If the race for Best International Feature Film feels rushed this year, it is: the Academy pushed up country submission deadlines by a month. Films still have until November 15 to play in theaters in their respective countries. The Academy has also laid down more rigorous rules for who serves on the Oscar selection committees: 50 percent must be filmmakers (including artists and craftspeople). France, for example, beefed up its committee from seven members to 11.

As a country with a robust film industry, France has often been criticized for picking the “wrong” Oscar submission, from Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Titane” (Neon), which was not nominated, to “The Taste of Things” (IFC Films) over Neon’s eventual Best Picture contender, “Anatomy of a Fall.”

In fact, Audrey Diwan, director of “Happening” — a film many thought should have been submitted instead of “Titane” — is now on the French selection committee, along with veteran...

France’s revamped Oscar committee has selected Jacques Audiard’s exhilarating redemption thriller “Emilia Perez” for the international feature film race. The movie won two major awards at the Cannes Film Festival and earned rave reviews.

“Emilia Perez” stars Karla Sofía Gascón as a fearsome drug lord who embraces her true self as a woman. The Spanish-language film earned one of Cannes’s longest standing ovations and went on to win the Jury Prize (in a jury presided over by Greta Gerwig), on top of a best actress prize for the ensemble cast, including Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz. The movie was bought by Netflix for the U.S. and the U.K. following its Cannes premiere.

Audiard is a revered French auteur who won a Palme d’Or with “Dheepan,” and was previously nominated for a foreign-language Oscar with “A Prophet” starring Tahar Rahim.

Although “Emilia Perez...

France’s Oscar committee has shortlisted four movies, including Jacques Audiard’s redemption thriller “Emilia Perez” and “The Count of Monte Cristo,” an epic adventure film adapted from Alexandre Dumas’ classic, as well as Payal Kapadia‘s “All We Imagine as Light” and Alain Guiraudie’s “Misericordia.”

All four movies word premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. “Emilia Perez” won two major awards, the Jury Prize and a best actress nod for its ensemble female cast, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldana and Adriana Paz; while “All We Imagine as Light,” a tale of two Mumbai nurses bonding, won the Grand Prize, becoming the first Indian film in 30 years to win the award. Kapadia was also the first Indian female director to compete at Cannes. Guiraudie’s darkly comic and provocative “Misericordia” played at Cannes Premiere and recently screened at Telluride and Toronto, while “The Count of Monte Cristo,...

France’s National Film Board has unveiled its revamped and expanded Oscar committee which is presided over by Charles Tesson, the former artistic director of Cannes’ Critics Week.

Along with Tesson, the committee includes “Emmanuelle” director Audrey Diwan who won Venice’s Golden Lion with “Happening” in 2021; critically acclaimed French playwright, director and producer Florian Zeller (“The Father”); former Lionsgate boss Patrick Wachsberger; international sales veterans Carole Baraton from Charades, and Gregoire Melin from Kinology; powerful French distributor Michèle Halberstadt from Arp Selection; producers Rosalie Varda (“Faces Places”) from Ciné-Tamaris, Nadim Cheikhroua (“Olfa’s Daughters”) and David Thion (“Anatomy of a Fall”) at Les Films Pelléas; and actor Clemence Poesy.

Appointed by France’s culture minister, Rachida Dati, the committee is facing the difficult task of picking the French film that is best suited to give the country its first Oscar win for best international feature in over three decades.

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist was the talk of the Lido on Sunday as the seven-years-in-the-making period epic finally received its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival’s historic Sala Grande cinema.

The audience inside the premiere erupted in applause as the credits began to roll on the film’s epic three-hour, 35-minute running time, giving Corbet and his cast a rousing, festival-best 13-minute standing ovation. Stars Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones looked teary at times by the effusive reaction to the movie.

The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a rave review, with chief critic David Rooney describing The Brutalist as “a monumental symphony of the immigrant experience” with a “devastating” performance by Brody as Tóth.

The Brutalist has all the thematic heft and intellectual rigor befitting its subject: The historical trauma and artistic vision that gave rise to the great works of mid-century American Brutalist architecture. But Corbet...

The Match Factory has acquired international sales rights for “An Urban Allegory,” a short film by Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher and French artist and director Jr, ahead of its world premiere at Venice Film Festival, where it plays out of competition.

“An Urban Allegory” marks the second collaboration between Rohrwacher, best known for “La Chimera,” “Happy as Lazzaro” and “The Wonders,” and Jr, whose credits include “Faces Places,” “Women Are Heroes,” “Paper and Glue” and “Tehachapi,” after premiering “Omelia Contadina” at Venice Film Festival in 2020.

