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French singer-writer-composer Charles Dumont, who is best known for co-writing Édith Piaf classic Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, has died at the age of 95 after a long illness.

Dumont, who was born in the French city of Cahors in 1929, developed an early passion for jazz and trained first to be a trumpet player at the Toulouse Music Conservatory.

He moved to Paris after Word War Two, where he continued his music career but had to abandon the trumpet after an operation on his tonsils. He then pivoted to the piano and composition writing.

Throughout the 1950s, Dumont continued to work in music while staying financially afloat with odd jobs. It was during this period that he met lyricist and long-time collaborator Michel Vaucaire, and the pair co-wrote Non, Je Regrette Rien in 1956.

According to Dumont’s own account, Piaf iconic connection to Non, Je Regrette Rien nearly did not happen after the singing star,...

Did Ian McKellen reject the role of Dumbledore? (Photo Credit – Koimoi)

Ian McKellen is famous for his sharp discernment, even if it means turning down some of the most high-profile gigs. In a BBC HARDtalk interview, he took a trip down memory lane, revealing why he rejected the coveted role of Dumbledore in the Harry Potter franchise—a decision that still raises eyebrows among fans.

After Richard Harris, who originally played the wise headmaster in Harry Potter, passed away in 2002, McKellen seemed the natural choice to fill those iconic robes. But McKellen turned down the role, citing Harris’s strong disapproval of him as the core reason. “I couldn’t take over the part from an actor I had known didn’t approve of me,” McKellen said candidly.

Their feud, if one could call it that, had subtle beginnings but ran deep enough to influence McKellen’s decision. Harris had once dismissed McKellen,...

Belgian filmmakers Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon take viewers on a wild ride with their 2023 crime comedy The Falling Star. Abel and Gordon, who also star in the film, direct a charmingly bizarre cinematic world. They blend elements of slapstick and noir into a comedy of errors involving mistaken identity.

At the center of the story is Boris, a reclusive former activist who tended bar at a small Brussels pub called The Falling Star. He’s been hiding from the authorities for decades, but his cover is blown when a one-armed vigilante named Georges tracks him down seeking revenge. Facing danger, Boris’ wife Kayoko hatches a plan with friends Tim and Kaori to use an unfortunate man named Dom as a decoy.

Yet swapping identities only leads to more chaos. Dom knows nothing about Boris or why he’s been kidnapped. Meanwhile, his wife Fiona, a private eye, grows suspicious,...

Bette Gordon in her home office. Photograph by the author.The problem that I have dealt with in my whole career is that I essentially am not an American filmmaker. That I am anything but.The first person to place a camera in Bette Gordon’s hands was her father, Kenneth. A photographer himself, he met Gordon’s mother at a mutual acquaintance’s wedding, where he discreetly swapped place cards in order to sit next to her. They would later welcome Bette into the world he had been vigilantly chronicling, and by the time she was twelve, he began to teach her how to look. He advised her to hold her breath when snapping a photograph, how to frame images, where to find beauty. Since these teachings, Gordon has built a career upon images of eroticism and crime, arranging them into stories of a repressed woman working the box office at a porn theater,...

What would you consider the best film franchise of all time? Despite the objective metrics for success -– box office, critical consensus, awards and quantifiable impact -– this is a surprisingly subjective question, and the answer you give may say more about yourself than anything else. You might go to bat for genre-defining classics like the "Alien" franchise or "Scream" movies, or highlight childhood favorites for your generation, like "Harry Potter" or "Indiana Jones." Franchises surrounded by big mythology (on screen and off), like "Star Wars," often earn greatest-of-all-time status for fans, while arthouse lovers may pick something less familiar to American audiences, like Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy.

It's a question with either no right answers or many, depending on how you look at it, but the folks at aggregate site Metacritic recently decided to answer it for themselves once and for all by using their well-established system...

"I don't care about prizes..." A legend visits the legendary store in Paris! The latest Video Club video from Konbini in Paris is with the one-and-only filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola - there to promote the release of Megalopolis. They've been on a roll (a cinephile's dream job), getting Brad Pitt and Christopher Nolan, but now it's Coppola's turn. And boy does he deliver. It's their banger 100th episode of the Video Club. "The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Dracula... Francis Ford Coppola is probably the most talked-about director in the history of our Video Club. To celebrate our 100th episode, we couldn't have asked for a more legendary guest." He takes his time strolling around the Parisian video store, chatting about films and filmmakers he admires (and a few he doesn't like), telling stories from his past and his experiences in cinema. He mentions other greats like Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir,...

