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No sound so definitively evokes Jewish culture in the popular imagination as that of klezmer. With perceptible roots in Eastern Europe and a purely secular function, it’s a musical form that provides a direct link to centuries-old folk traditions that have all but vanished since the Holocaust. The Klezmer Project, the debut feature of Argentinian filmmakers Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann, combines documentary footage with a metatextual narrative to explore the remnants of Yiddish culture in small villages throughout the historical region of Bessarabia—the nexus of Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine, where the musical language of the Jews who lived there is kept alive by those who knew them.

In the early part of the 20th century, Hungarian composer Béla Bartók transcribed thousands of folk melodies across Eastern Europe, and in its own modest way, The Klezmer Project is guided by a similar spirit of preservation. Among other things,...

Argentine filmmaker Gastón Solnicki is cooking up his latest feature, “The Souffleur,” which he’ll be presenting during the Venice Gap-Financing Market, which runs Aug. 30 – Sep. 1.

The film tells the story of Lucius Glantz, an American who’s managed the same international hotel in Vienna for 30 years. When he discovers one day that the venerable building is slated to be sold and demolished, he embarks on a quest to stop its destruction, pitting him against a cocky Argentine realtor. As the conflict between them escalates, the hotel’s trademark soufflé mysteriously stops rising, forcing Glantz to confront the prospect of the end of all he holds dear.

Directed by Solnicki off a script he co-wrote with Julia Niemann, “The Souffleur” is produced by Gabriele Kranzelbinder and Eugenio Fernández Abril for Vienna-based Little Magnet Films, Primo and Solnicki’s Argentine production company Filmy Wiktora.

The director tells Variety that the idea...

Illustrations by Chantall Veerman.Every few years, a projection screen is installed in a clearing near the Greek village of Lyssarea, in Arcadia. Hundreds of red beanbags and pillows dot the field, with benches at the rear and a 16mm film projector atop its wooden stand. As the sun sets over the craggy Peloponnese, the projector whirs to life and spectators settle in for open-air cinema. Crickets chirp. Dogs bark. The temperature falls. Moths prepare for an epic frenzy.Without any opening credits, a flash of light floods the screen and then cuts to black. This is the Temenos. Long sections of black film leader advance and then strobe with clear leader, until sustained illumination bathes the audience. Dark again, the projection surface dissolves into the sky as our eyes readjust from the brightness. Finally, an image appears on the screen: the torqued body of a naked man glistening in warm light,...

Legendary film editor Thelma Schoonmaker is honoring the films of filmmaking duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger with an upcoming retrospective at MoMA.

Titled “Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger,” the screening series is presented in collaboration with the BFI and will take place from June 21 to July 31. The program includes more than 50 films — many of which are new restorations — and was curated by conservation experts, archivists, and curators at the BFI National Archive.

Oscar-winning editor Schoonmaker will open the series on June 21 with an introduction to the new digital restoration of “Black Narcissus” (1947). Schoonmaker was married to British director Powell from 1984 until his death in 1990.

Powell and Pressburger’s cultural legacy is most notably recognized in their film “The Red Shoes” (1948), which has inspired sequences in films such as Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan,” and Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” which Schoonmaker edited.

Powell’s expressionist-hallucinatory adaptation of Bartók features a blazing performance by Ana Raquel Satre as Bluebeard’s bride

The Powell/Pressburger season at London’s BFI Southbank has given us this rediscovered gem from the later works that Michael Powell directed on his own. It is an amazing and expressionist-hallucinatory adaptation of Béla Bartók’s one-act opera Bluebeard’s Castle, with original libretto by film critic and theorist Béla Balázs; it was first transmitted in 1963 on West German television, but mostly unseen since then, due to legal issues with the Bartók estate. Now it has been restored under the supervision of Powell’s widow Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese.

Bluebeard’s Castle was originally to be the first part of a double bill directed by Powell; the other half being Bartók’s nightmarish cabaret ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, about a young girl forced by three sinister figures to perform seductive dances at...

Martin Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker have seen more movies than you. Both of them have long been champions of independent and international cinema, and they have each done their part to amplify titles and filmmakers that might be lost in the sea of the commercial American film market. When they're not making movies, they're likely overseeing the restorations of lost classics or recommending great movies you've never heard of on Turner Classic Movies. But they're also constantly incorporating nods and tips of the cap to those films in their own work.

Schoonmaker was in a relationship with celebrated British filmmaker Michael Powell, the co-director (with Emeric Pressburger) of such classics as "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," "I Know Where I'm Going!," "Black Narcissus," and "The Red Shoes." Their romance spanned a decade, starting in 1980 and sadly ending in 1990 when Powell died. In a recent interview with Little White Lies,...