The film stars César winner for most promising actress Lyna Khoudri, Palme D’Or winner director Leos Carax and Naïm El Kaldaoui in his first role.

According to a press statement, the synopsis is as follows: “In the ‘Allegory of the Cave,’ Plato ponders: What would happen if one of the prisoners managed to free themselves from their chains and escape from the cave? What if that prisoner were Jay,...

For the second year in a row, the L’Oeil d’or prize – the top award for documentary at the Cannes Film Festival – is being shared by two films.

The award announced on the Croisette today went to Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck, and The Brink of Dreams, directed by Ayman El Amir and Nada Riyadh.

Peck’s film centers on the titular South African photographer who documented life under apartheid for his country’s oppressed Black population. Actor Lakeith Stanfield voices writings from the late artist in the film. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found premiered in the Special Screenings section of Cannes.

Director Raoul Peck at the Deadline Studio during the 77th Cannes Film Festival presented by Neom on May 22, 2024.

The L’Oeil d’or jury – comprised of president Nicolas Philibert, as well as Dyana Gaye, Elise Jalladeau, Francis Legault and Mina Kavani – wrote,...

Fitting of the man who made “Faces Places,” a road trip movie alongside French New Wave icon Agnès Varda, to be chatting it up with Alfonso Cuarón, another highly regarded international filmmaker, before an interview with IndieWire at 50th Telluride Film Festival.

Seated at a coffee shop across the street from the theater currently screening his new film “Tehachapi,” one that just so happens to have one of his signature installation — a blown-up black and white photo of Varda and her hands peeking over the rooftop — staring back at him, artist and documentarian Jr can’t help but have his late friend on his mind.

“I feel she’s still with me. I feel like she prepared me for quite a journey and she took the time, those years that she taught me so much, and I knew at that time I could not process everything, but thank God it’s processing now,...

Two films by Arab women directors are sharing the L’Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) prize for the best documentary in Cannes. Four Daughters (Les Filles d’Olfa) by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania and The Mother of All Lies (La Mère de tous les mensonges) by Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir were announced as the winners at a joint ceremony this morning at the Palais in Cannes.

“It’s huge,” Ben Hania told Deadline after the announcement. “I’m very happy and I’m also very happy to share this prize with Asmae from Morocco. And I think that it means something for the region, for the storytellers, for us women directors… It’s so special.”

Both Ben Hania and El Moudir were on hand for the presentation at the Salon des Ambassadeurs. It the second prize in two days for El Moudir. On Thursday, she won best director in...

Every year, the Cannes Film Festival program yields its riches. And every year, documentaries are kept to the selection sidebars, with the exception of just three over the years, two of which won the Palme d’Or: “The Silent World,” co-directed by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle in 1956, and Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” in 2004.

This year, out of 16 documentaries in the Official Selection, two are in the Competition, the first time nonfiction titles have joined that storied roster since Moore’s inclusion.

This is progress, but a quick glance at the latest Palme d’Or predictions reveals that Wang Bing’s “Youth” (marking the first 3.5-hours of an eventual 10-hour triptych) and “Olfa’s Daughters” from Kaouther Ben Hania are not high on the list of likely winners. Both are recognized by critics as boundary-pushing examples of the form but seem unlikely to become consensus award picks from Ruben Östlund’s eclectic Competition jury.

Tom Luddy wasn’t famous exactly. But he had a huge impact on film culture via Uc Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive in the ’60s and the Telluride Film Festival in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and up to his death in February at age 79. And while he was based in the Bay Area, a theater full of Luddy-philes from both coasts turned up for his tribute at New York’s packed Paris Theater on April 15. They represented the cross-cultural network that Luddy created over decades of introducing people, sharing his favorite film gems, and luring folks to Telluride by inviting their films or bringing them in as guest directors (like Stephen Sondheim or Salman Rushdie) or tributees (like Athol Fugard or Michael Powell). Once they came, they usually came back.

Five of the stalwarts in the Luddy family, who have supported the festival on the Telluride board of directors and in other ways,...

The songs in the running for the 2023 Best Original Song Oscar are “Lift Me Up” (“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”), “This Is a Life” (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), “Naatu Naatu” (“Rrr”), “Applause” (“Tell It Like a Woman”), and “Hold My Hand” (“Top Gun: Maverick”). Our current odds show that “Naatu Naatu” (16/5) is favored to win, followed in order by “Lift Me Up” (39/10), “Hold My Hand” (4/1), “This Is a Life” (9/2), and “Applause” (9/2).

Only two of the 12 individual songwriters included on this year’s roster have vied for this prize before, with Lady Gaga (“Hold My Hand”) being the sole past winner. She is seeking a bookend trophy after prevailing in 2019 for writing “Shallow” for “A Star Is Born.” Her first song nomination came in 2016 for “Til It Happens to You” from the documentary “The Hunting Ground.”

