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There are shades of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1973 Depression-set comedy Paper Moon in Argentinian director Iván Fund’s melancholy road movie The Message. Aside from crisp black-and-white cinematography and a backdrop of financial crisis, this is a film about a family of grifters profiteering from the sale of hope. In Paper Moon this involved the sale of inscribed bibles to grieving widows desperate for a memento of their late husbands. The premise of The Message would appear to be even more callous: this ragtag trio roam the countryside with a little girl who can commune with animals, alive or dead. But while this, on the surface, would appear to a con on a par with the Nigerian Prince phishing scam, Fund’s film is going for something altogether more spiritual than that.

The little girl is Anika (Anika Bootz), who travels with her guardians Myriam (Mara Bestelli) and Roger (Marcelo Subiotto...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Japan Society

A six-film Nobuhiko Obayashi retrospective, featuring imported 35mm and 16mm prints, begins (watch our exclusive trailer debut).

Anthology Film Archives

Willem Dafoe: Wild at Heart features films by Ferrara, Lynch, Scorsese, and Kathryn Bigelow.

Film at Lincoln Center

A highlight of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu inspirations includes David Lean, Jean Cocteau, and more.

Museum of the Moving Image

Snubbed Forever brings The Magnificent Ambersons and 3:10 to Yuma, as well as 35mm prints of The Quiet Man and Rosemary’s Baby.

Roxy Cinema

Paris, Texas and a 35mm print of Girl, Interrupted play on Saturday.

IFC Center

A new 4K restoration of Picnic at Hanging Rock continues; Eraserhead, Inland Empire, Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Dr. screen; Fargo, Misery, and House show late.

Museum of Modern Art

A Jerry Schatzberg retrospective continues.

Film Forum

Godard’s A...

If the four-year gap between Frank Ocean’s debut studio album Channel Orange and his follow-ups Endless and Blonde felt long, it’s now been over double the wait to see if another album will ever materialize from the wunderkind artist. We now have a major update on Ocean’s creative output, but rather than a new album in the works, he’s started shooting his directorial debut.

Variety reports David Jonsson has landed the lead role of Ocean’s directorial debut, which Ocean also wrote and is now shooting in Mexico City. While no plot details have arrived, a bit more digging reveals the current title is Philly and shooting actually began in mid-December. As seen below, Ocean was also spotted in Mexico City this past summer shooting footage. Earlier rumors suggested A24 and Taylor Russell were involved in the project, but that has yet to be confirmed.

It...

Fresh off Nosferatu being nominated for four Academy Awards, Bloody Disgusting is excited to announce that visionary director Robert Eggers has hand-selected eight movies that influenced his gothic-horror hit feature for Conjuring Nosferatu: Robert Eggers Presents, an upcoming series from Film at Lincoln Center that’s being presented this February.

Presented from February 5 through February 9, the program kicks off with a special 35mm screening of Nosferatu, joined by eight films selected by Eggers as companion pieces.

“I am honored to share this collection of films that inspired my adaptation of Nosferatu,” Eggers said in a statement. “It’s a world of Gothic Romance, fairy tales, and folklore, made by filmmakers with a passion to transport the audience to another time, another place, and another way of thinking and believing.”

Eggers continues, “From the overwhelmingly atmospheric work of David Lean or Thorold Dickinson’s Queen of Spades that utilize massive set...

Robert Eggers is taking the concept of a bloody Valentine quite literally for an upcoming program at New York City’s Film at Lincoln Center. The auteur has curated a nine-film lineup for “Conjuring ‘Nosferatu’: Robert Eggers Presents,” which will take place February 5 through 9. Eggers has selected a series of films to screen, all of which influenced his latest Gothic horror film, “Nosferatu,” which will have a special 35mm screening as part of the series.

“I am honored to share this collection of films that inspired my adaptation of ‘Nosferatu,’” Eggers said in a press statement. “It’s a world of Gothic romance, fairy tales, and folklore, made by filmmakers with a passion to transport the audience to another time, another place, and another way of thinking and believing.”

Eggers picked a slew of 20th century international features, including iconic films like Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version of “Beauty and the Beast...

Pedro Almodóvar and Halina Reijn have a lot in common. They’re linked by Jean Cocteau’s 1930 play “The Human Voice,” which Almodóvar adapted into a short film (starring Tilda Swinton) as his first English-language production, while actor-turned-director Reijn starred in a touring production of the solo show. This year, the Spanish auteur and the Dutch filmmaker worked outside their native languages to make movies about transgressive topics: Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” intertwines a narrative about the intimacy of friendship (led by Swinton and Julianne Moore) with the hot-button subject of euthanasia. Reijn’s “Babygirl” stars Nicole Kidman as a high-powered CEO grappling with suppressed sexual desires. And as they made these movies about sex and death, they found themselves moved to tears on set.

“Sometimes I cry — can you believe it? There was one moment when I had to hide myself in the restroom,” Almodóvar tells Reijn,...

