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When François Truffaut made his feature directorial debut with “The 400 Blows” in 1959, it quickly became an international sensation and the French New Wave’s first smash hit. Along with Jean-Luc Godard‘s “Breathless,” it established many of the conventions for which the French New Wave would become known: documentary-style location shooting, playful experimentation with editing and film form, and most importantly, a direct connection between the filmmaker’s personality and the action on screen.

Many of the New Wave directors aspired to theorist Alexandre Astruc’s dream of using the film camera as intimately and personally as a writer uses a pen, but few realized that dream and its possibilities with as much artistic success as Truffaut. Anyone with even a cursory awareness of the director’s biography can see the direct link between him and “The 400 Blows” hero Antoine Doinel, a 14-year old constantly at odds with...

A tiny miracle of a movie, Ari Gold’s deeply personal Brother Verses Brother is a whimsical musical à la John Carney’s Once, taking place on city streets, in pubs, and around small apartments. Set on a winter day in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, the film discloses upfront that this is “Live Cinema”––improvised and shot in real-time––with a conversation that feels nuanced and natural, identical brothers Ari and Ethan roaming the streets with guitars en route to find their 96-year-old father, beat poet Herbert Gold.

Along the way the brothers grapple with their own relationship, popping into bars to perform and walking onwards, seemingly never missing an opportunity to perform as they look for their father who did not show up for their first performance. They so want to please him that they never miss a chance to perform, even if in an alleyway for themselves.

Illustrations by Michelle Perez.The inner life of man is constituted by the fact that man relates himself to his species, to his mode of being. […] He can put himself in the place of another precisely because his species, his essential mode of being—not only his individuality—is an object of thought to him. —Ludwig FeuerbachThere are only individuals. —Friedrich NietzscheThe idea of the individual haunts much of the writing on Vittorio De Sica’s films. No other critic has played a greater role in shaping how we speak about them than André Bazin, who remarked that De Sica’s postwar masterpiece Bicycle Thieves (1948) allowed its actors “first of all to exist for their own sakes, freely … loving them in their singular individuality.”1 This line has cast a long shadow over the perception of De Sica’s neorealist work and the manner in which it is mythologized. Typically described,...

Widely considered one of the most important and prolific film critics in America, Jonathan Rosenbaum began his career in the 1970s writing film criticism for Sight and Sound, Film Comment, and the Village Voice before becoming chief critic of the Chicago Reader from 1987 to 2008. At the Reader, he published over 5,000 reviews and columns; now, Jonathan runs his own website where he publishes old and new capsules. He is known, among other things, for being a champion of independent and international auteurs and for writing about them in a highly accessible yet personal, erudite style. Jean-Luc Godard once likened him to André Bazin and James Agee.

He has written multiple books on film. The latest, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader, was published by Hat & Beard Press in June of last year, and can be considered the definitive culmination of Jonathan’s writing (to date!). An autobiographical and chronological journey,...

From the early stages of film history, two broadly contrasting factions of filmmakers can be identified based on their approach to film aesthetics. The first group, which placed their faith in montage, can be classified as formalists, while the second group, which emphasized a more realistic representation of the world, can be classified as realists. Early film theorists sought to establish cinema as a legitimate art form by emphasizing its capacity to deviate from the real world. They argued that cinema had the right to diverge from reality in order to distinguish itself as an art form that evokes a subjective sense of the real.

Early filmmakers like Georges Méliès can be seen as one of the proponents of this notion, as their films delve into fantasy worlds that have little in common with the real world, often structured in an episodic manner, with separate images stitched together through editing.

Petite Planète: Japon.In the hundreds of images in Staring Back, Chris Marker’s 2007 exhibition and corresponding book, the artist captures the gazes of strangers, protestors, recognizable figures, and even animals during his travels far and wide. The critic Brian Dillon wrote to Marker with a request to discuss the photographs but, when he found Marker “crushed under [his] present grind” in his Paris studio, he was left to stare back into these faces and see what he found. Responding to a series of photographs of metro riders, Dillon considered Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” a whole world of observations cohabitating between these fourteen words: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.Not long after the piece was published, Dillon received an email. Marker wrote that he had Pound’s poem in mind when organizing the book and exhibition but...