Diane Warren, with whom Lady Gaga shared her first Oscar bid, has now achieved her...

India’s All That Breathes followed up its victory at the Sundance Film Festival by winning top documentary honors in Cannes.

The film directed by Shaunak Sen, which documents a pair of Muslim brothers in Delhi who devote countless hours to restore the health of ailing black kite birds, earned the L’Œil d’or (“Golden Eye”) award in a ceremony on Saturday.

“From their makeshift bird hospital in their tiny basement, the ‘kite brothers’ care for thousands of these mesmeric creatures that drop daily from New Delhi’s smog-choked skies,” notes a description of the documentary. “As environmental toxicity and civil unrest escalate, the relationship between this Muslim family and the neglected kite forms a poetic chronicle of the city’s collapsing ecology and rising social tensions.”

The Golden Eye jury, headed by filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, saluted All That Breathes for reminding “us that every life matters, and every small action matters.

Snd is teaming up with Easy Riders Films to develop a premium limited series loosely based on “The Family,” Suzanne Privat’s best-selling investigative book on a French cult which has existed for more than 200 years.

“The Family” is penned by rising French screenwriter Clémence Madeleine-Perdrillat, whose recent credits include “Nona and Her Daughters,” as well as the Amazon Original show “Mixte.” She led the writing team for season 2 of “In Treatment.”

Set in Paris’s underworld, the thriller series will shed right on the rites and customs of this enigmatic religious sect from diverse perspectives, focusing on the experiences of those inside and outside the community. The book, whose French title is “La Famille, itinéraires d’un secret,” was published by Les Avrils editions in 2021.

Madeleine-Perdrillat said “The Family” “offers the incredible opportunity to untangle the torments, paradoxes and quiet loyalties at the root of all families — all in...

MSNBC is giving cable news rival CNN increased competition in the exploding documentary arena through ramped up acquisitions by a revived arm devoted to non-fiction programming.

MSNBC Films showed the seriousness of its intent in June, when it won an intense bidding war for “Paper & Glue,” by the visual artist and prior Oscar nominee Jr, ahead of its Tribeca Film Festival premiere. “Paper & Glue” has since qualified for Academy Award consideration, and is competing against documentaries including “Julia,” backed by CNN Films and Sony Pictures Classics. MSNBC also has qualified two short documentaries – Emily L. Harrold’s “Meltdown at Dixie” and Seth Freed Wessler’s “The Facility” — for Oscar consideration

“We’re cherry-picking projects that exist in the ecosystem, whether it’s content from studios, or from an independent filmmaker, or a production company,” explains MSNBC president Rashida Jones, who brought in veteran docu producer Amanda Spain as...

After being delayed a year due to the pandemic, Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated musical remake of the best picture winner “West Side Story” had its first screenings this week before critics, journalists and varying awards and guild voters. The social media reaction has been loud and palpable throughout the Oscar chamber, which could bring about a late December entry run for the best picture prize, which would be the first since Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” (2017) and Clint Eastwood’s “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).

There’s incredible history to be made if the buzz is replicated and embraced throughout the awards season. Rita Moreno became the first, and still, only Latina to ever win an acting Oscar for the 1961 original version as Anita, and she could be welcomed back into the fold, now as the newly created character Valentina, with the remake.

A nomination for Moreno would not just be groundbreaking,...

Charlie Chaplin was singled out for a honorary Oscar at the first Academy Awards in 1929 for his “versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing, and producing ‘The Circus.'” Forty-three years later, he was feted a second time by the academy for his “incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century. The following year he won his only competitive Oscar for the score of “Limelight,” which had not been released in Los Angeles during its initial 1952 run.

This year, the new documentary “The Real Charlie Chaplin” could strike Oscar gold as well. The film made the rounds on the fall film festival circuit before its theatrical release on November 19 and its Showtime debut on December 11. And it wouldn’t be the first biography of a show business figure to claim the prize.

“The Real Charlie Chaplin” tells Chaplin’s life story, framed by his own recorded words,...

The French artist and photographer Jr — known for his enormous murals of faces and ambitious projects that seek to transcend boundaries, both physical and human — already has co-starred in (and co-directed) the Oscar-nominated documentary Faces Places. But the late filmmaker Agnès Varda, his co-star and co-director on the project, told him he should follow it up with a new film.

“Agnes had always told me, ‘You need to show more of your process and she was always pushing me that I show more of the layers of how the projects happen,” says the New York- and ...

