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The Rockaway Film Festival returns for its eighth year to coastal New York City — that’s Rockaway Beach if you’re unfamiliar — with a lineup of al fresco screenings and musical performances. IndieWire shares details exclusively below ahead of the event taking place August 20-24.

Highlights include the East Coast premiere of Hailey Gates’ war satire “Atropia,” starring Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner, and winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in this year’s Dramatic competition. (Luca Guadagnino also counts among the film’s producers). Xander Robin’s SXSW Special Jury Award-winning documentary “The Python Hunt,” produced by Lance Oppenheimer, also comes to Rockaway. The eccentric nonfiction film follows a crew of amateur snake hunters over 10 days in the Florida Everglades.

The Rockaway Film Festival will also screen stop-motion animation icons the Quay Brothers’ latest film, “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” their first feature in 20 years. Other...

Nebraska director Alexander Payne will receive the Pardo d’Onore at the Locarno Film Festival.

The American filmmaker will be presented with the honorary leopard on Friday, August 15. He will also present his 2011 pic The Descendants and 2013 title Nebraska and participate in a public discussion.

Payne, a writer-director also behind the likes of Sideway and The Holdovers, has won two Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and been nominated for Best Director on three occasions.

After studying filmmaking at UCLA, Payne wrote and directed politically-charged comedy Citizen Ruth, starring Laura Dern, in 1996. It premiered at Sundance and led to a run of seven influential films, which have starred the likes of Paul Giamatti, Reese Witherspoon and Jack Nicholson.

“Alexander Payne is an erudite auteur with an encyclopaedic cinephile knowledge,” said Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival. “Gifted with an unerring sense for the bittersweet facets of human comedy,...

Marisa Paredes, a well-known personality in Spanish cinema and close colleague of famed director Pedro Almodóvar, has died at the age of 78. The Spanish Film Academy reported her death, writing, “Spanish cinema is losing one of its most iconic actresses.”

Paredes’ career lasted nearly six decades, including over 75 films and a similar number of television shows. She is largely recognized as one of the most accomplished actresses of her time. Her work with Almodóvar includes remarkable performances in films like High Heels (1991), The Flower of My Secret (1995), All About My Mother (1999), and The Skin I Live In (2011).

Her journey to popularity was fueled by personal dedication. In an emotional interview with Spain’s Tve in June, Paredes discussed her poor beginnings as “the daughter of a doorkeeper.” At 15, she went on a hunger strike to encourage her father to support her acting career.

Desolado por la noticia del fallecimiento de Marisa Paredes,...

Marisa Paredes, the star of Pedro Almodóvar’s High Heels and The Flower Of My Secret, has died aged 78.

Paredes’ extensive career spanned nearly 80 feature films and a similar number of television productions over six decades.

Paredes also served as president of the Spanish Film Academy from 2000-2003 and received the industry’s highest awards, including an honorary Goya for lifetime achievement in 2018, the National Cinematography Award in 1996, and the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts in 2007.

Her final film, road movie Emergency Exit, was directed by Luis Miñarro; it filmed earlier this year and is still to be released.

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...

Telluride Film Festival has announced the line-up before the festival starts on Friday, with world premieres for Edward Berger’s Conclave, RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys, and Robbie Williams musical biopic Better Man.

Also making the cut in the main programme are documentaries Leonardo Da Vinci from Ken Burns, Kevin Macdonald’s One To One: John & Yoko, and R. J. Cutler’s Martha Stewart film.

Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 and Joshua Openheimer’s The End are in the main programme, alongside Cannes favourites Anora, The Seed Of The Sacred Fig, All We Imagine As Light, and Emilia Pérez.

The 51st...

Unless you’re a major studio or willing to pay for a rent-spiked ski lodge––and even then––few festivals ring more exclusive than Telluride, which has the distinction / misfortune of firing the starting gun for fall festivals and that ever-deleterious phenomenon we call “Oscar buzz.” Their 2024 lineup nevertheless features some films of note: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson’s Rumours; Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia; Payal Kapadia’s All That We Imagine as Light; Sean Baker’s Anora; and Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple series Disclaimer.

On a repertory end, Kenneth Lonergan’s been anointed this year’s Guest Director and has programmed the following: Arch of Triumph, Barry Lyndon, Doctor Zhivago, Grand Hotel, and My Darling Clementine. And Telluride’s 2024 Special Medallion goes to Les Films du Losange, who will represent Misericordia and have their history celebrated with the following screenings: Beauty and the Beast; Charles, Dead or...

Alfonso Cuarón was reflective but playful this afternoon as he headlined the latest session in the Locarno Film Festival’s popular masterclass series.