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After the success of her paired portrait-of-the-artist features The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II, British writer-director Joanna Hogg takes a stylistic swerve with The Eternal Daughter, a melancholy winter’s tale with horror elements.

It’s effectively a third chapter in the Souvenir story, one that jumps into the present day after the 1980s setting of Part II. This time, Tilda Swinton takes over the role of Hogg’s fictional avatar Julie (originally played by Swinton’s daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne) and also reprises the role of Julie’s contained, genteel mother Rosalind, affording the actor a chance to indulge her enthusiasm for complex hair and make-up disguises. The two women travel to a remote hotel in Wales for a sentimental journey, one that stirs up both happy and unhappy memories. In the end, it plays a little too often like an...

Gastón Solnicki's Kékszakállú (2016) is having its exclusive online premiere on Mubi. It is showing from April 10 - May 10, 2018.Who imagined, planned, and built the spaces we inhabit? How many people participated in the process and how many hours did it take them to culminate each building? What purposes did they seek to give us? Which of those purposes were meant solely for the spaces themselves? How many of these people’s own needs and purposes were renounced for the comfort and leisure of others? I suspect that these are some of the interrogations that start exploding as bombs in the mind of Laila (Laila Maltz) towards the final moments of Kékszakállú, Argentinian filmmaker Gastón Solnicki’s third feature film. “I often recognize that we are not capable of looking at what we have in front of us unless it’s placed within a frame,” said Abbas Kiarostami. In Kékszakállú,...

Ignore the jumble of accent marks and consonants that make up the title. Kékszakállú is the Hungarian word for Bluebeard, but that doesn’t matter. Nor is it particularly important to know that Béla Bartók’s 1911 opera Bluebeard’s Castle served as this experimental film’s (very, very) loose inspiration. The less you fret about meaning, the more you can concentrate on first-time director Gastón Solnicki’s striking images. Kékszakállú works best as pure cinema, mostly divorced from narrative; some of its most memorable moments don’t even really contribute to the vague theme that gradually emerges. Solnicki just seems to have shot a ton of random material, Terrence Malick-style, and given a home to anything that’s worth looking at for its own sake. This makes for a slightly frustrating experience, even at just 72 minutes, but only because the film feints at being something more than a ...

One of the most acclaimed films of the last year (since its debut at the Venice Film Festival), Kékszakállú will be getting a U.S. theatrical release this week, and now we have a new trailer to go along with it. Coming from Cinema Slate and Cinema Tropical, Gastón Solnicki’s debut feature, inspired by Béla Bartók’s opera, follows a handful of women in Argentina at the threshold of adulthood. This new trailer, which features just five shots and a few quotes, is a gorgeous one and teases just enough to hook one into making this a priority.

“In a year somewhat short on groundbreakers from experimental cinema, Solnicki’s operatic, radically loose portrait of teens trapped in limbo stood out,” our own Zhuo-Ning Su said, naming it one of his favorite films of 2016. “The scenes, if they can be called that, are minutely styled and observed, wholly self-centered...

Okay, it's time for me to stop trying to listen to more 2016 albums and just wrap up this list. In the past I would split my jazz list into a new releases part dedicated to current recordings and a historical part combining first releases of archival material with reissues. This year I'm skipping reissues, partly because some projects were so gargantuan that little guys like me weren't serviced with them, partly because the vinyl renaissance means everything is being reissued at once, and partly because so much stuff is just rehashing the same material in new packaging, with or without a gimmick or a little additional material added. So first releases of archival material are lumped in here. Maybe that's not entirely fair to the current guys, but on the other hand I don't include many archival items on my list.

1. Matthew Shipp & Bobby Kapp: Cactus (Northern Spy)

Two generations...

This was a busy year at Tiff, where I was a juror for Fipresci, helping to award a prize for best premiere in the Discovery section. Not only did this mean that some other films had to take a back burner—sadly, I did not see Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge—but my writing time was a bit compromised as well. Better late than never? That is for you, Gentle Reader, to decide.Austerlitz (Sergei Loznitsa, Germany)So basic in the telling—a record of several days’ worth of visitors mostly to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienberg, Germany—Austerlitz is a film that in many ways exemplifies the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. What is the net effect for humanity when, faced with the drive to remember the unfathomable, we employ the grossly inadequate tools at our disposal?Austerlitz takes its name from W. G. Sebald’s final novel.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center today announced the lineup for Explorations, a new section featuring bold selections from the vanguard of contemporary cinema, and Main Slate shorts for the 54th New York Film Festival.