The French artist and photographer Jr — known for his enormous murals of faces and ambitious projects that seek to transcend boundaries, both physical and human — already has co-starred in (and co-directed) the Oscar-nominated documentary Faces Places. But the late filmmaker Agnès Varda, his co-star and co-director on the project, told him he should follow it up with a new film.

“Agnes had always told me, ‘You need to show more of your process and she was always pushing me that I show more of the layers of how the projects happen,” says the New York- and ...

French auteur Agnès Varda may be gone, but graffiti artist and photographer Jr continues the work they collaborated on, and documented, in 2017’s “Faces Places,” creating large-scale installations in which impoverished and/or fragmented locales are plastered with images of their residents. “Paper & Glue” is an unofficial companion piece to Jr and Varda’s prior non-fiction film, focusing exclusively on the former’s career, and while it certainly proves a similar celebration of art’s ability to give voice to the voiceless, and to build bridges between disparate individuals and classes, Given its outsized subject matter, a limited theatrical release makes aesthetic sense, but its box-office prospects nonetheless appear small.

“Paper & Glue” opens with the Varda quote, “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.” Jr’s documentary both agrees with that sentiment and serves as its flip-side, contending that landscapes are comprised of fascinating men and...

At the start of Jane B. par Agnès V., a 1988 documentary made about singer and actress Jane Birkin by, well, the French director Agnès Varda, Birkin sits in period dress and looks directly at the camera with her characteristic deadpan expression. She talks about the nausea she feels when she looks at herself in the mirror and sees the signs of aging on her body. She has just turned 40 but talks as though she is much older, the consequence of experience.At the 2021 Cannes premiere of her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg’s new documentary, titled Jane par Charlotte in deliberate homage to Varda’s film, Birkin is 74. She arrives dressed in the relaxed-fit blue jeans and oversized white shirt she made iconic in her twenties. She seems to be inviting comparison, to highlight how much she has aged while retaining her je ne sais quoi. Something so deliberate must come from a position of self-confidence,...

"Can art change the world?" A very good question! Perhaps it can...? MSNBC Films and Abramorama have unveiled an official trailer for the documentary film Paper & Glue, the latest feature directed by and about the artist best known as Jr. From the Oscar-nominated director of Faces Places comes a thought-provoking documentary that portrays social realities through massive, visionary art installations. Paper & Glue follows acclaimed French photographer Jr around the world as he builds some of his most monumental projects and inspires new perspectives that unite communities through his awe-inspiring work. If you first learned about Jr and his art projects watching the lovely Faces Places film with Agnes Varda, this doc takes us back through his entire life and career - starting out in illicit graffiti videos captured on Paris rooftops at night, to his adventures around the world installing pasted paper in iconic places. This looks fantastic!

Exclusive: In a highly competitive acquisition situation ahead of the documentary’s Tribeca Festival premiere, MSNBC Films has picked up Paper & Glue from Imagine Documentaries, Impact Partners, Time Studios, and Shark Island.

The feature is a project by acclaimed French artist Jr, whose known for giving a global voice to everyday people through a genre-blending combination of public art, photography and large format spectacle. In the docu, Jr turns the camera on his own work as he builds some of his most monumental projects. From early illicit graffiti videos captured on Paris rooftops at night, to the US-Mexico border, to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, to a current collaboration at a California supermax prison, the movie follows Jr as he turns these communities inside out, turning images of residents into eye-catching and immersive art installations. Paper & Glue follows the Oscar-nominated Faces Places, which was directed by Jr along with Agnès Varda.

Fox Corp. streaming service Tubi has made a deal with Cohen Media Group to put 80 of its film titles on the free, ad-supported platform.

Tubi will have exclusive free streaming rights to classics like Howards End and Daughters Of The Dust. More recent films that are heading to the platform include Agnès Varda and Jr’s documentary collaboration, Faces Places and Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang.

Cohen titles already on Tubi include Maurice with Hugh Grant; Farewell My Queen, starring Diane Kruger and Léa Seydoux; and François Ozon’s Double Lover and The New Girlfriend. The full slate will roll out throughout the month of June.

Fox closed its $440 million acquisition of Tubi last year and has steadily increased its programming offering. It now has 30,000 film and TV titles from more than 250 suppliers.

Tubi reported having 33 million monthly active users as of last fall. It has also said that streaming...

Exclusive: Imagine Documentaries and Impact Partners have partnered on the feature documentary Paper & Glue. It is directed by renowned French artist Jr about a very personal subject: his own artwork. Using unexpected canvasses, Jr’s intention is to give a global voice to everyday people through a genre-blending combination of public art, photography and large-format spectacle.

The film will make its debut at one of the spring festivals, and I hear that will likely be at the Tribeca Film Festival in June.