The follow-up to his anarchic debut feature The Twentieth Century, a postmodern restaging of Canadian history that eschewed accuracy and realism in favor of strange psycho-sexual fetishes and aesthetic fixations, Matthew Rankin’s Universal Language takes a similarly irreverent approach to depicting his country’s geography and socio-political environment.

The film initially centers on what appears to be an Iranian middle school, albeit one situated in an incongruously wintry landscape, where an irate teacher (Mani Soleymanlou), ranting at his misbehaving pupils, asks them, “Can’t you at least fool around in French?!” We soon follow two young girls (Saba Vahedyousefi and Rojina Esmaelli) who set out to retrieve a banknote stuck inside a frozen puddle, as Rankin’s sophomore effort gradually reveals itself to be set in a parallel-universe Canada that recalls 1980s Iran as envisioned by one of the auteurs of the Iranian New Wave. Meanwhile, a character named...

Laurent Tirard, the French screenwriter and director whose best-known works included adaptations of René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé’s Little Nicholas and Nicolas on Holiday, has died after a long illness. He was 57.

Tirard was a well-liked figure in the French film industry who made 15 features over the course of two decades.

They also included Molière (2007), starring Romain Duris as the historic playwright; Astérix & Obélix: God Save Britannia (2012) with Catherine Deneuve, Fabrice Luchini and Guillaume Gallienne; romantic comedy Up For Love with Jean Dujardin and Virginie Efira, and costume drama Return Of A Hero (2018), also starring Oscar-winner Dujardin.

He also directed early episodes of hit show Call My Agent!.

Tirard’s films rarely debuted at film festivals but regularly achieved healthy box office results at home and sold well internationally too.

“He had a talent for capturing and retelling human stories with a lot of humor and sensibility,” PR agency...

A pair of moderate releases with a handful of docs and titles in limited release topline an end-of-summer specialty market. Labor Day weekend can be slow and indie openings are up against few new wide releases and holdovers from Deadpool & Wolverine to Inside Out 2. Meanwhile, the Venice film festival, with Telluride and TIFF coming soon, is generating indie headlines and the new crop of arthouse films.

Bleecker Street goes the widest under 1,000 screens with Mikael Håfström’s Slingshot, starring Casey Affleck and Laurence Fishburne, at 840 locations.

This psychological space thriller follows an elite trio of astronauts aboard a years-long, possibly compromised mission to Saturn’s moon Titan. As the team gears up for a highly dangerous slingshot maneuver that will either catapult them to Titan or into deep space, it becomes increasingly difficult for one astronaut to maintain his grip on reality.

Written by R. Scott Adams...

To say that French director Emmanuel Mouret has had one thing on his mind since he started making features two decades ago would probably be an understatement. If you take the English-language titles alone of his prolific oeuvre — 11 features, including the latest — you get a fairly good idea of the subject dearest to him: Shall We Kiss, Please, Please Me, The Art of Love, Lovers, Caprice, Love Affairs, Diary of a Fleeting Affair…

The question, perhaps, is whether anything but love and sex actually interests Mouret. After making a few slapstick-style comedies early on, the director has decided to focus almost exclusively on people falling in and out of affairs and relationships. And if his first few films were inspired by both Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, his work since then draws heavily from the worlds of both Eric Rohmer and middle-period Woody Allen — up to using the Woodster’s...

What if Jacques Tati made a film noir? The Falling Star offers a commendable answer to this question, though the final result does not quite live up to such expectations. This is the fifth feature from Belgium-based filmmaking duo Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, and an ambitious one at that.

The basic premise concerns Boris (Abel), an activist-in-hiding at a local watering hole who’s finally discovered by a vengeful gunman with a mechanical arm (Bruno Romy). Despite a hilariously bungled assassination attempt, Boris needs to go into hiding once more. Boris, his partner Kayoko (Kaori Ito), and good friend Tim (Philippe Martz) conveniently stumble upon Dom (also Abel), a loner who is Boris’ spitting image. Meanwhile, Fiona (Gordon) is a shy private eye and slightly estranged wife to Dom, burdened with a fracturing marriage and a case of a missing dog. Her emotional distractions spell the dog’s doom.

On August 22, 1929, only two months before the Wall Street crash that would sink the United States into the Great Depression, a movie house opened in Chicago, Illinois. Compared to theaters of the time that could hold 3,000 patrons, the Music Box Theatre only had room for 700 and was considered by many to be the little sibling to the movie palaces of the era. However, what it lacked in size, it made up for by delivering the highest quality of projection and sound. Rather than serving as a multi-purpose venue for variety performances, as well as movies, the Music Box focused exclusively on the rising popularity of motion pictures, preceding many others.