Read More: Nyff Reveals Main Slate of 2016 Titles, Including ‘Manchester By the Sea,’ ‘Paterson’ and ‘Personal Shopper’

Explorations is devoted to work from around the world, from filmmakers across the spectrum of experience and artistic sensibility. It kicks off with six features, including Albert Serra’s latest, “The Death of Louis Xiv,” featuring a tour de force performance by French cinema legend Jean-Pierre Léaud; Douglas Gordon’s portrait of avant-garde icon Jonas Mekas, “I Had Nowhere to Go”; João Pedro Rodrigues’s “The Ornithologist”, which won him the Best Director prize at Locarno; as well as Natalia Almada’s “Everything Else”, Gastón Solnicki’s “Kékszakállú,” and Oliver Laxe’s “Mimosas.”

New York Film Festival Director...

Between reviews I'd been accumulating, things I listened to for my best-of-2014 list, and a couple of comparisons I'd planned to make, there's enough for another review roundup before the close of the year. Note that the three that could fit into the reissue category -- Rilling, Berman, and the first 71 tracks of the lead review here -- would all have been on my best-classical-reissues-of-2014 list if I'd made one.

Budapest Zoltán Kodály Girls' Choir/Ilona Andor; Magnificat Children's Choir of Budapest/Valéria Szebellédi; Budapest Zoltán Kodály School Children's Choir/Csilla Öri & Eszter Uhereczky; Zoltán Kodály Hungarian Choir School of Budapest/Ferenc Sapszon; Kecskemét Miraculum Children's Choir/László Durányik; Kecskemét Aurin Girls' Choir/László Durányik; Angelica Girls' Choir of Budapest/Zsuzsanna Gráf; Pécs Béla Bartók Girls' Choir/Attila Kertész Kodály: Bicinia Hungarica; Tricinia (Hungaroton Classic)

This is part of Hungaroton's monumental Kodály Complete Edition, and contains exactly...

Event returns in Budapest after being dogged by controversy

The Hungarian Film Week made its return last night more than two years after it was shut down amidst a bitter dispute between former Hungarian Film Fund CEO Andrew Vajna and renowned arthouse director Béla Tarr.

The festival opened with a screening of a digitally restored version of Mihály Kertész’s Hungarian silent classic The Exile (A tolonc/1914). Kertész himself would later move to the Us and change his name to Michael Curtiz, where he directed Casablanca.

The Exile, a melodrama of lost parents, stolen honour and passion, was accompanied by a new score composed by Attila Pacsay, performed by a 52-member live orchestra. Held at the Palace of Arts’ Béla Bartók National Concert Hall, attendees at the opening included Oscar-winning Hungarian director István Szabó.

Over the coming days, the Hungarian Film Week - organised by the Hungarian National Film Fund, National Media and...

There’s more theories concerning Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining than there are takes of Jack Nicholson delivering his iconic “Here’s Johnny” line – which is rumored to be well over a hundred. The soon to be released documentary Room 237 tackles just a handful of some of these that range from probable to absolutely ridiculous. To give you a taste of one of the more “creative” topics, one interviewer discusses the cloud design in some of the camera shots. Kubrick was certainly a perfectionist and someone that meticulously planned shots and compositions, but the likelihood of capturing the clouds just right seems a little far-fetched. Fans and historians have given meaning over the years to such specifics as the pictures hung in the hotel. One aspect of the film that is frequently discussed is the opening credit sequence. The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and...

Rewatching Stanley Kubrick's horror classic brings new insights every time

Will I ever get to the bottom of The Shining? I wonder. I saw it the day it was released in 1980, and again this afternoon for what must be the 40th time. As with every viewing, I scribbled another 20 pages of notes. I noticed things that I'd never spotted before (how did I ever miss the goose-stepping Mickey Mouse on Danny's sweater), refreshed certain cherished notions (is Wendy a traumatised extension of Shelley Duvall's chatterbox character from Altman's 3 Women?) and considered the influence of Eraserhead, which Kubrick deeply admired and screened for cast and crew. Indeed, The Shining is the movie that decanted the horrific blank-gaze deadpan of Lynch's movie into the mainstream. Upon release, however, it was decried as stately to the point of narcolepsy, unfaithful to Stephen King, and the end of Jack Nicholson as a serious actor.

His life was as romantic and colourful as his exquisite music, yet his works are rarely performed today. Delius deserves better, writes Julian Lloyd Webber

No other composer polarises opinion like Delius. You either love or loathe his music. And it is rare to find someone who has grown to like it. Although this coming year – the 150th anniversary of his birth – will bring opportunities to reassess his work, that central fact will never change.