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 major film festival is complete without at least one Love Letter To Cinema™ from a filmmaker of some renown, to advocate the joys of the medium to an audience that doesn’t have to be told twice. French writer-director and Cannes regular Arnaud Desplechin brings that to the Croisette this year with “Filmlovers!,” a duly warm and nostalgia-washed cine-valentine, but one with a little more to say than just, “Movies, amirite?” Indeed, the film’s somewhat inelegant English-language title risks concealing the more specific focus of this unassuming but winning hybrid documentary: The French title, “Spectateurs!,” makes clear this is first and foremost a celebration of spectatorship rather than filmmaking, probing the dynamics of cinema audiences and their relationship to the screen. In either language, it’s impassioned enough to earn its exclamation point.

Not a major work but a bright, pleasurable one, with its director on more limber...

For his tenth Cannes feature premiere, Arnaud Desplechin chose to present a docu-fictional love letter to cinema. Two years after Brother and Sister was in Competition, Spectateurs (or Filmlovers!) is one of the festival’s Special Screenings, an effervescent walk down memory lane with a director who has helped shape contemporary French cinema for the better. It’s not hard for a Frenchman to be a cinephile––almost everyone is trained in film knowledge, either formally or informally, as part of their cultural upbringing. But Filmlovers! manages to set itself apart from all the other meta-documentaries or essays about how cinema made their director the person they are today. Instead it is both an honest and highly poetic feature that quite naturally absorbs film and literary references to address the structural role cinema has played for both Desplechin himself and our way of viewing the world.

Filmlovers! is narrated by Paul Dédalus,...

Movies are hot, according to Marshall McLuhan, who wasn’t paying them a compliment but placing them within his theory of hot and cool media. He was referring to the sensory richness that makes movies such a captivating and complete experience that they require little active participation from the audience. Just sit in the dark and let the magic wash over you. Arnaud Desplechin doesn’t disagree about the magic, but he puts a different slant on things in the docufiction Filmlovers! (Spectateurs!), whose focus is the moviegoer as an essential part of the equation.

Abounding in movie love, the director’s first feature since Brother and Sister cites more than 50 films in its eloquent onrush of clips and philosophizing and memory. But, in a departure from most such cinema essays, there’s no auteur namechecking (or onscreen titles ID’ing clips); it’s not those 50 films’ making-of or even their makers that matter here,...

Sporting a warm smile and a pair of sunglasses – “Sorry, I’ve been busy editing and my eyes hurt,” he explained – one of China’s leading indie directors Jia Zhangke, whose upcoming film “Caught by the Tides” will be vying for the Palme d’or in Cannes next month, was guest of honor at the 55th edition of Swiss doc festival Visions du Réel this week.

Finished just in time for submission to Cannes, the film features his wife Zhao Tao, his muse over the last two decades, and tells the story of a couple spanning 20 years. (Jia previously spoke with Variety about the film in February when it still went under the working title “We Shall Be All.”)

Explaining how the pandemic gave him the opportunity to review his footage all the way back to 2001, he described his new film as “a concentration of 20 years’ experience,” which blends footage...

From Eternal Current Events, a collection of writings by Chris Marker, edited and translated by Jackson B. Smith, and published by Inpatient Press.A Grin without a Cat.In 1946, a 24-year-old Chris Marker—or, as he was briefly known then, Chris Mayor—began writing for the Paris-based magazine Esprit. He remained a regular contributor to the leftist monthly until the early 1950s, around which time he made his first films. Marker’s writings for the magazine traverse genres and forms—stories, poems, essays, and reviews—consistently blurring the lines between fact and fiction while maintaining the distinctive blend of humor and political engagement that viewers of his films know well. Marker’s writing most often appeared in the section of the magazine called the “Journal of Many Voices”: an assemblage of political, social, and cultural commentary in which the musings of many contributors—among them the film critic André Bazin,...

David Bordwell, an influential film scholar and longtime professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, died Feb. 29 after battling a “long illness,” according to the university. He was 76.

Uw-Madison described Bordwell as a prolific researcher, dedicated teacher and passionate cinephile — a man who helped guide “countless colleagues, students, and film lovers to heightened awareness of the medium’s artistic possibilities.”

For more than two decades, Bordwell penned commentaries, produced visual and written essays and interviews for films in the Criterion Collection and was seen and heard on 50 episodes of “Observations on Film Art” on the Criterion Channel, who described him as a “tireless champion of cinema,” in a statement.

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He taught at Uw-Madison from 1973 until his retirement in 2004 and was the university’s Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the time of his death.

Damien Chazelle, Oscar-winning...