The discussion was mostly geared to discuss Cuarón’s origins and most successful projects, all of which he has discussed at length many times before. The four-time Oscar winner did, however, give some insight into projects he has yet to get off the ground.

“My aspiration is to one day do a horror film,” he told the packed crowd at the stylish outdoor Spazio Cinema in Locarno.

“I love Rosemary’s Baby, and the other Polanski films, and films like The Babadook. They’re so grounded in reality and in character so I love those,” he said. “As a spectator, I have a wider taste but anything I feel I could do would need to be more grounded. I’ve been trying to write something like that, but somehow,...

Alfonso Cuarón will be receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival.

The five-time Academy Award-winning Mexican filmmaker will be celebrated August 11 in Piazza Grande. The event will include a panel conversation at Forum @Spazio Cinema, moderated by Cinémathèque suisse director Frédéric Maire. The ceremony will accompanied by the screening of Alain Tanner’s “Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000),” a 1976 film that was personally selected by Cuarón.

Cuarón’s own filmography includes the iconic “Y tu mamá también,” Academy Award-winning films “Gravity,” and “Roma,” as well as novel adaptations such as “Great Expectations,” “A Little Princess,” “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” and “Children of Men.”

“Alfonso Cuarón is a visionary author of agile and liberated imaginaries,” Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, said in a press statement. “Combining an experimental spirit with the sweep of great popular writers,...

Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón will receive the lifetime achievement award at the 77th Locarno Film Festival (August 7-17).

Cuaron’s credits range from adaptations such as Great Expectations (1998), Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban (2004), and Children Of Men (2006) through to Y Tu Mamá También (2001), Gravity (2013) and Roma (2018).

Cuarón’s latest project is psychological thriller series Disclaimer for Apple TV+ starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline, set to start streaming on October 11. It is based on the novel by Renée Knight about a journalist who becomes the subject of a scandal she is more used to writing about.

Locarno artistic...

Alfonso Cuarón, the Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker known for the likes of Gravity, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Roma, will receive a lifetime achievement award at the 77th edition of the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland.

He will receive the honor, a tribute to “film personalities with extraordinary careers,” on Sunday, Aug. 11 in the Swiss town’s Piazza Grande after audiences can catch a panel conversation with him earlier in the day.

“From low-budget films in Mexico to blockbusters in Hollywood, from adaptations of Charles Dickens, P.D. James or Harry Potter to the audacity and delicacy of modern classics, such as Y tu mamá también (2001), Gravity (2013) and Roma (2018) — which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival — Alfonso Cuarón has embodied the true spirit of a chameleonic contemporary artist able to master any assignment,” Locarno fest organizers said. “Though known for the dynamic long-takes that characterize the...

The Locarno Film Festival will be celebrating multiple Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón with a lifetime achievement award.

The prominent Swiss fest dedicated to global indie cinema noted that Cuarón is a five-time Academy Award winner who has written and directed a wide range of movies, spanning from low-budget films in Mexico like his 1991 debut “Love in the Time of Hysteria” and road trip movie “Y tu mamá también” to Hollywood blockbusters such as “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” Cuarón embodies “the true spirit of a chameleonic contemporary artist able to master any assignment,” a Locarno statement said.

Three of Cuarón’s Oscar wins are for Netflix’s “Roma,” (2018), the director’s homage to the Mexico in which he grew up. The other two are for his direction and editing of Warner Bros.’ Sandra Bullock-starrer “Gravity” (2013), which he co-wrote with his son Jonás.

Cuarón’s upcoming project...

Lyon, France — Four-time Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón and “Time Bandits” helmer Terry Gilliam will join a star director-studded lineup at this year’s Lumière Film Festival including Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne and Wim Wenders.

Cuarón is returning to Lyon – where he was a guest of honor in 2018 – to present a selection of films by Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner.

Gilliam will screen the newly restored version of his 1995 sci-fi thriller “Twelve Monkeys.”

One of Anderson’s latest shorts, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” part of four Roald Dahl adaptations to be released on Netflix later this month, will screen at Lyon’s plush 2,000-seat Auditorium, where he will give a masterclass.

Like other guests, he will not only be introducing a retrospective of his own films but works by others, as part of an ongoing drive by the festival “to strengthen the link between the past and the present of cinema,...

With the festival kicking off tomorrow, Telluride Film Festival has now unveiled its lineup, featuring new films from Jeff Nichols (the first image from which can be seen above), Emerald Fennell, Annie Baker, Andrew Haigh, Yorgos Lanthimos, Justine Triet, Wim Wenders, Kitty Green, Ethan Hawke, and many more.