Obsessed With Light directors Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum with Anne-Katrin Titze at the Quad Bar while composer Paul Cantelon watches their inspiring Loïe Fuller documentary Photo: Ed Bahlman

At the Quad Cinema in New York, on the evening of SantaCon, Obsessed With Light and Letters From Baghdad composer Paul Cantelon joined directors Zeva Oelbaum and Sabine Krayenbühl for a post-screening conversation on the significant and wide-ranging influence of Loïe Fuller from Auguste Rodin, Jean Cocteau, and Isadora Duncan to John Zorn (in his Femina Part 4) and Taylor Swift.

Zeva Oelbaum, Anne-Katrin Titze, Paul Cantelon and Sabine Krayenbühl at the Quad Cinema Photo: Ed Bahlman

The visually illuminating Obsessed With Light (a highlight of the 15th edition of Doc NYC) has Cherry Jones as the voice of Fuller and an impressive list of on-camera interviews, which include Robert Wilson on what came first for...

Jude Law has his suave, talent, and he’s been melting hearts since his breakout days. From playing the dreamy Graham in The Holiday, (the one who made everyone swoon with his Mr. Napkin Head bit), to stealing scenes in Sherlock Holmes and Fantastic Beats, Law had quite the Hollywood ride. But how much did this dashing Brit make and is worth in 2024?

Jude Law in Skeleton Crew (Credits- Disney)

Well, with a career spanning decades, it’s no surprise the Law has been on top of his game and earning blockbuster paychecks backed by awards. Whether charming us in romantic comedies or taking on the wizarding world, he has perfectly stayed relevant in an ever-changing industry. But it’s not just acting, Law has got his hands in a few other pots.

Interestingly, Law has showcased his prowess in voice work, theatre, and even brand deals that added some...

Disney's Beauty and the Beast was almost an entirely different film, but it's a good thing that the original plan didn't work out. The 1991 animated film is one of the House of Mouse's most beloved masterpieces, so it's difficult to imagine a world in which it never existed. However, if Walt Disney had gotten his way in the 1930s and 1950s, Belle's story would never have made it to the screen in the 1990s. Of course, this would mean songs like "Be Our Guest," "Gaston," and, of course, "Beauty and the Beast" wouldn't have ever happened either.

Beauty and the Beast arrived during Disney's second big animated-movie boom, following the success of 1989's The Little Mermaid. Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, the 1991 movie managed an impressive $451 million at the global box office, inspiring Disney to continue producing major animated features throughout the '90s. Of course, though Disney...

In the mid-1980s, Whoopi Goldberg exploded onto the entertainment scene via her self-titled, one-woman Broadway show, which was considered so electric and essential that HBO filmed a performance and aired it within a year of its stage premiere. At this point, Goldberg was a force of nature, a comedic dynamo capable of zipping from one deep-tissue character study to another with the ease of Richard Pryor. Meanwhile, her big, brilliant brain seemed to run a mile a minute, like the one possessed by her friend and colleague Robin Williams. Whoopi, it seemed, could do anything. Movie stardom seemed a cinch.

It was. Kind of. After making her dramatic debut in Steven Spielberg's "The Color Purple," she scored a smallish hit with Penny Marshall's comedy thriller "Jumpin' Jack Flash." That led to two more star vehicles in the 1987 duo of "Burglar" and "Fatal Beauty," but they didn't take.

Bing as Apollo with Naomi Watts as Iris in David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s wondrous and sage adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s National Book Award winning novel The Friend

In the first instalment with novelist Sigrid Nunez, we start out discussing the costume design (by Bina Daigeler) for Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore's outfits in Pedro Almodóvar’s enlightened The Room Next Door and the clothes (by Stacey Battat) for Naomi Watts in David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s wondrous and sage adaptation of her National Book Award winning novel The Friend (a highlight in the Spotlight programme of New York Film Festival).

Sigrid Nunez with Anne-Katrin Titze on Jean Cocteau’s Beauty And The Beast: “You know there's something about a man-sized cat.”

Bing, the Harlequin Great Dane who steals the show...

Albert Finney as Kilgore Trout with Bruce Willis as Dwayne Hoover in Alan Rudolph’s adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions

In the second instalment of my conversation with Alan Rudolph on his adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast Of Champions, shot by frequent collaborator Elliot Davis (Equinox; Mortal Thoughts; Love At Large), we start out with what his friend, the novelist Tom Robbins, who has a cameo (as Pesky Weber), told him after the film was finished.

Alan Rudolph with Anne-Katrin Titze on the influence of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée on final scene: “Probably not directly, but you know, every little drop of water feeds the plant.”

The director/screenwriter has assembled the perfect cast of accomplices, including Albert Finney, Nick Nolte, Glenne Headly, Barbara Hershey, Omar Epps, Lukas Haas, Owen Wilson, Buck Henry, plus a hyperactive Bruce Willis starring as Dwayne Hoover, the ringleader of what goes on in Midland City.