Le chinoise.Most serious writing about Jean-Luc Godard tends to be both high-flown and forbidding, rather like the films it’s discussing. Translations from French to English or vice versa can make things even dicier. But according to the literary scholar Fredric Jameson, who contributes an enthusiastic preface and afterword, Reading with Jean-Luc Godard—a compendium of 109 three-page essays by 50 writers from a dozen countries, announced as the first in a series—launches “a new form” and “a new genre.”The brevity of each entry tends to confirm Jameson’s claim. The book can be described as an audience-friendly volume designed to occupy the same space between academia and journalism staked out by Notebook while proposing routes into Godard’s work provided by his eclectic reading—a batch of writers ranged alphabetically and intellectually from Louis Aragon, Robert Ardrey, Hannah Arendt, and Honoré de Balzac to François Truffaut, Paul Valéry,...

Established in the 1950s by André Bazin, Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, France’s Cahiers du cinéma has been a bastion for international film criticism for decades, even amidst recent changes. They’ve now unveiled their predictably stellar top 10 films of 2023 list.

Topping the list is Laura Citeralla’s four-hour epic Trenque Lauquen, while Víctor Erice’s long-awaited return Close Your Eyes and Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall round out the top three. The list also features Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer, and Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World.

Cyril Schäublin’s overlooked drama Unrest also got a mention while Pierre Creton’s Un prince and Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up tied for tenth place. They also have room for one major surprise, this year being Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s Berlinale...

Apologies to André Bazin, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris, but Roger Ebert was unquestionably the most influential film critic of the cinema's first century. In fact, unless the media landscape is drastically altered over the next few years, he may also wind up being the last film critic who ever truly mattered.

I do not mean this as a put-down of my colleagues. If you actually read film criticism nowadays, you know that there's never been a more thrillingly diverse assortment of voices in this too-cluttered arena. Manohla Dargis, Justin Chang, Scott Tobias, Angelica Jade Bastién, and Bilge Ebiri are must-reads in this house, and I could name a few dozen more who are reliably incisive and original in their thinking. I don't have time to read all of the critics I respect, which is both a frustrating and good thing.

But be honest, do you actually read film criticism nowadays?...

With the release of Ari Aster's third feature film, "Beau is Afraid" (read our review here), the word around the virtual water cooler is that Aster has solidified his place as the next great auteur. The word "auteur" gets thrown around a lot these days, joining the ranks of words like "iconic" that have seemingly lost all meaning in favor of becoming a way to say, "I really like this." Artistic assessment by the masses has grown increasingly hyperbolic, with every new film earning as many 5-star Letterboxd comments reading "a masterpiece" as it does 0.5-star declarations of "the worst movie ... ever." But auteur theory gained prominence back in the 1940s, birthed from French theorists André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc and given its name by American film critic Andrew Sarris.

The foundation was based on the idea of "director-as-author," but has evolved to also encompass a director's signature style or recognizable motifs.

There's ambition and then there's Richard Linklater shooting "Boyhood" with the same core cast from 2002 to 2013.

The "Before" trilogy director's Oscar-winning 2014 drama follows Texan boy Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) as he goes from age six to 18. It's a journey that takes Mason and his family from the highs of camping trips and the midnight release of a new "Harry Potter" book to the lows of having an abusive, alcoholic stepfather and experiencing romantic heartbreak for the first time. Call it "boring" all you want, but Linklater's film makes for a fascinating cinematic time capsule of life in the 2000s. One could even argue it embodies what the legendary film theorist André Bazin was talking about when he asserted that photography "embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption."

Linklater, in comparison, was perfectly humble when discussing his intentions for the movie during an interview with The Guardian to...

OpinionThe argument that you need the validation of a film appreciation course or a film school to write a piece of film criticism can end up de-democratising the space.Neelima MenonDuring an earlier interview to an online portal, actor Mohanlal, while promoting his film Aaraattu, had a rather controversial opinion to share. “People who have no relation to cinema are criticising it. Do you even know anything about editing when you comment on it? You should have some idea about filmmaking. In Hyderabad, they love their cinema and won’t write any negative stuff about it. They respect the industry. I am not sure if that is prevalent here,” the veteran actor said. Not only was this comment condemned and trolled on social media, but a section of the audience also felt that this was a petty remark, especially coming from an actor of Mohanlal’s stature. More so, considering...

Filmmaker Sally Potter discusses a few of her favorite movies with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Orlando (1992)

Look At Me (2022)

The Roads Not Taken (2020)

Singin’ In The Rain (1952) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

On The Town (1949)

Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954) – John Landis’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review

Whisky Galore! (1949) – Charlie Largent’s Blu-ray review

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

8 ½ (1963) – Allan Arkush’s trailer commentary

Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953)

Jules and Jim (1962) – Michael Peyser’s trailer commentary

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) – Charlie Largent’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Persona (1966)

On The Waterfront (1954) – John Badham’s trailer commentary

Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)

Citizen Kane (1941) – John Landis’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

The Third Man (1949) – George Hickenlooper’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairings

Come And See (1985) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary, Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

The Cranes Are...

Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb.Some old classification anxieties up front: what is cinema? Is it just a cultural object that moves twice, first in narrative operation and then as technology, a montage of the photographic or pixelated? Is it the truth at 24 frames/franchises per second, or is there a cinematic something that differentiates “film” from its cousin, “new media”? And (how) does that matter anyway? Maybe the idea of “film” is related to what’s loggable on Letterboxd: movies, sure, but also some TV shows. No to music videos, yes to (some) porn. Yes to lots of Taylor Swift live shows; John Berger’s 1972 series of video essays, Ways of Seeing; and the boring-delirious, 28-minute film made for closed-circuit Vegas televisions, Caesar’s Guide to Gaming With Orson Welles. Sporting events aren't included, but there are sports documentaries and documentations, lots of sports “content”—like something...

Jean-Luc Godard, the pioneering French New Wave director who challenged and upended conventional filmmaking methods for over half a century, died today according to multiple reports in the French media. He was 91.

Godard’s celebrity mystique was defined by the image of the enigmatic chain-smoking auteur, adorned in sunglasses while indulging in existential insight, revolutionary politics, and radical ideas about art. But his career never rested on that cartoonish brand.

Though he would remain most famous for his first feature, the 1960 meta-noir “Breathless,” that iconic debut kickstarted a lifetime of ambitious, often confrontational work. His filmography consists of everything from genre deconstructions to political screeds and avant-garde gambles designed to confuse and provoke new avenues for an evolving art form. Through it all, Godard remained a divisive figure whose prolific output embodied — and often interrogated — the cultural and intellectual proclivities of French society and the world at large.

His legacy...

Jean-Luc Godard, a leading figure of the French New Wave, has died. He was 91. The French newspaper Liberation first reported the news which was confirmed to Deadline by a source close to the filmmaker.

Best known for his radical and politically driven work, Godard was among the most acclaimed directors of his generation with classic films such as Breathless (À bout de souffle), which catapulted him onto the world scene in 1960. The film was from a treatment by his contemporary and former friend François Truffaut and followed the story of a young American woman in Paris, played by Hollywood star Jean Seberg, and her doomed affair with a young rebel on the run, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Hollywood & Media Deaths 2022: A Photo Gallery

President Emmanuel Macron of France paid tribute to the director with a statement on Twitter, calling him the “iconoclastic of New Wave filmmakers.”

Born in Paris...

"Auteur" is one of those words that get thrown around a lot, yet its meaning seems to vary depending on who you ask. It's a term that is most often afforded to directors whose work is held in high regard, but it can just as easily be applied to a filmmaker whose movies are rarely the bee's knees in the eyes of critics. This issue has even led to the coining of the somewhat polarizing phrase "Vulgar Auteurism" as a way for critics to avoid having to lump the Martin Scorseses of the world in with the likes of Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich.

In truth, you could fairly describe all three of those directors as being "auteurs." The basic idea dates back to at least 1954 when François Truffaut coined the term "La Politique des Auteurs" or "The Policy of the Authors." Even then, Truffaut was building on the writing of critics like André Bazin,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSHaunted Hotel.The British Film Institute has begun unveiling the program for the London Film Festival, which runs from October 5-16. So far, they have announced the official competition, featuring films from Alice Diop, Mark Jenkin, and Hlynur Pálmason, and the VR- and Ar-oriented "Extended Realities" strand, including a new work from Guy Maddin, Haunted Hotel.Production has begun on Bruno Dumont's The Empire. Cineuropa reports that the science-fiction film depicts the "epic parallel life of knights from interplanetary kingdoms"; the cast includes Lyna Khoudri (César-winner for Papicha) and the gendarmerie duo from Li'l Quinquin, Bernard Pruvost and Philippe Jore.The international film critics association Fipresci have chosen the winner of their 2022 Grand Prix for Film of the Year: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car.Recommended VIEWINGAndrew Mau and Alan Mak's seminal...

If you’re looking to take a summer film analysis course for free, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson have graciously offered that opportunity. The invaluable film theorists, who previously hosted a selection of their digital books on PayPal, have now made them available at no cost in protest of Peter Thiel’s campaign contributions to J. D. Vance and other Maga cretins. “[We]e see no reason to add to PayPal’s revenues, not even the few cents it receives from a purchase here,” notes Bordwell on his site.