Writing for the Chicago Tribune in 1983, architectural critic Paul Gapp wrote of the Music Box, “The architectural style is an eclectic melange of Italian, Spanish and Pardon-My-Fantasy put together with passion,” but the actual style has been defined as “atmospheric.

The official poster and trailer for The Falling Star have been released (check them out above and below). The film will be released in New York on August 30, 2024! Kino Lorber is pleased to present The Falling Star, the enchanting new caper from Dominique Abel & Fiona Gordon that parodies film noir with their signature deadpan wit and quirky, colorful whimsy.

Synopsis: An official selection of the Telluride and Locarno Film Festivals, the latest caper from Abel & Gordon filters the language of film noir through their characteristically colorful palette to create a series of deceptively minimalistic set pieces that recall the best of Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton. Abel plays Boris, a former activist hiding from his dark past, keeping in the shadows as a barkeeper until a one-armed vigilante finally hunts him down. The fortuitous appearance of a double – the depressive recluse Dom (also played by Abel) – seems to offer the perfect decoy.

It’s not just Maxime Le Mal, the “Despicable Me 4” villain with the broad accent, that has a distinctly French flavor.

In fact, Universal and Illumination’s animated franchise boasts Gallic DNA throughout all of the hit movies. And even though Chris Renaud, the Oscar-nominated director of the latest “Despicable Me” and two of its predecessors, owes his French-sounding name to his Canadian origins, the helmer says “essentially everybody” working on the films is French. The only exceptions to this geographic over-representation are the writers (Mike White and Ken Daurio) and some of the storyboarder artists who are U.S.-based.

“Everything from what we call the layout, up through the animation, lighting and compositing — almost the entire team is French! The picture that you see is all compiled and created here in France,” says Renaud, who moved to Paris in 2010 to work on the first “Despicable Me” production...

John Ford’s classic Western “The Searchers” is back on the big screen — and this time, in 70mm.

IndieWire can exclusively unveil the full lineup for Museum of the Moving Image and Mubi’s ninth annual “See It Big: 70mm” film festival, with “The Searchers” headlining. The annual summer 70mm series is New York City’s only festival of 70mm films. The festival takes place from July 18 through August 18.

Ford’s “The Searchers” in 70mm will make its East Coast premiere after the print debuted at the American Cinematheque earlier this year. From July 18-21, the 1956 masterpiece will be presented seven times in a new restoration and newly struck 70mm print. The film was scanned from the original 35mm VistaVision camera negative for this print and has been approved by The Film Foundation, which was founded by Martin Scorsese. (He’s credited “The Searchers” for being a direct influence on his Oscar-winning film “Taxi Driver.

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

No matter how badly your week is going, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the fact that you’re not currently embroiled in a violent feud with a snake venom dealer who calls himself Butcher Hu. But we can’t all be so lucky.

Lang (Eddie Peng) is a changed man since coming out of prison. Emotionally callused and silent by choice, you’d never guess that he was once a beloved entertainer who played rock music and rode motorcycles in the local circus. But when he leaves the joint and returns to his small hometown in China’s Gobi Desert, there’s nothing waiting for him except bad vibes. His father is drinking himself to death at the local zoo, his neighbors resent him for his perceived crimes and assume he got a light sentence because of his celebrity, and his town is overrun with rabid dogs. To make matters worse,...

In the Canadian cities of Montreal and Winnipeg, a futile tension exists between French and English speakers — doubly silly, since the country is officially bilingual. In his gently satirical “Universal Language,” writer-director Matthew Rankin imagines a rather fanciful solution, where Farsi is now the region’s dominant tongue. Taking his cues from such Iranian classics as “Children of Heaven” and “The White Balloon,” Rankin mixes the humanism of Majid Majidi, Jafar Panahi, et al. with his own peculiar brand of comedy (as seen in the more off-the-wall “The Twentieth Century”), offering a delightful cross-cultural hybrid designed to celebrate our differences.

Though Rankin shows a genuine affection for all things Persian, the first and most obvious hiccup to his premise is that audiences don’t necessarily share his interest or his references. There’s something inherently provocative — and perhaps even triggering to some — about seeing a nondescript Canadian elementary school where...

Juliette Binoche, Sally El Hosaini and Isabel Coixet, are among the six filmmakers taking part in anthology film Bike Me Up, which will shoot across six European cities this summer, celebrating the locations’ relationships with cycling.

Binoche will make her debut as writer and director for the Paris film, in which she will star alongside Ralph Fiennes. London will be written and directed by El Hosaini and feature James Krishna Floyd. Berlin will be directed by Matthias Schweighöfer and star himself and Ruby O. Fee.