“Fifty years is a long time to do anything. And while we might be a little biased, we feel the work that Tff does is pretty important,” comments Telluride Film Festival director Julie Huntsinger. “We take the charge of preserving the theatrical experience and promoting film seriously, but with necessary winks here and there. We’re ecstatic to share a program we feel reflects so much of the past fifty years, naturally and organically, films old and new, which stand as a testament to our beloved co-founders Tom Luddy and Bill Pence who are no longer with us.”

• All Of US Strangers...

2023 Festival dedicated to founders Tom Luddy, Bill Pence, Stella Pence, James Card.

Telluride Film Festival has announced its 2023 50th anniversary line-up with Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner Anatomy Of A Fall, and Steve McQueen’s Occupied City on the roster.

The selection, which will play in the Colorado Rockies locale from August 31 to September 4, includes Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, Jonathan Glazer’s Cannes sensation The Zone Of Interest, Pablo Larrain’s El Conde, Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel, George C. Wolfe’s Rustin, Nyad from Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin,...

Swiss new wave film director whose work focused on characters alienated from mainstream society

The film director Alain Tanner, who has died aged 92, was a leading light in the Swiss new wave at the start of the 1970s. Tanner’s cinema attempted to arouse “a smug nation drowsed by a facile ideology of neutrality” by looking at alternative lifestyles.

In 1968, Tanner and his friend Claude Goretta co-founded the Groupe 5 collective of Swiss film-makers. They proposed an idea to Swiss TV for the funding of full-length features to be shot in 16mm and then blown up to 35mm for release. This enabled Tanner to make his first feature film, Charles Mort ou Vif, which won first prize at the Locarno festival, and became the first Swiss film in more than two decades to be shown widely abroad.

Michelangelo Frammartino’s new feature, Il buco, is his first that can be rightfully labelled a period piece. Set in the early sixties, it reenacts a legendary caving expedition that saw a handful of young speleologists travel from Turin to Calabria and descend down the Bifurto Abyss—a 700 meters deep cave then thought to be the third largest on Earth. But the Italian director’s filmography (a protean body of work spanning shorts and three features) has always hailed from its own anachronistic planet, one where time seems to work differently—if it does work at all. His first two features were ostensibly set in the present, but the rural Calabria they immortalized looked like a universe telegraphed from the past. Ancestral rituals, slow-paced routines, and pastoral landscapes where humans are almost camouflaged against plants and animals; to be walking into Frammartino’s films is to experience a kind of temporal dissonance,...

Swiss national film archive Cinémathèque Suisse is finishing up a new restoration of Hans Trommer and Valerien Schmidely’s 1941 romantic drama “Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe” (“Romeo and Julia in the Village”), considered one of Switzerland’s best films of all time.

It is one of a number of recent restorations carried out or made possible by the film archive, which recently opened its impressive new Research and Archive Center in Penthaz, equipped with a film digitization lab and a vast storage facility.

“Romeo and Julia in the Village” is particularly significant for the Cinémathèque Suisse. “It was totally unsuccessful when first released, but it is considered one of the best, if not the best Swiss film,” says Cinémathèque Suisse director Frédéric Maire. “We wanted to restore it for a long time but it was very difficult to find all the necessary elements because the original negative was recut...

While Netflix is far from being a haven for admirers of classic cinema, they thankfully are backing strong repertory programming in New York City. After acquiring The Paris Theater, located on 58th Street in Manhattan, and briefly reopening with some runs of Netflix features and other specialty programming, they are now officially opening their doors again on August 6 with a more substantial slate of classic cinema.

Featuring two programs, one curated by Radha Blank and another by the theater’s programmer David Schwartz, the reopening lineup features work by John Cassavetes, Kathleen Collins, Luis Buñuel, Mira Nair, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Ingmar Bergman, Terence Davies, and much more––with many on film prints.

One can also enter to win a pass for Schwartz’s series “The Paris is For Lovers,” with a newly-unveiled scavenger hunt tied to Ira Deutchman’s new documentary Searching for Mr. Rugoff, which opens on August 13 and is part of the lineup.

The Paris Theater, a beloved arthouse cinema in New York City, is reopening its doors next month.

To celebrate its return on Aug. 6, filmmaker Radha Blank is curating a slate of repertory titles to screen alongside her directorial debut “The Forty-Year-Old Version.” Her movie, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival, is playing through Aug. 12.

The Paris opened in 1948 and is the only single-screen movie theater in Manhattan. Netflix acquired the 545-seat venue in 2019 and, prior to Covid-19, held premieres, special events and screenings of its films in the storied institution, which is just south of Central Park.