Freely available books include On the History of Film Style, in which Bordwell “scrutinizes the theories of style launched by André Bazin, Noël Burch, and other film historians” and looks at a wide-ranging span of cinema; Planet Hong Kong, an essential text featuring analysis on works from Wong Kar-wai, King Hu, Stephen Chow, Johnnie To; and many more. There are also books...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.It’s not always necessary to know a filmmaker’s biography in order to fully appreciate his or her work, but in the case of François Truffaut, it is not only beneficial, it may also be unavoidable. Few directors have so ardently worn their lives on their cinematic sleeve as Truffaut, persistently projecting his passions on the screen for all to see. Born February 6, 1932, he was a child of World War II, but only later in his career was that great tragedy the subject of conspicuous focus. Rather, his recurring concerns were of a more personal nature, ranging and reappearing throughout his work in the form of fleeting flirtations and complex affairs, the multifaceted unrest of childhood, and, of course, the cinema itself. As a wayward young man, Truffaut found refuge...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Femmes femmes“Post New Wave” has mutated into a catch-all term that not only accounts for French directors whose output began to crest in the 1970s and beyond, but also for those who may have operated adjacently, or even on the fringes of the five-pronged Nouvelle Vague. Belabored attempts to identify a newly-minted movement in French cinema and subsequently foist it upon a sect of filmmakers typically buckle under closer scrutiny. The more one burrows and subdivides this unwieldy categorization, the more the examples only grow more far-flung, resisting the very grouping that collected them side by side in the first place.Although not a direct predecessor of André Bazin and his acolytes, Diagonale et Co., the production company founded by one-time Cahiers du cinéma critic and director Paul Vecchiali, exists...

Established in the 1950s by André Bazin, Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, France’s Cahiers du cinéma has recently gone through major changes this year, with their staff quitting en masse to protest new ownership. The heralded magazine, however, has soldiered on and returned last year. They are now back with their favorite films of 2021.

Topping the list is Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, a film that premiered in 2019, came out in the U.S. in 2020, and finally arrived in France this year. Over half the list features Cannes selections, including Leos Carax’s Annette, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Memoria.

There’s also the requisite entry that hasn’t traveled far beyond France, Guillaume Brac’s À l’abordage aka All Hands on Deck, as well as my personal favorite 2022 U.S. release thus far: Silvan and Ramon Zürcher’s The Girl and the Spider.

See the full list below.

“Without Franco, I wouldn’t be here, nor this book. Thank you, Francisco. It’s the only good thing you did in your life.” The author behind this characteristic note of thanks is none other than French filmmaker and critic Luc Moullet, whose endearing and very funny autobiography, Mémoires d’une savonnette indocile (“memoirs of an unruly piece of soap”) has just been published by Capricci. In 42 chapters, the “prince of shoestring cinema” walks us through his young years as a critic at Cahiers du cinéma, his filmmaking life, and his stints in various professional and educational bodies. The book was announced in 2012, with the intention for it to be published posthumously. Reading it nine years later, with the author still in the pink of health, one senses that the cause for Moullet’s original reticence may have had to do less with his comments on his peers and collaborators...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.The Battle of AlgiersCommenting on the role of cinema in his native Cuba, director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea once wrote that films should not just add to people’s enjoyment of life, but also “contribute in the most effective way possible to elevating [their] revolutionary consciousness.” Gutiérrez Alea was writing in 1982 (the words are cribbed from his essay “The Viewer’s Dialectic”), over twenty years since Fidel Castro ousted Fulgencio Batista and brought an end to the US-backed dictatorship in the island. But the idea that cinema can serve a higher function that mere entertainment—the belief that films should both educate and agitate spectators—is as old as the medium itself. Lenin once called cinema “the most important of all the arts;” Trotsky “a weapon for collective education.” For Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés,...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.“Je résiste. I’m still fighting. I don’t know how much longer, but I’m still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film, you know?” —Agnès Varda, “An Interview with Agnès Varda,” The Believer, October 1, 2009Summing up Agnès Varda is nigh impossible; reducing her down to a single quote futile. There are words I might use to describe her—creative, ambitious, whimsical, pragmatic—but these feel remissive in their temperance. Simply put, Varda’s work is what epitomizes her, each feature, short film, photograph, and installation a breath of life. In elaborating on her concept of cinécriture, or “cinematic writing,” she affirms that it’s not “illustrating a screenplay, not adapting a novel, not getting the gags of a good play, not any of this.