The Barcelona segment will be helmed by Coixet, while Bucharest will be written and directed by Cristina Jacob.

Paris-based international film sales company Pulsar Content has formed a strategic partnership with Digital District Entertainment, a leading post-production, VFX and production facilities company, with offices in France, Belgium and India. The partnership will create “a streamlined and cost-effective production process for international film projects,” according to a statement.

Pulsar Content’s Cannes lineup includes Un Certain Regard’s “Niki” by Céline Sallette, Antoine Chevrolliers’ “Block Pass,” premiering in Critics’ Week, and Camila Beltran’s “Mi Bestia,” premiering at Acid.

Dde’s Cannes lineup includes Julien Colonna’s “Le Royaume” in Un Certain Regard and Patricia Mazuy’s “Visiting Hours” in Directors’ Fortnight.

The companies have previously worked together on several films, including “The Deep House” by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, which sold to Blumhouse for the U.S. and Universal for international territories. They also teamed up on Edouard Salier’s “Tropic” and “Mads” by David Moreau.

Dde...

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

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

Med Hondo’s 1979 musical extravaganza West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty is a satirical skewering of the legacy of French imperialism in the West Indies and beyond. From the outset, it defies categorization through its distinct sense of free association as it leaps from one colorful image to the next, often shunning context along the way. Throughout Hondo’s film, the xenophobic and racist rhetoric of haughty, predominately white French aristocrats, bureaucrats, and citizens is combatted, challenged, or lampooned by various African figures. Some are slaves, some are revolutionaries, while some are simply power hungry. The result is a deliriously iconoclastic anti-colonialist work that’s worthy of the finest films from roughly the same period by Ousmane Sembene and Dijbril Diop Mambéty.

Adapted by Hondo and Daniel Boukman from the latter’s novel Les Negriers, West Indies traces an epic history of colonial oppression and enslavement in the West Indies,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSDry Leaf.On Criterion’s Daily, David Hudson has shared a useful roundup of films that might be expected to premiere during 2024. Among the inclusions are: Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s first film since Parasite (2019); It’s Not Me, Leos Carax’s latest collaboration with Denis Lavant; and Dry Leaf, the enticing-sounding new film by Alexandre Koberidze (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? [2021]), which is said to be about “a photographer who shoots soccer stadiums [who] goes missing.”A list of international filmmakers including Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Costa, Radu Jude, Ira Sachs, Claire Denis, and Abderrahmane Sissako have signed a letter, published during the holiday season in the French newspaper Libération, demanding (as translated by the Film Stage) “an immediate end to the bombings on Gaza,...

Pablo Berger’s “Robot Dreams,” which gets a theatrical release from Neon at an as-yet-unannounced time this year, was one of the animated delights of 2023. The Spanish/French hand-drawn dramedy (adapted from Sarah Varon’s wordless graphic novel) concerns the bittersweet friendship between lonely Dog and Robot, which he buys for company, in a version of ’80s Manhattan populated with animals. It’s garnered awards buzz in a longshot quest for an Oscar nomination this season.

After premiering at Cannes, “Robot Dreams” earned the Annecy Contrecham Award along with The Animation Is Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize. It was also selected as the runner-up for Best Animated Film by both the Los Angeles and Boston Film Critics groups.

Although the Spanish director was enamored with the graphic novel when he read it in 2010, he didn’t consider turning it into an animated feature until after making two live-action films,...

The animated version of Rowan Atkinson’s silent slapstick sitcom Mr Bean is to return to television for a fourth series in 2025.

Mr Bean must be one of the most well known comedy characters on the planet. Relying entirely on Rowan Atkinson’s rubber face, slapstick and visual humour, Atkinson first wrote the show with Richard Curtis and Robin Driscoll almost 35 years ago.

Premiering in 1990, Mr Bean ran for just 15 episodes, with stories typically following a formula of the hapless title character trying to accomplish a seemingly simple task and escalating it to farcical levels. Memorable moments include a dangerous diving experience, putting his swimming trunks on without removing his trousers and, perhaps the most iconic sequence from the entire series – getting a turkey stuck on his head. In 1997, the character went to America in the feature film Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie, which was directed by the much missed comedian Mel Smith.