From early illicit graffiti videos captured on Paris rooftops at night to a monumental portrait set on the U.S.-Mexico border wall to a current collaboration in a California supermax prison, Paper & Glue uses the power of collaborative art to uplift communities and inspire self-expression. Told through Jr’s first-person accounts, the film uses his vast personal archives to revisit and reveal rare behind-the-scenes moments in his...

A version of this story about “Collective” first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

The Oscar category of Best Documentary was once a reliable safe haven for homegrown American films, but in recent years it has gone international. Since 2015, there have been at least one, and often two, non-English-language titles among the nominees. Films like Italy’s “Fire at Sea,” France’s “Faces Places,” and Brazil’s “The Edge of Democracy” have told stories not with an outsider’s eye, but from within the counties and cultures in which they take place.

But no film had ever been nominated for Best Documentary and Best International Feature Film (formerly known as Best Foreign Language Film) until North Macedonia’s “Honeyland” turned that trick last year. This year the doubleheader occurred again with Alexander Nanau’s “Collective,” an accomplishment that was even more notable considering...

"Do you think it's fair to bring a book into Times Square?" Netflix has revealed the first official trailer for Pretend It's A City, a new docu-series directed by Martin Scorsese about his friend, the kooky, outgoing, outspoken author / speaker Fran Lebowitz. Wander the New York City streets and fascinating mind of wry writer, humorist and raconteur Fran Lebowitz as she sits down with Marty to discuss life in the Big Apple. Directed by Lebowitz's longtime friend Martin Scorsese and peppered with his own witty takes on a town he knows best, Pretend It's A City is described as "a double dose of NYC attitude that sparks pangs of delight, fury and recognition among those who love the place as deeply as they do." This looks like so much fun! It seems like a NYC follow-up to Jr & Agnes Varda's wonderful doc film Faces Places, following two friends around town...

For the subjects of Benjamin Ree‘s new documentary “The Painter and the Thief,” the story begins with a pair of paintings stolen by a man in the throes of drug addiction from a gallery where a woman recently debuted her art that attempts to wrestle with her own past trauma. From there the painter, Barbora Kysilkova, and the thief, Karl-Bertil Nordland, form the unlikeliest of bonds, leading to major turning points in both their lives as well as one indelible friendship. Watch the trailer above.

In only his second feature film, Norwegian documentarian Ree discovers two compelling subjects in “The Painter and the Thief” and lets their own exploration of each other tell his story. After a courtroom appearance during which Kysilkova first sees Nordland, she invites him to her studio so that she can paint him, seeing in him something inescapable that inspires her to put his likeness on canvas.

Portuguese film distributor Midas Filmes has picked up a slew of new acquisitions, including Nanni Moretti’s upcoming “Three Floors,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Memoria” and Daniele Luchetti’s “The Ties,” which opened this year’s Venice Film Festival.

The Lisbon-based company, which is taking part in this year’s International Classic Film Market (Mifc) focus on Portugal in Lyon, France, has also recently picked up Belgian helmer Lucas Belvaux’s “Home Front,” starring Gérard Depardieu; “The Woman Who Ran,” by Hong Sang-Soo; and “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue,” Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke’s documentary about a local literature festival in Shanxi, China, which premiered at this year’s Berlinale.

Launched in 2006, Midas Filmes has released more than 60 films and boasts a DVD catalog of more than 200 films. Catalog titles and classics play major roles in the distributor’s repertoire, some 85% of which comprises international films, about 10% Portuguese titles and 5% U.

I’ve spent most of the summer spying on my next-door neighbors. It’s not particularly dignified—especially since I’m literally peeking through my horrible kitchen blinds—but what else do you do when you’re stuck in an apartment by yourself all day? My neighbors’ eldest son is a competitive swimmer, who spent the early part of summer doing “laps” via a resistance harness in an above-ground pool the family set up in their small Queens backyard space, which is when I became fascinated by people I had never paid attention to until a pandemic forced us all to stay home 24/7. This situation reminded me of Daguerréotypes, Agnès Varda’s 1975 documentary about her humble shopkeeping neighbors on the Rue Daguerre—a film shot within 300 feet of her apartment because she couldn’t be away from home while caring for her young son. Rather than allow her frustrating physical constraints to limit her,...

The Criterion Collection has announced a new treat for cinephiles coming this summer. The Complete Films of Agnès Varda, a 15-disc collector’s set, will feature all 39 of the late French icon’s features, shorts, and documentaries. The set hits shelves on August 11 this year.