“I made ‘Forty-Year-Old Version’ in 35mm Black & White in the spirit of the many great films that informed my love of cinema,” says Blank. “I’m excited to show the film in 35mm as intended and alongside potent films by fearless filmmakers who inspired my development as a storyteller and expanded my vision...

The Paris Theater, an NYC cinematic landmark rescued by Netflix in 2019, will officially reopen August 6 with the streamer’s The Forty-Year-Old Version by Radha Blank and a week of repertory films programmed by the director.

The only single-screen movie theater in Manhattan and the borough’s largest, with 545 seats, has hosted limited theatrical engagements since March that included Netflix’ 17 Oscar-nominated films, retrospectives of Charlie Kaufman and Orson Wells, zombie movie classics and a Bob Dylan film series.

The Paris closed in August of 2019 after its lease with City Cinemas expired. That November, Netflix entered an extended lease agreement, said to be for ten years with owner the Solow Family, to keep the theater open and use it for events, screenings and theatrical releases of its films. The first was Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. The theater was shuttered by Covid-19 last spring.

(In May of 2020, Netflix acquired another storied theaters,...

The 2020 special edition of the Locarno Film Festival, deemed For the Future of Films, gathers audiences in both virtual and physical space. At the center of this year's festival are 20 suspended projects, each halted in some way by the Covid-19 pandemic, that will compete in the The Films After Tomorrow section. From Lisandro Alonso and Miguel Gomes to Lav Diaz and Lucrecia Martel, these 22 filmmakers have also joined together to handpick twenty films from previous editions of the festival. The program, A Journey in the Festival's History, is an anthology of timeless films from Locarno's past (from 1948 to 2019) that reflect the festival's spirit of discovery and celebration of stylistic breakthrough. Mubi is immensely proud to be partnering with the festival to make these selections available for streaming outside Switzerland. Below, the directors have shared some words about their inspired choices. Wang Bing on Horse MoneyPedro Costa’s films explore...

“Traveller,” the first major screen credit of “The Crying Games’” Neil Jordan, Canadian Denis Coté’s debut feature “Drifting States” and Arturo Ripstein’s “The Place Without Limits,” a 1977 Mexican LGBTQ movie, are three titles featured in the inaugural lineup of the Locarno Film Festival’s Heritage Online section.

Another, 1954 Egyptian transgender comedy “Miss Hanafi,” underscores the wealth of discoveries offered by Heritage Online, a digital database and screening room collating details of classic film catalogs from all over the world, facilitating the work of buyers, especially VOD platforms in search of rights holders to heritage titles.

Heritage Online fully launches on Saturday with the distribution to its subscribers of a newsletter in which companies detail their offer on the website, plus a panel on heritage film distribution.

Aimed at “establishing a loop between the heritage industry and streaming platforms” by clarifying rights ownership, the site launches with film-by-film details...

Like most film festivals this year, Locarno Film Festival will not be moving ahead as usual. However, they’ve found inventive ways to both celebrate filmmakers they’ve long admired and present films physically and digitally. After announcing a new initiative to support new films by Lucrecia Martel, Lisandro Alonso, Lav Diaz, Wang Bing, Miguel Gomes, and more, they’ve asked this class of talented directors to select their favorite films in Locarno history.

A Journey in the Festival’s History is devoted to Locarno’s 73-year history of showing the best in international cinema. Made up of twenty films, a selection will screen online for those in Switzerland as well as Mubi internationally. On August 5-15, they will also screen in person at Locarno’s theaters.

Lili Hinstin, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, said, “It would be an impossible task to present a review of the history...

Films by Roberto Rossellini, Chantel Akerman and Marguerite Duras feature in selection.

The Locarno Film Festival has unveiled the selection of 20 classic film titles that will be showcased in its A Journey In The Festival’s History sidebar as part of its special hybrid edition running August 5 to 15.

The line-up is part of the festival’s ’Locarno 2020 – For the Future of Films’ edition which was created after it was forced to cancel its 73rd edition due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The titles have been selected by the directors taking part in its festival’s exceptional The Films After Tomorrow initiative...

High-profile filmmakers including Lucrecia Martel and Lav Diaz have contributed to a retrospective program for the Locarno Film Festival (August 5-15), selecting 20 titles from the event’s 74-year history that will have online and physical screenings next month.

Due to ongoing pandemic disruption Locarno shifted the majority of its festival online this year, though ten of the below list of titles will still have physical screenings in Switzerland. The entire program will be shown online for free in Switzerland by the fest, while it is partnering with streamer Mubi to stream the films outside of the country.