As an end-of-year gift to our writers and readers, we've compiled a user-friendly overview of our publishing highlights from 2023. The collection is broken down by category: essays, interviews, festival coverage, and recurring columns.Browse at your leisure, and raise a glass to our brilliant contributors!Meanwhile, you can catch up with all of our end-of-year coverage here.{{notebook_form}}ESSAYSContemporary Cinema:Cinema as Sacrament: The Limitations of Killers of the Flower Moon by Adam PironA Change of Season: Trần Anh Hùng and Frederick Wiseman's Culinary Cinema by Phuong LeWalking, Talking, & Hurting Feelings: Nicole Holofcener's Everyday Dramas by Rafaela BassiliThe Limits of Control: Lines of Power in Todd Field's Tár by Helen CharmanThe Art of Losing: Joanna Hogg's Haunted Houses by Laura StaabTreading Water: Avatar: The Way of Water by Evan Calder WilliamsThe African Accent and the Colonial Ear by Maxine SibihwanaTen Minutes, but a Few Meters Longer:...

Three decades after the 1915 Armenian Genocide, an optimistic American Armenian returns to his Sovietized homeland, only be thrown in prison under flimsy circumstances. From his squalid jail cell, he peers daily into the home and inner life of one of his Armenian prison guards, and inadvertently finds the cultural connection he’d been searching for. This broad premise informs the sentimental comedy-drama of “Amerikatsi” (or “The American”), Armenia’s shortlisted international Oscar submission. Written and directed by Michael A. Goorjian, who also stars in the leading role, it’s a moving work about diasporic yearning, coming to us as history repeats itself, after more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians were forced to flee Nagorno-Karabakh earlier this year.

The movie’s dreamlike prologue follows a young Armenian boy escaping the brutality of the Ottoman Army during World War I, peering out of a tiny hole in an ornate luggage trunk. The interior of...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSBreak no.1 & Break no.2..The lineups for select sections of the 2024 editions of the Berlinale and International Film Festival Rotterdam have been unveiled, with films from Panorama, Forum, Forum Expanded, Generation, and Berlinale Special announced for the former, and the Tiger and Big Screen competitions at the latter. In Berlin, so far, we are excited by the prospect of new films by Jane Schoenbrun (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair) and Jérémy Clapin (I Lost My Body), whereas in Rotterdam, we have our eye on new work by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich and Lei Lei. As the year comes to a close, the Best of 2023 lists keep coming. Sight & Sound shared the seventh edition of their always-interesting poll of the best video essays of the year,...

Georgian film director who was the true heir to Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati and Luis Buñuel

At the time when the film Favourites of the Moon was released in France in 1985, little was known in western Europe about its Georgian director, Otar Iosseliani, who has died aged 89. He had already made three features and several shorts in the Soviet Union, where he had suffered some censorship, the prime reason for his becoming an exile in France in 1982. For many, Favourites of the Moon, shot in Paris in French, was their first entry into the singular world of Iosseliani.

His self-described “abstract comedies” are understated and incisive explorations of human absurdity, always faithful to his idiosyncratic vision, and discarding any kind of cohesive narrative. Iosseliani observed his characters through behaviour rather than dialogue. His use of sound and silence, and his complex movements of people, animals and objects made him the true heir to Jean Renoir,...

“Deep Dive” is an in-depth podcast and video essay series featuring interviews with the stars and creative team behind an exceptional piece of filmmaking. For this edition, the IndieWire Crafts and Special Projects team partnered with Warner Bros. to take a closer look at “Barbie” with director and co-writer Greta Gerwig and nine members of her creative team who breathed life into the iconic Mattel doll.

The tagline “Barbie is everything” turns out to be pretty apt. “Barbie” contains within it multiple kinds of high-concept comedy, musicals, action sequences, mother-daughter stories, and a liminal void wherein Barbie (Margot Robbie) can meet her maker, Ruth Handler (Rhea Pearlman), and elect to transcend toyhood to become a human woman. All in less than two hours!

That “Barbie” contains so much and accomplishes so much — stylistically, tonally, and emotionally — is a huge credit to co-writer and director Greta Gerwig and her creative team,...

Netflix is finally opening the doors to the newly restored Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood this week, and in a first-look preview ahead of its November 9 reopening, the streamer and its partner, the nonprofit American Cinematheque, highlighted some of the enhancements and a screening schedule through the end of 2023.

The Egyptian will reopen on Nov. 9 with a sold-out screening of David Fincher’s “The Killer,” followed by a Q&a with the director. Throughout November it will showcase a 70mm series that includes titles like Jacques Tati’s “Playtime,” Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus,” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights.”

Announced today were December screenings for “Days of Heaven,” “L’amour Fou,” “Don’t Look Now,” “Imitation of Life,” “Lone Star,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and a new Netflix film for good measure: a 70mm screening of Zack Snyder’s upcoming “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire.”

The screenings of...

Clear your calendar, L.A. cinephiles! The American Cinematheque has announced the titles for its extraordinary 70mm festival taking place at the iconic Egyptian Theatre in the days after the movie palace reopens following a three-year restoration. Netflix, in partnership with the American Cinematheque, bought the cinema in 2020.