Established in the 1950s by André Bazin, Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, France’s Cahiers du cinéma has gone through major changes this year, with their staff quitting en masse to protest new ownership. The heralded magazine, however, has soldiered on and delivered new issues, the latest of which features their top 10 films of 2020.

Topping the list is Frederick Wiseman’s latest masterpiece City Hall, which graced their October 2020 issue this past fall. Also included are two films by Hong Sang-soo (The Woman Who Ran and Hotel by the River), the latest work by Cristi Puiu and Philippe Garrel, as well as a number of overlooked gems. Also, because of its release in France earlier this year, the Safdies’ Uncut Gems made the cut.

Check out the list below.

– Top 10 2020 des @cahierscinema – pic.twitter.com/m2xUv55yIt

— Cahiers du Cinéma (@cahierscinema) December 2, 2020

The post Cahiers du cinéma’s...

Mubi's double bill Renoir, Beginnings and Endings is showing September 15 - October 15, 2020 in the United States.Above: NanaJean Renoir, one of the greatest French filmmakers, if not the greatest, was a passionate raconteur. Not only did he write his expansionist memoir, My Life and My Films (1974), and rendered some of his life in prose in his late novels, but, according to his biographer, Pascal Merigeau, he also had a prodigious talent for molding fact into myth.Renoir’s dramatic story begins with his second feature, Nana (1927). Renoir adapted the tale about a striving actress from Émile Zola’s novel, to launch the career of his wife, Catherine Hessling. Hessling dreamed of Hollywood, as eventually did Renoir. Some ten years later, he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived till his death, in 1979. The film’s Nana plays hussies but dreams of a tragic role. When a theater director humiliates her,...

IMy first encounter with an Edward Hopper painting took the form of a postcard-sized reproduction of Cape Cod Sunset. It was not long after searching and finding other works by him that I began to consider Hopper to be “my” painter. Even after subsequent encounters with Hopper’s works, both in books and in museums, it is still that initial coming together that endures the most in my memory. Closing my eyes, I can still see the painting’s afterimage imprinted on the underside of my lids: A two-story greyish house set down lonely at the edge of a field of yellowing-blue grass underneath a crepuscular sky, shading from light blue to green-yellow with bands of orange settling over the uncannily blurred pine forest that encircles the house. The house itself shows no signs of life, the windows muted and opaque; a mysterious house amongst the pines to dream oneself into; an image of calm,...

Though his actual first name was Howard, and he signed his books “James Harvey,” in the 20-plus years of our friendship I always knew him as Jim. In our household, my wife, daughter and I also had a nickname for him, “The Owl,” because of the night hours he kept. I am a morning person, and sometimes the difference created tension between us, if, say, we were having dinner after a film and it was going on 10:30 and I could barely keep my eyes open. I would stand up to signal I was done and ready to leave while he was still nursing his espresso, just getting started, and he would get a wounded look in his eyes and let me know he thought I was being rude. It’s true, I can be abrupt, and he was the opposite, apt to make a more gradual, mannerly leave-taking. We were both great walkers,...

Cahiers du Cinéma, the influential French film magazine founded in 1951, is undergoing dramatic changes that have cast its future into doubt. As reported on Thursday by Agence France Presse, Cahiers’ entire editorial board of 15 staffers have resigned en masse following a recent sale that landed the publication in the hands of shareholders that the staff said, in a statement, “create a conflict of interest for a critical publication.”

In their statement, staffers also alleged that the individuals that make up the consortium of shareholders want to soften Cahiers reviews into a more accessible read. “Whatever articles are published, there would be a suspicion of interference…Les Cahiers has always been engaged, taking clear positions.” In its monthly issues published by Phaidon Press, Cahiers is known for its often academic and critical pieces, and its idiosyncratic, contrarian, and occasionally arcane 10 best lists.

French newspaper Le Monde revealed further details about the mass exodus of Cahiers staffers,...

Cahiers du Cinéma, the legendary French film magazine and one of the most prestigious movie publications in the world, has selected David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” as the best film of the decade. The selection is a controversial one as there has been constant debate since over whether or not the program is a film or a television series. Critics have been arguing over which medium “Twin Peaks: The Return” belongs to since its debut in 2017. IndieWire’s television team placed “The Return” at #32 on its list of the best television shows of the decade.