Each of the 15 discs presents a curation of films organized by themes that marked Varda’s work, including explorations of Paris in “Cléo From 5 to 7,” studies of married life with “Le Bonheur,” her collaborations with Jane Birkin in “Jane B. par Agnès V.” and “Kung-Fu Master!,” and Jacques Demy with “Jacquot d Nantes,” “The Young Girls Turn 25,” and “The World of Jacques Demy,” and much more. She was married to Demy up until his death in 1990.

The full list of included titles is below. The set also features a 200-page book surveying Varda’s career, which launched in 1955 with “La Pointe Courte,” followed...

New mini-theatre complex will mark Uplink’s third arthouse cinema in Japan.

Japanese specialist distributor-exhibitor Uplink Co is gearing up to open a four-screen cinema in the city of Kyoto, marking its third arthouse cinema opening in Japan.

Scheduled to open on April 16, the cinema will show arthouse films from around the world, as well as Japanese films with English subtitles for English-speaking residents and tourists in Kyoto. Each screening room will have a different design concept, colours and style.

The cinema will be located in the Shinpukan cultural and shopping complex, a redevelopment based on a historic building that...

So, How Was Your Decade is a series in which the decade’s most innovative musicians answer our questionnaire about the music, culture, and memorable moments that shaped their decade. We’ll be rolling these pieces out throughout December.

Early in the 2010s, rock & roll revivalists Low Cut Connie were a band without a home, releasing their own records after they received rejection slips from 20 different major labels. “At the time, those were all terrible blows,” singer Adam Weiner told Rolling Stone in 2018, “but now I see it as a blessing.

In the latter years of her filmmaking career, Agnès Varda — a giant of the French New Wave of the 1960s — integrated herself more and more into her work, becoming a central character in acclaimed documentaries like “The Gleaners and I” and “Faces Places,” not to mention the autobiographical “The Beaches of Agnès,” which she made to mark her 80th birthday.

As someone accustomed to telling the story of her life on film, it’s not surprising that she ended her career by creating her own memorial: “Varda by Agnès” premiered at the 2019 Berlinale, just one month before she died at the age of 90. This final film acts as a perfect button to a legendary life in art, and it’s also a launchpad to viewers who want to go back and explore her groundbreaking contributions to the cinema.

Structurally, “Varda by Agnès” is built upon a series of lectures she gave,...

The New York Film Critics Circle is so determined to be one of the first groups to weigh in with its picks for the best of the year that the date of its decision-making keeps getting advanced. But how much influence does it have on the last group to be heard from — the motion picture academy which will reveal the Oscar winners 67 days from now on Feb. 9, 2020? Let’s take a look back at the last eight years of the Nyfcc picks and see how well (or not), these early kudos previewed the Academy Awards.

Last year, “Roma” swept the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, winning Best Picture and both Best Director and Best Cinematography for multi-hyphenate Alfonso Cuaron. While he won both those individual races at the Oscars, his film lost the big prize to “Green Book,” which had been snubbed by the Nyfcc. Four-time Academy Awards winner...

The Toronto Film Festival today unveiled The Best Of The Decade: An Alternative View, a top ten movie list from the last decade. Tiff asked film curators, historians, and archivists from Canada and around the world to choose the best films of the 2010s — any length, genre, or format. Judging by the list, it’s fair to say that superhero movies weren’t front of mind.

Coming out on top of the arthouse list was…Lucrecia Martel’s 2017 festival favourite Zama, the dreamlike tale about a Spanish officer in Seventeenth century Asunción, Paraguay, awaiting his transfer to Buenos Aires. Plenty of great movies make the cut. Check it out below.

“Many of the films in the poll’s top 10 address the perilous era we have just lived through, with such prescient works as Film Socialisme, Neighboring Sounds, and Sieranevada predicting various types of ecological, political, and social calamity,” said Tiff Senior Programmer James Quandt.

When director Agnès Varda came out with her 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary Faces Places, co-directed with the artist Jr, many people assumed it would be her final film. In her late 80s at that point, her eyesight was failing—if not her unquenchable curiosity.

But in fact she would complete one more film before her death in March at age 90. Varda by Agnès, the capstone to a remarkable career in cinema, plays at AFI Fest in Los Angeles November 21. The next day it opens in theaters in New York before expanding nationwide.

“It’s a way of saying goodbye,” Varda explained at the film’s world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February, a month before her passing. “I have to prepare myself to say goodbye and to go away. It’s fine.”

The film is built around talks Varda gave late in her career about her work. Rosalie Varda, the...

Ava DuVernay is starting an Array 360 Film Series, aimed at bringing together filmmakers and emerging artists for six weekends from Sept. 27 to Nov. 2 in Los Angeles.