The 516-seat theater, which was the longtime home of the American Cinematheque before the refurbishment, will retain its full ability to project 70mm prints and also be one of only five cinemas in the U.S. capable of projecting nitrate film. That early form of celluloid prints is notable for its astounding sharpness and vivid colors — you’ve never seen Technicolor until you’ve seen it in nitrate — but it’s extremely flammable, which you know if you’ve seen “Inglourious Basterds,” and thus harder to handle for many projectionists today.

The festival “Ultra Cinematheque 70: Hollywood,” running from November 10 through November...

Veteran French editor Dominique Auvray says there’s an essential intuitive element to her work. The woman who created the sound for “Paris, Texas” and cut such films as “No Fear, No Die,” “L’Amour Fou,” and “Hu-Man” says her career has been built around one key ability: Tuning in to your eyes and ears.

Speaking at the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival this week, the longtime collaborator with seminal French director and author Marguerite Duras said, “I think the first thing when you are an editor, you have to look and to listen. And to listen at the same time to your heart and your head. And to listen to the director. And to listen to what the images say, you know.”

Auvray says she approached her work on the definitive Duras films “Le Camion,” “Woman of the Ganges” and “Le Navire Night” this way, and is still listening...

In America, doing what Andy Lau does in Hong Kong film industry satire “The Movie Emperor” would likely net him an Oscar nomination. Or at least an MTV Movie Award. Or maybe just the admiration of his peers, considering how few stars are willing to poke fun at their own image, much less entertain the question of what might happen if their fans were to turn on them tomorrow.

Reteaming with “Crazy Stone” director Ning Hao for an ultra-polished, good-sport parody of A-list vanity, Lau plays Dany Lau — not quite himself, but a megastar of roughly his own stature. The movie is loaded with inside jokes, but like French series “Call My Agent,” it should have no trouble translating around the globe. Between Lau’s international standing — bolstered by roles in everything from “Infernal Affairs” to “A Simple Life,” plus a Cantopop singing career — and the script’s deft way...

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 London BFI Film Festival. Netflix releases the film on its streaming platform on Friday, December 15.

What are you — a British chicken named Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) — supposed to do when your plucky young chick Molly (Bella Ramsay) insists on returning to the dangerous world that you spent the entire 84 minutes of Aardman’s “Chicken Run” escaping? Furthermore, how does it feel to realize that you’ve become the very thing that you once revolted against: Aka a jailer? “We’ve got our happy ending,” Ginger insists to her American rooster, Rocky (Zachary Levi). They are living in a grassy, human-free island sanctuary, making popcorn by rigging a magnifying glass to an upside-down jar and letting the sun do its work on corn kernels.

Ginger is issuing a reprimand to Rocky after he tells Molly about the adventurous way that they arrived...

One can often tell a cinephile by the rituals they establish. For my part, I begin every summer by revisiting Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), the feature debut of his most beloved character. I can no longer remember what drew me to this habit outside of a strong association of the season with the smooth jazz theme to the film “Quel temps fait-il à Paris?”, written by Alain Romans. Revisiting the film last summer, I decided for the first time to put on the 1953 version of the movie instead of the 1978 version I usually watch, which is labeled “definitive” by Les Films de Mon Oncle, the foundation responsible for the restoration and rerelease of Tati’s films. Outside of one addition to this later cut, I was unaware of the differences between them, and couldn’t find much information about the original release. Almost immediately, I was shocked to...

After a brief closure this summer, New York City’s Paris Theater reopens in September with a newly-installed Dolby Atmos sound system (making the 500-seat Paris Theater the largest Dolby cinema in Manhattan) and, for the first time in 15 years, a series of 70mm screenings. Highlights include the first U.S. 70mm screening of Jacques Tati’s Playtime in 10 years; the first NYC 70mm screening of Ron Fricke’s Baraka in 10 years; the U.S. premiere of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria in Dolby Atmos; a screening of William Friedkin’s excellent Sorcerer as a tribute to the recently deceased director; and the first NYC […]

The post NYC’s Paris Theater To Reopen in September With Dolby Atmos System and 70mm Screenings first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

After a brief closure this summer, New York City’s Paris Theater reopens in September with a newly-installed Dolby Atmos sound system (making the 500-seat Paris Theater the largest Dolby cinema in Manhattan) and, for the first time in 15 years, a series of 70mm screenings. Highlights include the first U.S. 70mm screening of Jacques Tati’s Playtime in 10 years; the first NYC 70mm screening of Ron Fricke’s Baraka in 10 years; the U.S. premiere of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria in Dolby Atmos; a screening of William Friedkin’s excellent Sorcerer as a tribute to the recently deceased director; and the first NYC […]

The post NYC’s Paris Theater To Reopen in September With Dolby Atmos System and 70mm Screenings first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Probably inspired by the success of “The Horse Thieves. Roads of Time” that brought together cast and crew from Kazakhstan and Japan, “Under The Turquoise Sky” attempts to do the same with Mongolia and Japan this time, in a movie that unfolds like an occasionally surreal road film.