“Twin Peaks: The Return” tops Cahiers du Cinéma’s 10 best films of the decade list. The magazine’s selections also include runner-up “Holy Motors,” Leos Carax’s 2012 fantasy drama that placed #6 on IndieWire’s best films of the decade list. Cahiers du Cinéma has also named Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,...

Veteran French director Bertrand Tavernier (“Round Midnight”) – president and director of the Institut Lumière and Lumière Festival, which he co-manages with Cannes’ Thierry Frémaux – has played a pivotal role in restoring classic French films and defending the importance of French directors, such as Claude Autant Lara, Henri Decoin and André Cayatte, who were attacked by the film critics of the Nouvelle Vague.

He says his aim is to strike a new view of this period of French film history, citing the example of Francis Ford Coppola who praised and rehabilitated British filmmakers such as Michael Powell, similarly written off by some critics.

In 2016 Tavernier released his feature documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema,” and follow-up 8-episode TV series released in 2018, both of which are inspired by Martin Scorsese’s personal documentaries on American and Italian cinema.

Guests of this year’s 10th Lumiere Festival include Coppola, who receives a retrospective,...

“What is the essence of cinema?” is the question that haunts film critics and theorists for decades. In his book “What Cinema Is!”, film scholar Dudley Andrew believes that film is a conduit to bring the audience toward others’ lived experience. Following the idea that film should be an encounter with the world, Andrew argues that the film frame leads the audience to different spaces. A threshold “functions as a passage from one to the other [space].” While Andrew drew his inspiration from André Bazin’s writings, Malaysian-Taiwanese director Ming-Liang Tsai’s film “The Hole” illustrates Andrew’s thinking of film surprisingly well.

“The Hole” is a hybrid of science fiction and musical. The film is set in 1999’s Taipei and a new epidemic, “Taiwan fever”, breaks out. Those infected by the disease will start to crawl like a cockroach and there seems to be no cure for the disease.

Gary Oldman has signed on the dotted line to take the lead role in the biopic of ‘Citizen Kane’ screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, in ‘Mank’.

‘Gone Girl’ directed, David Fincher has also been announced to direct the film which is said to follow Mankiewicz’s tumultuous development of the ‘Kane’ script alongside director Orson Welles. Despite its critical success, the script was the only part of the film to win an Oscar.

The script had been written by Fincher’s father Jack before he passed away in 2003. Fincher will produce alongside producing partner Cean Chaffin and Douglas Urbanski. The film will be in black and white, with production due to commence in November.

Also in news – Felicity Jones joins cast of George Clooney’s ‘Midnight’

Considered by many to be the greatest film ever made, ‘Citizen Kane’ examines the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles, a character...

Varda passed away following a short battle with cancer.

Agnès Varda, the Belgian-born director whose work played a pivotal part in the French New Wave, has died aged 90.

She died shortly after being diagnosed with cancer, according to a statement from her family given to French news agency Afp. It said: ”The director and artist Agnès Varda died at home on Thursday night due to cancer, with her family and loved ones surrounding her.”

Her death comes just weeks after Varda put in a fitting final appearance at the Berlin International Film Festival with the documentary Varda By Agnès.

An extended filmed masterclass of sorts,...

The 30th entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. As is well known, Donald Trump is a big fan of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). But, as Errol Morris pointed out (having interviewed him for an unfinished TV documentary segment in the early 2000s), Trump tends to read Kane askew: when prompted by Morris to offer Charles Foster Kane some life advice, Trump confidently replied: “Get yourself a different woman.”Our agitprop audiovisual essay, started on the day of Trump’s recent “declaration of emergency” and concerning the border between Mexico and America, begins from this wild speculation: if Trump, in his announced Welles fandom, has ever seen Touch of Evil (1958), what mangled trace of it could remain embedded in his imagination? We are not equating the mindsets of Trump and Welles here. Touch of Evil is a complex film. As many intelligent B-movies do,...

Jean-Luc Godard quipped that his criticism represented a kind of cinematic terrorism. Serge Daney said his writing taught him not to be afraid to see. The Parisian publishing house Post-Éditions has made available a long overdue collection of his articles in French to decide for ourselves. Jacques Rivette became a filmmaker even before he became a critic. When he came to Paris from Rouen in 1950, he had already completed a short film, unlike Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer or Chabrol, his colleagues-to-be at Cahiers du cinéma and later fellow New Wave directors. By his own admission, he never wanted to be a film critic, not in the traditional sense of the term. But, considering his own dictum that “a true critique of a film can only be another film,” he never ceased to be one. Textes Critiques as an object has the appearance of a cinephilic totem: half-a foot in size, portable,...