Ranging from 1948 (Locarno’s third edition) to 2018 (its 71st), the titles offer a broad insight into the fest’s history and are directed by filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke, and Whit Stillman. The selectees are all participating in Locarno’s ‘The Films After Tomorrow’ initiative this year,...

Los Angeles-based production-distribution house Cinema Libre Studio has acquired U.S. rights to Frédéric Choffat and Julie Gilbert’s “My Little One,” in the wake of its U.S. premiere at the Miami Film Festival.

The deal was closed by Philippe Diaz, Cinema Libre Studio chairman and Loic Magneron, founder of Paris’ Wide Management, the film’s sales agent.

Produced by Anne Deluz and Jessica Huppert Berman for Luc Peter’s Intermezzo Films and Les Films du Tigre, and co-produced by public broadcaster Radio Télévision Suisse (Rts), “My Little One” has been seen to date, of festivals, at Germany’s Frankfurt Biennal, Tübingen and Stuttgart and Mannheim-Heidelberg, as well as France’s Beaujolais French-Language Cinema Meetings and Switzerland’s Solothurn Film Festival, before its theatrical release in Switzerland.

“My Little One” has been licensed to South Korea in an all rights deal and to Eastern Europe, for premium pay TV and VOD.

Věra Chytilová shooting Time Is RelentlessIn Something Different (1963), housewife Vera has had it with her emotionally unavailable husband, exhausting chores, and child-rearing, so she starts an affair. A broken woman, she bursts into sporadic fits of giggling, scaring both men in her life. Prefiguring to some extent Alain Tanner's La salamandre, this laughter lifts the veil over the heroine's existential crisis, one so reluctant to be put into words and yet occasionally susceptible to movie images. Over the almost 50-year span of her career, we've heard Věra Chytilová's laugh so many times that it deserves to be catalogued. Daisies (1966) gave the censors plenty of reasons to ban it, but the derisive cackling of two girls at war with common sense would've sufficed. You can hear the sound as early as her student film Caterwauling (1960), made at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (Famu). There,...

Bruno Ganz, who died last week at the age of 77, had 121 acting credits to his name, from his debut as a hotel page in the 1960 comedy The Man in the Black Derby to his final role as a judge in Terrence Malick’s yet to be released Radegund. His underworld guide in Lars von Trier’s The House that Jack Built would have been at the very least a fitting send-off, but since that film premiered in Cannes last year he has also played Sigmund Freud in The Tobacconist and starred in a Macedonian war crimes drama, I Witness. Born in Zurich, to Swiss and Italian parents, Ganz was a truly international star, working with Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, and Volker Schlöndorff in Germany, but also Eric Rohmer, Jerzy Skolimowski, Alain Tanner, Gillian Armstrong, Jonathan Demme, Theo Angelopoulos, Francis Ford Coppola, Ridley Scott, Atom Egoyan, Barbet Schroeder, Bille August, Sally Potter,...

Conceived amid the French social unrest of 1968, and born in 1969, Directors’ Fortnight celebrates its 50th edition this year.

Martin Scorsese is a filmmaker more associated with Cannes Official Selection than the sidebars running alongside but this year he hit Directors’ Fortnight to receive its honorary Carrosse d’Or and participate in the opening of its 50th edition in a programme of events billed as “an exceptional day with Mr Scorsese”.

The Palme d’Or and Oscar-winning director also assisted in a screening of his breakthrough picture Mean Streets, which premiered internationally in the then renegade section in 1974, and took part...

Ursula Meier heads up the Cannes Camera d’Or jury deliberating on first films Photo: Raphael Zubler/Festival de Cannes

Cannes Film Festival organisers have revealed the name of this year's president of the Caméra d'or Jury - Swiss director Ursula Meier.

Along with six fellow-professionals Meier will select the best first film presented in the Official Selection, the Semaine de la Critique and the Directors' Fortnight.

Meier boasts a small but perfectly formed filmography, which includes five short films, two works for television, two documentaries and two feature films for cinema - Home in 2008 and Sister (L’enfant d’en haut) which won the Silver Bear in Berlin in 2012. She also contributed to Bridges Of Sarajevo, a portmanteau film involving 13 European film-namers which was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014.

She took her first steps as an assistant director alongside Swiss veteran Alain Tanner on Fourbi in 1996. She...

