to scratch your King Arthur-shaped itch?

MGM+’s new series about King Arthur, The Winter King, is a combination of gritty historical fiction and “low” fantasy. It is also fairly grim and violent. But there are lots of different ways to tell a story about King Arthur and his knights, with or without round table, Merlin, the Lady of the Lake and so on. Here, we’ve rounded up a few of our favourite films and TV shows about or featuring King Arthur,...

Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi drama “The Beast,” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday, follows a star-crossed duo, trying — and failing — to make love work across three timelines. Moving between 1910, 2014 and 2044, the film mixes period drama, speculative sci-fi and bouts of genuinely chilling horror — particularly in a middle section set in contemporary Los Angeles.

There, aspiring actress Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) catches the attention of Louis (George MacKay), a self-described incel with a violent hatred for women. Bonello based the character on Elliot Rodger, a 2014 mass killer who uploaded a misogynist manifesto to YouTube before claiming seven lives. The filmmaker also re-created scenes from Rodger’s infamous video verbatim in the film.

Why did you choose to cite Elliot Rodger?

When I learned of the story back in 2014, I was shocked by the atrocious attack, of course, but I was also shocked by his words, so much so that...

The well-liked film critic is fondly remembered as a passionate supporter of arthouse films.

Figures from the UK and international industry have been paying tribute to the beloved former Guardian, Screen International and Evening Standard film critic Derek Malcolm, who died aged 91 at the weekend.

“Derek Malcolm was a great critic and a true friend of the Venice Film Festival. Even at the Lido he exercised his great curiosity and sensitivity towards global cinema. It’s a big loss for film culture,” Alberto Barbera, artistic director of the Vernice Film Festival, told Screen.

Legendary US documentary maker Fred Wiseman reminisced...

Since Sofia Bohdanowicz introduced Deragh Campbell’s Audrey Brenac in Never Eat Alone, the eye-gravitating protagonist has always been on some inquiry, not unlike a non-criminal investigator. In A Woman Escapes, Audrey ventures into new territory for her fifth film, where she heals from losing her friend Juliane in Paris at her grandmother’s home. Along the path, Williams and Çevik play fictional versions of Audrey to help her in her grief through filmmaking while separated during the pandemic.

Containing dialogue and imagery recalling Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped, this explicit homage to the French auteur allows the three filmmakers to expand what experimental film could be. Throughout her work, Bohdanowicz seeds a bridge between fact and fiction to evoke the audience’s connection with their existing reality. She, Williams, and Çevik emit a patient, inquisitive approach to gazing at the world: Williams’ 3D layering of subtitles and physical...

Although he is rightly judged as being in the vanguard of British independent cinema, Mark Jenkin nonetheless seems out of place in such company. Unlike his contemporaries—Peter Strickland, Lynne Ramsay, Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard, and Jonathan Glazer, among others—he is a strict formalist, creating expressions through the rhythms and combinations of images and sounds rather than through conventional narratives or theatrical gestures. And what makes him yet more unique, both in the UK and internationally, is the breadth of his creative abilities: he writes, directs, shoots, edits, produces, and scores each of his films, and sometimes even develops the film himself, as with his BAFTA-winning debut feature, “Bait.” Like “Bait,” his latest work, “Enys Men,” is rather difficult to categorize.

Continue reading ‘Enys Men’: Director Mark Jenkin Talks ‘Bait,’ Robert Bresson & His Upcoming Time Travel Movie at The Playlist.

While we’ve known the results of Jeanne Dielman Tops Sight and Sound‘s 2022 Greatest Films of All-Time List”>Sight & Sound’s once-in-a-decade greatest films of all-time poll for a few months now, the recent release of the individual ballots has given data-crunching cinephiles a new opportunity to dive deeper. We have Letterboxd lists detailing all 4,400+ films that received at least one vote and another expanding the directors poll, spreadsheets calculating every entry, and now a list ranking how many votes individual directors received for their films.

Tabulated by Genjuro, the list of 35 directors, with two pairs, puts Alfred Hitchcock back on top, while Chantal Akerman is at number two. Elsewhere in the top ten are David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Orson Welles, Yasujirō Ozu, and Stanley Kubrick, and tied for the tenth spot is Wong Kar Wai and Ingmar Bergman.

Check out the list below,...

Now in his mid-80s, Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski proved that age is just a number when his film Eo premiered in Cannes last year, earning him the Jury Prize for this picaresque story of a donkey on the move, from good situations to bad. His lucky streak continued this year when the film was Oscar-nominated for Best International Feature — surprisingly, his first nod from the Academy in a career spanning 60 years.

Related Story Pawel Mykietyn Admits He Loved The “Crazy” Of Composing Music For A Wandering Donkey In Poland’s Oscar Entry ‘Eo’ – Sound & Screen Related Story 'Fire Of Love' Team On Their Volcanic Love Story For The Ages – Contenders Film: The Nominees Related Story Alice Rohrwacher & Alfonso Cuarón's 'Le Pupille' Draws Inspiration From Classic Italian Cinema – Contenders Film: The Nominees

Accompanied by his wife and writing partner Ewa Piaskowska for a panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event,...

A circus donkey embarks on a long, lonely journey, meeting human kindness and cruelty, in this strangely beautiful Oscar contender

By far the most intriguing category at the 95th Academy Awards is that of best international feature. While German director Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front seems an obvious pack leader (it’s up for nine awards – including best picture), there’s buzz around Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl (the first Irish feature to be nominated in this category), and enthusiastic support for Santiago Mitre’s historical drama Argentina, 1985. But the dark horse – or rather donkey – is Eo, the strangely wonderful Polish entry from veteran director Jerzy Skolimowski, inspired by Robert Bresson’s 1966 French masterpiece Au hasard Balthazar.

“This film was made out of our love for animals and nature,” says a closing intertitle, reassuring viewers that “the animals’ wellbeing on set was always our first...