The events will take place at the new Amanda Theater on the Array Creative Campus in Filipinotown. The series will include the work of filmmakers Agnès Varda, Euzhan Palcy, Barbara Loden, Suzana Amaral, Kathleen Collins, Shirin Neshat, Garrett Bradley and Mati Diop. Highlights include a weekend of screenings devoted to the work of John Singleton, a showcase of Filipinx cinema and a conversation between Michael Mann and DuVernay.

“As a model, Array does steep itself in inclusion models to correct long-held absences,” she said. “We believe in balance from the beginning. Our Array Creative Campus was built with this belonging in mind from the first day and Array 360 is a reflection of our mantra that everyone has a place in true cinema,” said DuVernay.

Features: Agnès Varda, Sandrine Bonnaire, Hervé Chandès, Nurith Aviv, Esther Levesque | Written and Directed by Agnes Varda

Varda by Agnes is directed by, and follows the filmography of, the late Belgian/French auteur Agnes Varda – from her early short film work in 1954 to her last feature film Faces Places released in 2018. Agnes’ last feature film is a poignant and captivating unravelling of an unparalleled force within the cinematic realm. An enlightening and foreboding feature that examines and discusses the career of a unique and deeply missed cinematic treasure.

Even at the ripe old age of ninety Agnes is a seismic screen presence with incredible charisma. She is a complete delight on-screen throughout the two hours running time with inspiring anecdotes and incredibly rich insight into her filmmaking process and development as a filmmaker. The jolliness and honesty Varda brings to the proceeding is magically immersive and engaging with its audience.

Other openers include cricket doc ‘The Edge’ and ‘Tell It To The Bees’.

CGI animation The Lion King is the latest Disney remake to hit UK cinemas, and will look to challenge the highest openings of the year on its first weekend.

Its target will be the £31.4m three-day gross of Avengers: Endgame in April this year – by some distance the record opening weekend for a film in the UK.

The presence of several other blockbuster titles still in cinemas – Toy Story 4 and Aladdin from Disney, plus Sony’s Spider-Man: Far From Home – make this a lofty goal.

However...

Charles S. Cohen doesn’t just love French cinema: he puts his money where his mouth is. And with a net worth estimated at $3.3 billion by Forbes Magazine, the owner of producer/distributor Cohen Media Group — the largest American distributor of French films in the U.S. — is showing his love in a multitude of ways.

“I am finalizing plans with the French government for the renovation and expansion of La Pagode Cinema, the only theater

in the 7th arrondissement [of Paris],” the real estate magnate says.

It’s only one of his many recent efforts involving French cinema, which include licensing the film libraries of Maurice Pialat, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and others, restoring and releasing them on home video through his Cohen Film Collection.

He’s also chairman of the Alliance Française, and his efforts in promoting French cinema and art earned him France’s National Order of Merit in...

Chicago – If the French New Wave cinema movement (1958 to late 1960s) had a mother, it was undoubtably Agnés Varda. The versatile filmmaker began her film journey shortly before the movement began, and her influence resonated throughout that era and within her career. Varda died at the age of 90 on March 29th, 2019.

French Filmmaker Agnés Varda in Chicago, October of 2015

Photo credit: Joe Arce of Starstruck Foto for HollywoodChicago.com

Arlette “Agnés” Varda was born in Brussels, Belgium, and through her French mother applied to the Sorbonne (University of Paris) shortly after World War II, gaining a degree in literature and psychology. Continuing her education in art history, she turned to photography before becoming a voice in Left Bank Cinema and the French New Wave. Her debut film was 1954’s “La Pointe Courte,” which she built from still images of her photographs.

Her career built from there, as her follow feature...

The Cannes Film Festival is saluting director Agnès Varda with its official poster, which depicts the filmmaker, then in her mid-20s, shooting her first feature, 1955’s “La Pointe Courte.”

The announcement reflects the enormous respect the director-cum-visual-artist had earned from Cannes and the film community worldwide as a pioneering director — the woman whose independent debut paved the way for the French New Wave. Later, Varda went on to make “Cléo from 5 to 7,” which premiered in competition at Cannes in 1962 and featured a cameo from “Breathless” director Jean-Luc Godard, whose own film career was catalyzed in part by her example. Varda died at 90 last month.

Varda was a regular at Cannes, whether or not she had a film to screen there — and she presented many, including “Jacquot de Nantes,” “The Gleaners and I,” and, most recently, “Faces Places” — and served on the jury in 2005, the year Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne...

Agnès was an artist. And like all artists, she made our lives different. She captured life through the most normal lens to reveal what is beautiful and strange about it, while also working tirelessly to expose the false truths. Her presence in the world was absolutely unique but also intuitive, such that nothing surprised us coming from her: an idea, a phrase, a photograph, a documentary.