Above: illustration by Jean-Marie Troillard.When the great arthouse impresario Dan Talbot passed away last week, just two weeks after the announcement of the closing of the Lincoln Plaza, his flagship Upper West Side multiplex, it was a double-blow to the New York film community. To me and to a number of my friends and colleagues it was also a deep personal loss. Dan had given me my first job in New York in 1990 at his distribution company New Yorker Films, hiring me first to type up their annual catalogue and then to be an assistant to himself and his right-hand man, Jose Lopez. Ironically, it was a New York Times article about the closing of another of Dan’s theaters, the Cinema Studio, that alerted me not only to Dan and to New Yorker Films, but also to the whole concept of film distribution. Dan took a chance on...

This beautiful pair of illustrated posters for two late 50s Maigret adaptations by Jean Delannoy is the work of Nathan Gelgud, an artist who by now should be well known to cinephiles in New York and Los Angeles. Nathan is the creator of the auteur tote bag, an essential cinephilic fashion accessory for the 2010s, more on which later. Full disclosure: I was involved in the art direction on these posters at Kino Lorber, whose repertory division is re-releasing Maigret Sets a Trap (originally released in the Us as Inspector Maigret and later re-released as Woman Bait) at Metrograph today and will be releasing both films on Blu-ray in December. I’d been aware of Nathan’s work for a while, but it was his comic-book style resumé poster for Metrograph’s Alain Tanner retrospective this summer that convinced me he’d be perfect for Maigret. And, as luck would have it,...

The following essay was produced as part of the 2017 Locarno Critics Academy, a workshop for aspiring film critics that took place during the 70th edition of the Locarno Film Festival.

Swiss cinema isn’t exactly stuck in a rut. Its artistically-challenging documentaries are thriving: Markus Imhoofs meditation on bees in the climate-change era “More Than Honey” from 2012 was released in 29 countries around the globe, and last year, the animated “My Life as Zucchini” was nominated for an Oscar. Historically, however, Switzerland has given rise to an outstanding list of worldly auteurs such as Claude Goretta, Alain Tanner and Jean-Luc Godard. Why haven’t we heard much about young Swiss talent making the leap out of the small alpine state?

There is one major exception here: Ursula Meier is a Geneva-based cinematographer and filmmaker who has found a string of international successes. With “Sister” in 2012, she received the Silver Bear at the Berlinale.

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Quad Cinema

Godard’s La Chinoise has been restored.

The Bava series continues, as do No Maps on My Taps and Zulawski’s That Most Important Thing: Love.

Metrograph

“A to Z” continues with Altman and Suzuki, while the Alain Tanner retro winds down, “‘Scope in the ’60s” plays, and Mary Poppins screens.

Film Society...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

Hitchcock and Altman play for “Welcome to Metrograph,” while Annie is scheduled.

Chris Marker’s films screen in a series, as does the work of Alain Tanner.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

The exhaustive, potentially exhausting “Scary Movies X” is underway.

BAMcinematek

The Edgar Wright-curated crime series and camp-centered cinema showings are ongoing.

We live in remarkable times, us film aficionados. Across the country it seems as though repertory theaters and art houses are opening at a never-before-seen rate and streaming services are seemingly even more prevalent. And with this comes the great honor of being part of a generation of rediscovery. Maybe you’re in middle America just now discovering Jean Renoir, or happen to be living in The Big Apple, and now have the chance to discover the work of an underrated titan of world cinema.

Starting earlier this week (and ending on 7/23), The Metrograph in New York City is introducing a new generation of film fans to the work of Geneva-born auteur Alain Tanner. Launching his career with 1969’s Charles, Dead or Alive, Tanner would go on to create an oeuvre full of outsiders, leftist politics and some of the most singular works of the golden age of world cinema.

Upcoming films by Babak Jalali, Kaouther Ben Hania and Bassem among the 34 projects due to attend this year.Scroll down for full list of projects

Argentine film-maker Lucrecia Martel and veteran producer Paulo Branco have been confirmed as the final two ‘masters’ at the Doha Film Institute’s talent development event Qumra.

They will join previously announced mentor-speakers Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, French auteur Bruno Dumont and creative documentarian Rithy Panh at the third edition of the bespoke event, running March 3 to 8, 2017.

Colourful Portuguese producer Paulo Branco – who is based between Paris and Lisbon – has more than 300 producing credits to his name, amassed over four decades, working with the likes of David Cronenberg, Wim Wenders, Chantal Akerman, Alain Tanner, Werner Schroeter, Olivier Assayas, and Cédric Kahn.

His Paris-based sales and production company Alfama Films is at the Efm this year with Robert Schwentke’s long-awaited Second World War adventure title The Captain.

“Paulo Branco is one...

Cult filmmaker to appear in conversation at film festival.

Chilean filmmaker and artist Alejandro Jodorowsky is to be awarded with a Pardo d’onore at the 69th Locarno Film Festival (Aug 3-13).