Established in the 1950s by André Bazin, Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, France’s Cahiers du cinéma has long been a bastion for quality film criticism. Year after year their rundown of the top films usually ignites a response, but their 2018 edition plays it a little more safe.

Their editors’ top 10 features a few films that got a release in the U.S. last year, but France this year as well as some awaiting a U.S. release. Topping the list is Bertrand Mandico’s gloriously trippy, gender fluid fantasy The Wild Boys, while Lee Chang-dong’s Burning and Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built also made the cut.

Check out the list below via their latest issue, also including links to coverage where available.

1. The Wild Boys (Bertrand Mandico)

2. Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (Bruno Dumont)

3. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)

4. Burning (Lee Chang-dong)

5. Paul Sanchez est revenu!

Ben Flanagan was a participant on this year's Film Critics Day workshop at the Cinema Rediscovered film festival in Bristol and Clevedon in the U.K., a celebration of the finest new digital restorations, contemporary classics and film print rarities from across the globe. Further examples of the writing from the workshop, as well as information about the program, can be found on the Cinema Rediscovered Blog.If the memic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming cinema might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. I’m reworking André Bazin’s Ontology of the Photographic Image here, wherein the great critic, who would have turned 100 this year, states that the cinema “embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption”. Similarly, the autonomy afforded the online user to remix and re-contextualise moments on film may be a way to navigate and index its history.

Since 2012, IndieWire has lent its support to the Locarno Critics Academy, a workshop developed as part of the Summer Academy initiative at the Locarno Film Festival designed to foster aspiring film critics. This year’s participants will contribute essays on the 71st edition of the festival, currently underway in Switzerland. Here’s an overview of their backgrounds and interests.

Name: Pedro Emilio Segura Bernal

Age: 28

Twitter Handle: @PedroEmilioSB / @LAOLACine

Home: Mexico City

Cinematic Area of Expertise: I can’t say I have expertise in anything… I can confess certain predilection for “non-traditional” narratives.

Best You’ve Seen in 2018: “Le Livre d’Image” (“The Image Book”) – Jlg

Movie You’re Most Looking Forward to Seeing At Locarno: It’s a tie between Mariano Llinas’ “La Flor” and “Gangbyeon Hotel” by Hong Sang Soo

Favorite Book or Piece of Writing About Film: The poem-essay used and composed by Godard as a...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWe're pleased to announce that Mubi is continuing our collaboration with Filmadrid International Film Festival to bring a section dedicated to the art of the video essay to this year's edition of the festival.Recommended VIEWINGIn celebration of the centennial of André Bazin, the original critical proponent for long takes and deep focus, Dave Kehr aptly shares this breathtaking 1-hour-long jaunt through Tokyo:

In honor of Andre Bazin's 100th birthday, here's a link to my favorite YouTube long take stylist, Guy Who Walks Around Tokyo, aka Rambalac.https://t.co/w1AXCgy7Ym— Dave Kehr (@dave_kehr) April 18, 2018 The trailer (now with English subtitles!) for Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda's latest—and mighty promising—family drama, set to premiere at Cannes next month:Conversely, here's the U.S. trailer for the latest movie by another similarly hyper-productive auteur,...

Auteur theory says a director’s vision is present in every frame. What happens if they turn out to be a liability?

Handing out the Oscar for best director three weeks ago, Emma Stone prefaced the award by suggesting the power and influence of that figure in the film-making process. “It is the director whose indelible touch is reflected on every frame,” she said. In any other year, that statement would have sounded uncontroversial; it has, after all, been integral to the notion of auteurship since it was first expounded in the late 1940s by André Bazin. And it was Andrew Sarris, courier of those ideas to English-speaking readers in the early 60s, who explained that an auteur should have an “identifiable personality” and bring “interior meaning”.

But these are more than usually troubled times in the film industry, and the assumption that the director is present in every frame...

Stereoscopic 3D Video students at Bard CollegeMy favorite class to teach is a seminar on how to make 3D movies. When I lead a course in this subject, I try to encourage students to explore the outer limits of the form. We begin with a description of what 3D movies are, and what they could be.To start, I explain that a 3D movie is nothing more (and nothing less) than two movies that a viewer happens to watch at the same time. A 3D movie's most fundamental property—the thing that makes it different from a regular 2D movie—it that it delivers separate streams of images for a viewer's left and right eyes. Most of the time, the "left eye movie" and the "right eye movie" are very similar to one another. 3D moviemakers usually manipulate the two-eye delivery system to create harmonious stereoscopic illusions, which give the...