It’s thanks to her film “The Gleaners and I” — which I saw at Cannes in 2000 as a simple festivalgoer — that, when I became artistic director a year later, I made it a point to program documentaries and essay films in the official selection. And what an extraordinary moment it was, in 2017, to welcome her for “Faces Places” in the grande salle of the Palais!

Agnès was the vital link in an invisible chain of women filmmakers, rubbing elbows with Alice Guy Blaché and Germaine Dulac,...

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday.

The film world lost a legendary figure on Friday morning, when it was announced that Agnès Varda had died.

The news sparked an immense outpouring of support, and it seemed as if many of the tributes were unified by a sense of boundary-breaking inspiration. Varda said that she always “wanted to make people see deeply,” that she didn’t want “to show people things, but to give people the desire to see,” and the response to her passing seems to prove that she was successful in her mission.

This week’s question: How did Agnès Varda inspire you?

Ken Bakely (@kbake_99), Freelance for Film Pulse

Though I’m unfortunately not as well-versed with Varda’s work as the many others who have written more extensive or personal tributes, what’s clear to...

Agnès Varda at her 2017 Blum & Poe exhibition in New York Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

When I arrived at the Washington Square Hotel on Waverly Place in the Village for my conversation with Michal Aviad, the director of Working Woman, it was the day after the passing of Agnès Varda on Friday, March 29. I had contacted Agnès for a tribute honouring Michel Legrand, who died just two months earlier, and she immediately responded with her memories of him with Jacques Demy and sent personal photos from the set of Demoiselles De Rochefort with Catherine Deneuve.

We discussed Faces Places (Visages Villages), Vagabond, Le Lion Volatil, Varda Par Agnès, and why Les Glaneurs Et La Glaneuse (The Gleaners And I) is Michal's favourite.

Michal Aviad on the difference between Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard: "You see what a lively, alive person she is. And what kind of an old grump - sorry to say - he is.

Many filmmakers have taught me how to look at the world, but Agnès Varda is teaching me how to age. She died this week at the age of 90, leaving behind an example we should all strive to meet as we get on in years.

One of the legendary filmmakers who made up the Nouvelle Vague, France’s influential cinematic New Wave of the 1960s, she continually embraced life and a changing world, even after losing her beloved husband and fellow New Wave icon, Jacques Demy, in 1990. In the years when one might have expected her to grow more home-bound, perhaps venturing forth to publish a memoir or pick up the occasional award, she instead continued to plunge into the ever-changing technology of cinema.

As a filmmaker, she constantly experimented with digital cameras and editing, never afraid to step into the arena of the young and always open to completely upending...

Until today, if you had asked me to name the greatest living filmmaker, I would have answered Agnès Varda. What a loss that the 90-year-old director — who died Friday, leaving behind such intimate masterpieces as “Cléo from 5 to 7,” “Vagabond,” and “The Gleaners and I” — will create no more.

Her passing is a chance for the world of cinema to come together and recognize the achievements of an outsider artist who lived long enough to appreciate the impact her work has had on both audiences and multiple generations of younger directors. Before the French New Wave took form in the late 1950s, it was Varda who paddled out from shore and shouted, “Hey boys, come on in! The water’s fine!” And in recent years, with a series of increasingly personal documentaries — including two, “The Beaches of Agnès” and “Faces Places,” that the Los Angeles Film Critics awarded along the way...

Tributes are pouring in for Oscar-winning filmmaker and French cultural icon Agnès Varda, who has died aged 90.

In a statement sent to Deadline, Martin Scorsese said, “I seriously doubt that Agnès Varda ever followed in anyone else’s footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art … which were one in the same. She charted and walked her own path each step of the way, she and her camera. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures, so beautifully balanced between documentary and fiction, is like no one else’s — every image, every cut … What a body of work she left behind: movies big and small, playful and tough, generous and solitary, lyrical and unflinching … and alive.

“I saw her for the last time a couple of months ago. She knew that she didn’t have much longer, and she made every second count: she didn’t want to miss a thing.

Iconic filmmaker, celebrated documentarian, and a cinephile for the ages, Agnès Varda may have passed away, but the legendary creator leaves behind a rich and wonderful legacy of dozens of films that will be enjoyed for years to come. From her earliest, pre-French New Wave days to an increasingly lively and personal series of documentaries she continued to create well into her eighth decade, there’s always something new to discover in Varda’s deep oeuvre.

In honor of the master filmmaker and all-around wonderful creator, take some time to check out some of her best films, currently available on various streaming outfits around the web. Here’s where to watch eight of Varda’s best films right now, including her signature classics, some new hits, and even a potential double feature.

“Cinevardaphoto” (Watch on Kanopy with library membership)

Varda’s talents extended far beyond the film frame, and her...