As well as screening a selection of his films and the award ceremony on the Piazza Grande, Jodorowsky will also participate in a conversation open to all festival-goers.

As son of Russian immigrants exiled in Chile, Jodorowsky began his artistic career as a puppeteer, poet and theater director. At 23, he moved to France and joined Marcel Marceau’s mime troupe, and five years later founded - alongside Roland Topor and Fernando Arrabal - the performance art movement Panique, which aimed to counter the mainstreaming of surrealism.

Jodorowsky subsequently moved to Mexico, where, over the next 17 years, he created avant-garde theater de Mexico, and directed Fando And Lis (1968), El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973) and Santa Sangre (1989), films which made him a cult filmmaker around the world...

The New York Film Critics Online has named Spotlight best picture of 2015, Tom McCarthy best director and added best ensemble to boot. We have the complete list of winners. Also in today's roundup, video interviews with Quentin Tarantino and Alejandro González Iñárritu, a new issue of Frames Cinema Journal with articles on Guillermo del Toro, David Bowie, Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs and Sean Baker's Tangerine—and more. Plus, remembering one of Andy Warhol's superstars, Holly Woodlawn, and actor Jacques Denis, who worked with Alain Tanner, Bertrand Tavernier, Bertrand Blier, Claire Denis and Raúl Ruiz. » - David Hudson...

The New York Film Critics Online has named Spotlight best picture of 2015, Tom McCarthy best director and added best ensemble to boot. We have the complete list of winners. Also in today's roundup, video interviews with Quentin Tarantino and Alejandro González Iñárritu, a new issue of Frames Cinema Journal with articles on Guillermo del Toro, David Bowie, Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs and Sean Baker's Tangerine—and more. Plus, remembering one of Andy Warhol's superstars, Holly Woodlawn, and actor Jacques Denis, who worked with Alain Tanner, Bertrand Tavernier, Bertrand Blier, Claire Denis and Raúl Ruiz. » - David Hudson...

The Italian auteur is to receive the Pardo d’onore at the Locarno Film Festival in August.

Italian director Marco Bellocchio is to be honored with the Pardo d’onore Swisscom at this year’s Locarno Film Festival.

Bellocchio’s debut feature Fists In The Pocket screened at Locarno in 1965, winning the Vela d’argento, and the film will play again this year as a special Piazza Grande screening on August 14. The restored print is being sold internationally by The Match Factory.

Bellocchio will also take part in a masterclass in the Spazio Cinema.

A regular visitor to Locarno, the Italian auteur’s Victory March played in competition in 1976. He was president of the jury in 1997 and in 1998, the Festival featured a major retrospective of his work.

Previous recipients of the Pardo d’onore include Jean-Luc Godard, Ken Loach, Sidney Pollack, William Friedkin, Jia Zhang-ke, Alain Tanner, Werner Herzog and, in 2014, Agnès Varda...

Editor's Note: The Notebook is the North American home for Locarno Film Festival Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian's blog. Chatrian has been writing thoughtful blog entries in Italian on Locarno's website since he took over as Director in late 2012, and now you can find the English translations here on the Notebook as they're published. The Locarno Film Festival will be taking place August 5th to 15th. ***Bulle Ogier has a brilliance all of her own. It is something quite interior, and thus difficult to define. Her screen presence has something of the apparition about it: perhaps due to those silences, prolonged just a touch longer than necessary, that half-closed mouth, that hesitation to speak out, that gaze which seems to be acutely focused on a point just beyond her interlocutor... Like mother-of-pearl, Bulle Ogier’s beauty is unshowy and multi-faceted. Bulle Ogier does not belong to that generation of actresses discovered...

The 68th Locarno Film Festival will honor international cinema nonpareil Bulle Ogier, 75, with a Pardo alla carriera, the Swiss festival's annual lifetime achievement prize. A selection of films and a conversation with the audience will accompany the tribute. With this award the festival looks back at the legacy of the Nouvelle Vague and its most iconic figures, including past recipients Anna Karina and Jean-Pierre Léaud. A stage actress before moving to film, Bulle Ogier (née Marie-France Thielland) broke out in Jacques Rivette's "L'amour fou" (1969). This sparked a collaboration on six more films including "Celine and Julie Go Boating," "Pont du Nord" and "Gang of Four." Major European directors continued to cast her in films, from Luis Bunuel, Rw Fassbinder and Manoel de Oliveira to Claude Chabrol and Claude Lelouch, as well as her husband Barbet Schroeder. Alain Tanner's 1971 Swiss drama...

French director to receive the Pardo d’onore at the Locarno Film Festival next month - only the second woman to receive the honour.