“Under The Turquoise Sky” is screening at Japan Cuts

Takeshi is the spoiled grandson of Saburo, a Japanese mogul who is disappointed by his behavior, since the young man spends all his time on drinks and women. Arma is a Mongolian man who is caught trying to steal a horse that belongs to Saburo. Instead of punishment, however, the latter arranges for him to take his grandson to Mongolia in order to find a woman she was romantically involved with during his time in the Japanese army. Gradually, through the interaction with Arma and the experiences he stumbles upon while in Mongolia,...

Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach’s hand-painted marvel “Chicken for Linda!” took home dual honors at the Annecy Animation Festival on Saturday, scooping up the festival’s top prize, the Cristal Award for best feature, as well as the Gan Foundation award for distribution.

A bittersweet childhood tale that finds screwball humor in mourning and melancholy, the French-language film premiered to some acclaim out of Cannes’ Acid sidebar last month, and was picked up for North American distribution by Gkids while competing in Annecy.

“We wanted something both funny and affecting,” said co-director Chiara Malta. “The two elements were never in conflict, because we made the film for children, putting ourselves in their perspectives while adopting their language.”

“We wanted a [joyful mess],” added co-director Sébastien Laudenbach. “The film is sad and funny. It’s full of energy and emotion, and as a result, the graphic style is dynamic as well.”

Hungary...

As Annecy rounds the final bend on its biggest edition to date, with a tantalizing promise of a brighter future for animation in much of Europe, Marjolaine Perreten’s 29-minute film “Pebble Hill” (“La Colline aux cailloux”), part of its TV Films competition, has been one of the multiple gems to come out of it.

Minimalist in design, a trademark of the young Swiss filmmaker’s unique style, the animation, which has already won an award at Hamburg’s Mo & Friese Kinder Kurzfilm Festival, is charming and tender, the 29-minute film, produced by renowned Swiss production company Nadasdy Film in Geneva, a producer on “No Dogs or Italians Allowed,” and France’s Les Films du Nord, tells the story of a family of shrews that after loosing their home due to the breaking of an upstream dam embark on a journey alongside an old shrew to find the Pebble Hill.

Anyone who has watched the Criterion Channel knows that writer-director Ari Aster is a devoted cinephile with broad taste and a deep understanding of how and why movies work. For his latest and most ambitious film, “Beau Is Afraid,” Aster told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast that he tried to leave specific tributes to other movies behind, at least consciously. “I would say that a lot of the influences were unconscious while I was writing it,” he said. “I became aware of them while we were shooting, or even in post.” Aster and his regular cinematographer, Pawel Pogorzelski, talked more about literary references than cinematic ones, but there’s no denying that several of the classics that Aster has “metabolized,” as he put it, found their way into the visual and aural DNA of “Beau Is Afraid.” Here are three key films that influeced Aster and Pogorzelski’s approach.

“Playtime...

Paul Schrader is warning about the “slippery slope” of filmmakers revisiting their work.

The Oscar winner addressed the films of Terrence Malick and George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” as examples of why films of the past should not be recut or adapted to modern times.

“I think that’s a very slippery slope. Everything changes, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Schrader told “Card Counter” star Oscar Isaac in conversation for Interview magazine. “When people like George [Lucas] work with CGI, you’re not going to recast the movie, you’re not going to rewrite the movie. You could fool with the color. I think Terrence Malick fooling with the color was wrong, and I think when Francis [Ford Coppola] did his longer version of ‘Apocalypse Now,’ it was worse than before. So I think it’s better to just let them be.”

Coppola released his...

If nothing else, “Barry” Season 4 has cemented director Bill Hader’s status as somehow the heir to both Otto Preminger and Jacques Tati. Hader and cinematographer Carl Herse’s camera, like some unholy combination of “Playtime” and “Anatomy of a Murder,” continually embrace patient, wide takes in which horror and comedy unfold one after the other after the other, staying however long it needs to in order to catch the characters out.

