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Simone Cleary (Kate Hudson) greets Shriver (Michael Shannon) in Michael Maren’s whimsical A Little White Lie

Michael Maren’s whimsical A Little White Lie (adapted from Chris Belden’s book Shriver) stars Michael Shannon (also a producer), Kate Hudson (executive producer), Don Johnson, and M Emmet Walsh with Kate Linder, Romy Byrne, Mark Boone Junior, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Jimmi Simpson, Wendie Malick, and Zach Braff.

Honoré de Balzac, Jerzy Kosinski and Hal Ashby’s Being There, starring Peter Sellers (shown to Olivia Colman by Toby Jones in Sam Mendes’s Empire Of Light), The Landlord, Harold And Maude, Linda Lavin and Harris Yulin in A Short History Of Decay, Max Frisch’s I’m Not Stiller and Call Me Gantenbein, John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance Of Lost Time, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper,...

Mathieu Amalric on the coat worn by Shirley Knight in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People and the one on Vicky Krieps: “That’s the reference. I told that to Caroline Spieth, the costume person.”

Mathieu Amalric’s terrific Hold Me Tight (Serre Moi Fort), based on the play Je Reviens De Loin by Claudine Galéa, shot by Christophe Beaucarne and starring Vicky Krieps and Arieh Worthalter was a highlight of the 74th Cannes Film Festival and New York’s 27th edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. In the first instalment with Mathieu we discussed his films on John Zorn, thoughts on Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, Jerry Lewis, and going to Rome to film with Nanni Moretti Il Sol Dell'avvenire.

Mathieu Amalric (Je Reviens De Loin by Claudine Galéa) with Anne-Katrin Titze on Vicky Krieps as Clarisse: “As you said, she does the film. Her character is the projectionist,...

Éric Baudelaire on Une Fleur À La Bouche and When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories: “These two flower stories were sort of overlapping in my mind subconsciously, but it wasn’t a conscious thing.”

In my conversation with Eric Baudelaire, the director of When There Is No More Music to Write, and Other Roman Stories also screened) and A Flower In The Mouth (Une Fleur À La Bouche) co-written with Anne-Louise Trividic, starring Oxmo Puccino and Dali Benssalah, we discussed his work with editor Claire Atherton, music historian Maxime Guitton connecting him to composer Alvin Curran, a Luigi Pirandello play, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Robert Musil and Young Törless (Der junge Törless).

Éric Baudelaire with Anne-Katrin Titze on When There Is No More Music To Write, And Other Roman Stories: “The flower vendor in Rome has been a subject of preoccupation for me since 2017 …”

From Paris,...

Mathieu Amalric with Anne-Katrin Titze on a link between Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Jerry Lewis, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Peter Sellers: “Somebody that is there, that didn’t ask anything and that puts the world in disorder.”

Mathieu Amalric’s terrific Hold Me Tight (Serre Moi Fort), starring Vicky Krieps and Arieh Worthalter was a highlight of the 74th Cannes Film Festival and New York’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema. He just premiered Zorn III (2018 - 2022) in Cinéma du réel at the Centre Pompidou and this weekend he will be in Hamburg on stage with Barbara Hannigan to perform Zorn’s The Song of Songs (written for Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson). Then Mathieu is off to Rome to star in Nanni Moretti’s Il Sol Dell'Avvenire.

Barbara Hannigan and John Zorn in Mathieu Amalric’s Zorn III (2018 - 2022)

In the first of my series...

A 16th-century noblewoman awaits her husband’s return from war in a stately, highly wrought drama etched with refinement and intelligence

Rita Azevedo Gomes’s The Portuguese Woman is elegant, mysterious, implacably distant slow cinema, beautiful but opaque, composed on the stately level of the court masque, and with a delicate, if not precisely subtle, flavour of eroticism. I found myself utterly absorbed – more so because I went away and read the 1924 short story on which it’s based, by the Austrian author Robert Musil, known for his monumental and unfinished The Man Without Qualities.

In the early 16th century, an unnamed Portuguese noblewoman (played by newcomer Clara Riedenstein) has married the aristocratic Lord von Ketten (Marcello Urgheghe). When he goes to war in Italy, she stays behind with her retinue and ladies-in-waiting, waiting for his return for over a decade in a becalmed state of torpor and inscrutable discontent.

A Portuguese Woman“It doesn’t really matter where things come from. What matters is picking things up again, mess them up, try to push them forward in a different way. All of us do it, we’ve all been doing it all through time, and things haven’t really changed that much since Greece. What we can try is to do something that seems to be new, or that is shown in a whole different way—even if not necessarily intentionally.”In a way, that’s what Rita Azevedo Gomes has been doing through her career as a filmmaker. A career, avowedly, somewhat confidential—her latest fiction, The Portuguese Woman, is only her 9th film since her 1990 debut O Som da Terra a Tremer—but one that has been quietly snowballing since 2012’s The Revenge of a Woman, to her own surprise, became a firm festival favorite. Her 2016 poetic...