I feel as if I have known Delius's music forever. My father was a devotee and I must have heard all of his most famous works (On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, The Walk to the Paradise Garden, La Calinda, et al) well before I started playing his cello music. I always felt instinctively attuned to Delius's unique musical language, which seemed akin to watching a painting that is slowly changing in a constantly moving canvas of sound.

Last week our critics picked their highlights of 2011. Did they get it right? Readers respond with their own highs (and lows)

MattB75

One Man, Two Guvnors was the most fun I've had in a theatre for years – easily the best play of 2011, and James Corden best performer. The National theatre largely misfired for me: A Woman Killed with Kindness, Cherry Orchard, 13, The Kitchen, Frankenstein and Greenland were all largely disappointing.

The RSC's Homecoming was the best revival. Rupert Goold's Merchant of Venice was great fun, even if the inconsistency in Portia's characterisation (from ditzy blond Glee fan to brilliant prosecutor, hm) took the edge off it.

Tom Brooke was my favourite actor of the year – in The Kitchen, and I Am the Wind.

oogin

Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid are still two of my least-admired starchitects. However, credit where it's due. I had the pleasure of wandering Toronto's Ago...

Ken Russell, who has died aged 84, was so often called rude names – the wild man of British cinema, the apostle of excess, the oldest angry young man in the business – that he gave up denying it all quite early in his career. Indeed, he often seemed to court the very publicity that emphasised only the crudest assessment of his work. He gave the impression that he cared not a damn. Those who knew him better, however, knew that he did. Underneath all the showbiz bluster, he was an old softie. Or, perhaps as accurately, a talented boy who never quite grew up.

It has, of course, to be said that he was capable of almost any enormity in the careless rapture he brought to making his films. He could be dreadfully cruel to his undoubted talent,...

Stanley Kubrick, 1980

Stanley Kubrick's hotly awaited adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling ghost story was considered a letdown on its release, particularly by the novel's fans, who were outraged by changes to the plot (Kubrick kills off a character who survived in the book) and disappointed that, owing to the limitations of the special effects of the era, the hedge animals that came to life in the original story were replaced by a maze. But the film has gained in stature over the years; its tracking shots of Danny riding his tricycle along the hotel's corridors made it among the first productions to exploit the potential of the Steadicam, while many set-pieces and lines of dialogue ("Redrum", the spooky twins, "Heeeere's Johnny!") are now so well known they're been parodied countless times by other films or TV shows. And the discordant, modernist soundtrack (Penderecki, Ligeti, Bartók) has few equals.

Elton John Buy: Lala.comGenre: PopSong: My Father's GunAlbum: Tumbleweed Connection (Remastered)Béla Bartók (& June De Toth) Buy: Lala.comGenre: ClassicalSong: Stomping DanceAlbum: Bartok Solo Piano Works, Volume 3Edie Brickell (& New Bohemians) Buy: Lala.comGenre: AlternativeSong: Stranger ThingsAlbum: Stranger ThingsMississippi John Hurt Buy: Lala.comGenre: BluesSong: Nobody's Dirty BusinessAlbum: 1928 SessionsLykke Li Buy: Lala.comGenre: AlternativeSong: Time FliesAlbum: Little Bit - EPLou Reed Buy: Lala.comGenre: RockSong: Nowhere At AllAlbum: Coney Island BabyKurt Weill Buy: Lala.comGenre: ClassicalSong: Very Very Very Wooden WeddingAlbum: TryoutChaka Khan (Rufus) Buy: Lala.comGenre: R&B/SoulSong: You Got the LoveAlbum: Rags to RufusArturo Toscanini (& the NBC Symphony Orchestra) Buy: Lala.comGenre: ClassicalSong: Die Walküre, Act 1 - Scene 3 (A Rehearsal Without Singers): Wälse, Wälse! Wo Ist Dein Schwert?Album: Arturo Toscanini Rehearses Die Walküre, Act 1 - Scene 3Roger Daltrey (The Who) Buy: Lala.comGenre: RockSong: Love Ain't for KeepingAlbum: Who's Next (Remastered)Arthur Lee (& Love) Buy: Lala.

I wish I had the chance to interview more compatriot composers here, but fact is there are very few Hungarian film composers I could talk to. Adam Balazs is one of them - although he lives in Los Angeles, he recently completed his first score to a Hungarian movie: Szíven szúrt ország is a documentary about the murder of a handball player whose tragic death brought forward many unresolved issues within the country. In addition to this new documentary, Ádám's new movie The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations will have a soundtrack CD released pretty soon, which is a first for the composer (although several of his scores are available through download options). We discussed these and a number of other projects in the following interview:

How did your interest in music begin?

I grew up in a fully musical environment — my father is a distinguished classical composer and before her retirement,...