French director Agnès Varda is to receive the Pardo d’onore (honorary Leopard) at the 67th edition of the Locarno Film Festival (Aug 6-16).

The festival’s tribute to her will be accompanied by screenings of a selection of her films: the features Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), The Creatures (1966), Lions Love (…and Lies) (1969), Documenteur (1981), Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, 1985), The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000) and The Beaches of Agnes (Les Plages d’Agnès, 2008), and the short film Oncle Yanco (1967), as well as the five episodes of the TV series Agnès de ci de là Varda (2011).

Varda will also take part in an on-stage coversation at the festival.

After working as a theatre photographer, Varda began directing in 1954 with the feature-length film La Pointe Courte, starring [link=nm...

Arab spring compilation wins Jihlava’s main award; Best Czech film for HBO-backed doc

Belgium-based Peter Snowdon’s The Uprising, a compilation of amateur footage from the Arab spring, was awarded the Opus Bonum - Best International Documentary Film Award at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic last night (Oct 28).

The winner was picked by a single juror, Us director-curator Craig Baldwin who described The Uprising as “a film which, in turn, saddened me, frightened me, outraged me, inspired me, and ultimately made me truly proud to be a part of the democratic project and the struggle for human dignity.”

The Uprising, which was produced by Brussels-based Rien à voir production with the UK’s Third Films of Duane Hopkins and Samm Haillay as co-producers, had its world premiere in Jihlava.

In the Czech Joy sidebar competition, the Best Czech Documentary Film Award went to Petr Hátle’s The Great Night which was co-produced...

★★★☆☆ There's a quiet movement happening among young French cinephiles in 2013. Films such as Justine Triet's La Bataille de Solférino and Antonin Peretjatko's La Fille du 14 Julliet come from a new generation of filmmakers, often working like repertory companies with their friends, making dynamic, fresh works that actively engage with the struggles of contemporary France. Multi-hyphenate Vincent Macaigne, serving almost as an unofficial figurehead for the group, stars in Sébastian Betbeder's 2 Autumns, 3 Winters (2013), a sprightly, cineliterate comedy announcing itself as the movement's Annie Hall.

2 Autumns, 3 Winters is structured into multiple short chapters mixing explanatory soliloquies with more straightforward dramatic scenes that play almost like vignettes. The aforementioned Macaigne plays Arman, a 33-year-old art school graduate who, deciding he needs a change in his life, starts jogging in a local park. One Saturday he meets Amélie (Maud Wyler) and quickly becomes obsessed with her. Consequently, events inevitably conspire to bring them together.

The photographer's new film, about global maritime trade, has been hailed by Occupy activists. Its maker has spent a life challenging new forms of capitalism

Water has always played a large part in the photographer Allan Sekula's life. As a student in San Diego at the end of the 1960s, he used to wander downtown and gaze up at the flophouse hotels through whose windows he could see money being exchanged between prostitutes and sailors. "It was Edward Hopper on military steroids," he recalls. "That was the time of Vietnam, and there were even mutinies on some ships – especially among African-American sailors who were protesting against racism in the navy. Young guys my age from the west coast were being dehumanised and turned into a few good men.

"They'd come to the fence of the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot and say: 'If I can get over this fence will...

The 64th Locarno Film Festival’s International Competition (Concorso internazionale) jury will be headed by the Portuguese producer Paulo Branco the winner of the very first Raimondo Rezzonico Prize in 2002. The films produced by him include Francisca by Manoel de Oliveira, 1981; In The White City by Alain Tanner, 1983; Come And Go by João César Monteiro, 2003, and Mysteries Of Lisbon by Raoul Ruiz, 2010. Read More...

Outsider Films On India, London

This fascinating series offers rarely seen artist eye views of India, revealing much about both the country and the people doing the looking. Roberto Rossellini's semi-documentary India Matri Bhumi, from 1958, captures the contrasts of the modernising nation in mystical imagery, just as Alain Tanner's 1966 documentary Chandigarh looks beyond Le Corbusier's architecture at the everyday humanity, while Marguerite Duras's avant-garde drama India Song comes on like a Calcutta-set answer to Last Year At Marienbad. On the other hand, Fritz Lang's European-made epic The Tiger Of Eschnapur is a campy slice of 1950s exotica. More up to date are Mark Lapore's 1990s experiments in "visual anthropology".

Tate Modern, SE1, Sat to Mon, tate.org.uk/modern

Starlite Urban Drive-In, London

There were good reasons why the drive-in cinema never caught on in Britain – limited space, limited car ownership, unlimited rain – but that...