The length of a moment and the slow arc of the camera can themselves justify a change in location or a transition, as in Barry’s flashes to his past and to the world he desires in Episode 2, “the bestest place on earth.” But as the camerawork of the show has adapted to Hader’s preference for giving the characters enough rope, so has every other aspect of “Barry” adapted.

For Season 4, this presented production designer Eric Schoonover...

[Editor’s note: This story contains major spoilers for “Beau Is Afraid.”]

Ari Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid” has a lot going on: It’s a sprawling, Homeric journey into the troubled psyche of neurotic, middle-aged man (Joaquin Phoenix) and a disturbing, pitch-black comedy about Jewish guilt rooted in that man’s unresolved problems with his mother (alternately played by Zoe Lister-Jones and Patti LuPone), a woman who may or may not be dead. It’s also a claustrophobic dose of surrealist satire of urban life and consumer society, a world overmedicated and undernourished. It has a sprawling dream sequence steeped in profound emotional yearning and a monster that suggests a Phallic interpretation of Jabba the Hutt.

It’s ridiculous, tragic, silly, and absolutely unlike anything else you’ll see this year. All of which makes Aster squirm over the prospects of talking about it.

“I’ve already said way too much here,” the 36-year-old New Yorker said about...

Ari Aster’s nearly-three hour journey Beau Is Afraid, described by the filmmaker himself as a “Jewish Lord of the Rings,” will arrive a bit earlier than expected. Now set to debut on April 14 in New York and LA before expanding wide the following week, including IMAX screens, we’ve received more context for what to expect thanks to a new series the director curated for Film at Lincoln Center.

Set to run April 14-20 at the NYC venue, selections include works by Alfred Hitchcock, Jiří Menzel, Guy Maddin, Albert Brooks, Nicholas Ray, Powell and Pressburger, Tsai Ming-liang, Jacques Tati, and more. “This eclectic and unexpected collection of masterworks drawn from seven decades of film history across a range of genres and production contexts sheds light on the inspirations and influences behind one of the most compelling directorial voices in Hollywood today,” notes the press release.

Aster also recently let...

Click here to read the full article.

Three years after the introduction of Daniel Craig’s Detective Benoit Blanc and the launch of a new murder mystery franchise with Knives Out, writer-director Rian Johnson debuted the sequel, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, on Monday at Los Angeles’ Academy Museum.

Craig (who missed the big L.A. event due to illness) is back as the renowned detective, but with a new cast and premise — this time following tech billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) and his friends on a getaway to his private Greek island, where someone inevitably turns up dead.

“I wanted to tell the audience right up front that this was going to be a very different film than the first one, so going from a cozy New England autumn to a Greek beach seemed like a really big, interesting way of doing that,” Johnson told The Hollywood Reporter...

How does one go about creating one of the best, most intense, and formally daring stories in all of "Star Wars?" Well, you go out, get the most talented artists, and put them in charge of various levels of production. Sounds simple enough, right? Having a filmmaker of the caliber of Tony Gilroy spearhead "Andor" already put this prequel series on solid ground, but his decision to collaborate with the best in the business has clearly been paying dividends throughout the first several episodes of the season. But while Gilroy's vision has received all its deserved praise, we'd be remiss not to look deeper and show some appreciation for the below-the-line contributions that have played invaluable roles in turning "Andor" into the acclaimed addition to the franchise that it is (you can read /Film's review here).

I recently had the opportunity to speak to two of the chief architects behind "Andor,...

Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness,” Ali Abbasi’s “Holy Spider,” and tributes to the French New Wave are among the most common programming choices for this year’s Month of European Film, a variegated showcase for continental cinema that will run across the continent from Nov. 13 – Dec. 10.

Piloted by the European Film Academy, the month-long initiative will extend across 35 partner cinemas in as many countries, with each theater hosting a unique program tailored to that specific market. Like three-dozen complementary programs rallying around the same banner, this year’s Month of European Film will feature screenings of recent festival standouts, retrospectives to directors Jonas Mekas and Lars von Trier, and country focuses on contemporary German, Portuguese and Nordic cinema – among many other moving parts.

“With the Month of European Film, the Academy is launching a new network,” says European Film Academy CEO Matthijs Wouter Knol. “A large part of...

Initiative aimed at strengthening the visibility of European films.

The European Film Academy (Efa) is launching a month-long initiative at cinemas across Europe that aims to strengthen and protect the future of European film.

The inaugural Month of European Film will begin on November 13 and will see cinemas in 35 countries present special programmes, events and dedicated retrospectives for four weeks. Mubi will concurrently stream a special focus on European films, taking the initiative global.

It will all lead up to the European Film Awards, set to take place in Iceland on December 10.

Matthijs Wouter Knol, CEO and director of Efa,...