Seven Portuguese titles will screen during the Berlinale, and a bevy of Portuguese producers are attending the European Film Market seeking co-producers and international sales agents for their projects.

Two Portuguese features will screen in the non-competitive Berlinale Forum dedicated to more avant-garde cinema. “The Portuguese Woman,” a historical drama by Rita Azevedo Gomes, is based on Robert Musil’s “Three Women,” adapted by Portuguese novelist, Agustina Bessa-Luis. The film premiered at Argentina’s Mar del Plata. It has an austere filmic style, based on static movements of the actors, thereby creating tableaux vivants.

“Serpentarius” is about a young man in search of his mother’s ghost in a post-disaster African landscape. Angolan-born Carlos Conceição’s shorts include “Goodnight Cinderella” and “Bad Bunny” which both played in Cannes’ Critics Week.

The Forum Expanded sidebar includes 40-minute experimental documentary “Fordlandia Malaise” by Susana de Sousa Dias, about failed utopia Fordlandia, established...

The Berlin International Film Festival on Friday unveiled the lineup for its Forum sidebar of avant-garde cinema, with fictional and documentary titles from across Europe, Africa and South America among the highlights.

Literary adaptations — from Rita Azevedo Gomes’s costume drama The Portuguese Woman, based on the Robert Musil novella, to Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska's adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s ghost novel The Children of the Dead to Ghassan Salhab’s essayistic collage An Open Rose, inspired by letters from prison from legendary leftist martyr Rosa Luxemburg — are a major focus in the Forum program this year.

The ...

The Berlin International Film Festival on Friday unveiled the lineup for its Forum sidebar of avant-garde cinema, with fictional and documentary titles from across Europe, Africa and South America among the highlights.

Literary adaptations — from Rita Azevedo Gomes’s costume drama The Portuguese Woman, based on the Robert Musil novella, to Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska's adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s ghost novel The Children of the Dead to Ghassan Salhab’s essayistic collage An Open Rose, inspired by letters from prison from legendary leftist martyr Rosa Luxemburg — are a major focus in the Forum program this year.

The ...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSJia Zhangke's In the Qing Dynasty, a project the auteur has been preparing since as early as 2007, is set to begin shooting in Spring 2019.

Jia Zhangke's historical epic In The Qing Dynasty, to be produced by Johnnie To, will have action by Ching Siu Tung. pic.twitter.com/LZsHboTw54— Asian Film Strike (@AsianFilmStrike) April 27, 2017 Recommended Viewinga neon-lit trailer for Harmony Korine's highly-anticipated The Beach Bum, which will be released in March of 2019. For GQ, Nicolas Cage provides a candid self-analysis of his personal favorite characters he has played in his singular acting career, from Castor Troy to Charlie Kaufman (with nods to German Expressionism and Fritz Lang!).Nuri Bilge Ceylan's latest, The Wild Pear Tree, has been selected as the Turkish entry for the Foreign Language award at the 91st Academy Awards next year.

Natalie Portman has played down claims that her character in Brady Corbet’s music drama Vox Lux is a “monster,” but that the film, which follows the rise of her pop star Celeste from the ashes of a major national tragedy, is a “reflection of our society.”

The Black Swan star plays Celeste, a pop star in 2017 trying to get through a series of scandals and make a comeback.

Earlier in the film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer’s Raffey Cassidy plays a younger Celeste, who survives a tragedy and becomes a pop star after performing at the memorial service. She is aided along the way by her songwriting sister, played by Stacy Martin, and manager, played by Jude Law. Later in the film, Cassidy plays the daughter. Jennifer Ehle also co-stars.

Portman says there is the theme of a “loss of innocence” across the movie. However, she says...

One of our most-anticipated festival premieres this fall, Vox Lux is the second feature from Brady Corbet, following the harrowing The Childhood of a Leader. Ahead of a Venice debut, the first teaser has now arrived, showing off Natalie Portman on her pop stardom journey, from 1999 to 2017. The preview is brief but enticing, following her character of Celeste as she prepares for a fabulous stage entrance.

Vanity Fair, who premiered the tease, also has more details about the ensemble. The Killing of a Scared Deer star Raffey Cassidy will play a young Celeste, when she experiences major trauma, which eventually provides her gateway into music. Stacy Martin plays her sister, who is also a songwriter, while Jude Law takes the role of her manager. As previously reported, Scott Walker will once again team with Corbet for the score, while Sia will provide original songs.

See the teaser below, following Corbet’s director’s statement.