Nicolas Cage is one of our most impressive living actors, and a big part of that is because of his intense love of cinema. He's a true student of the craft, with an obsession for older films that has led him to an extensive knowledge of all the medium has to offer. Cage's passion for his projects has led to him becoming the subject of many memes, mostly using his most over-the-top performances, but the man really knows his stuff. So, when Rotten Tomatoes asked Cage for his five favorite films of all time, he came a little over-prepared, offering his top 13 favorite films instead. He said that he simply couldn't narrow it down to five because "there's different movies for different reasons in different lifetimes," which is the most Nicolas Cage thing he could have said.

The actor often looks back to older cinema for inspiration and compares...

The actress Juno Temple is good at many things, but one of them is not — and has never been — living in the real world. “I’m fucking really not good at reality,” she’d said on a recent Friday afternoon, while taking a turn or two around Tokio7, one of New York City’s most well-loved vintage shopping establishments, and picking up items that seemed to prove her point.

“That’s got some real good twinkle to it, right?” she asks, flittering to a display case that holds a denim...

Just because “The Room Next Door” is in English doesn’t make it any less of a Pedro Almodóvar movie. It’s visually sumptuous, as always, bathed in saturated colors. It’s an intense, heightened drama about one woman facing death (Tilda Swinton) while her close friend (Julianne Moore) supports her journey. The Spanish director was in control, as always, even when he occasionally lost an argument with his actresses.

The 75-year-old auteur was moved by the film’s warm reception in Venice, where the jury awarded it the Golden Lion. But the fear of moving into a new language was always there.

Almodóvar had first considered shooting an English-language project with Meryl Streep, a version of “Julieta” (2016). He wrestled with how to adapt Canadian Alice Munro’s three short stories into English. He decided he’d rather set the story in Spain.

“If I would know what we all know now,...

No one will confuse "A Song Of Ice and Fire" with an old-fashioned fairy tale. George R. R. Martin, author of the still-incomplete epic, is not shy about admitting his influences, though, and classic fantasy is one of his greatest.

In "A Dance With Dragons," Quentyn Martell's doomed quest to marry Queen Daenerys Targaryen is compared with the tale of the Frog Prince (apparently a bedtime story in both Westeros and our world). This time, a princess' kiss does not make the frog into a romantic hero — Quentyn is kissed only by dragonfire. "The Frog Prince" was first told by the Brothers Grimm in the 1800s, but one can easily draw parallels to an earlier, even more famous French fable: "Beauty and the Beast."

In the 2012 "A Song of Ice and Fire" calendar, artist John Picacio drew 12 drawings of the series' most famous characters. For October, he picked Sansa Stark and Sandor Clegane/The Hound,...

Johnny Depp hasn’t taken a directorial credit on a feature film (his 50-minute music video “Unloveable” doesn’t count) since he presented The Brave in Cannes in 1997, and that did not go well. Given that unhappy experience, you have to wonder what it was about Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness — a portrait of Amedeo Modigliani, a painter and sculptor famous for his talent as well as his taste for drugs, debauchery and scandalizing the straights — might have lured the actor to pick up the virtual megaphone again.

Perhaps Depp saw in Modigliani a kindred spirit? After all, Depp too is famous for his talent but also his proclivity for indulgence, which was brought into an especially glaring, unflattering light over the course of his bitter courtroom battle with his ex, Amber Heard. Still, there are many other wild, druggy geniuses or genius-adjacent types he could have...

The first and last written words of writer William S. Burroughs form the basis of this superb adaptation of Queer, a novel written in the early ’50s that, for myriad reasons, remained unpublished until 1985. At the time, its belated arrival coincided with a major resurgence of interest in Burroughs, the oldest and longest surviving member of the original Beat Generation writers, the others being Jack Kerouac (who never made it out of the ’60s) and Allen Ginsberg. By then, Burroughs had received long-overdue recognition as the godfather of the counterculture; heroin was his drug of choice, which assured his long-standing association with rock ’n’ roll, but his beatification by hard-drug fetishists often overshadowed the astonishing quality — not to mention foresight — of his writing.

Landing three years before Ted Morgan’s for-a-long-time-definitive biography Literary Outlaw (until Barry Miles’ Call Me Burroughs followed it 10 years ago), Queer was the Rosetta Stone that...

After years marked by cold feet and false starts, the great Pedro Almodóvar made his English-language debut with 2020’s “The Human Voice.” The Spanish filmmaker started off easy, adapting a Jean Cocteau one-act into a 30-minute monologue delivered by Tilda Swinton — and the film was a charmer, breaking out of that year’s Covid-defiant Venice Film Festival, where it united a deeply improbable, socially distanced event.

The filmmaker more than doubled the number of speaking roles for his next short, “Strange Way of Life,” and now, four decades into his career, Almodóvar returns to Venice to premiere his long-awaited U.S.-set feature.

Though adapted from a wholly separate text to tell a very different story, “The Room Next Door” evokes an uncanny case of sequelitis, bulking up the form of Almodóvar’s 2020 short to play as a series of Swinton monologues, while welcoming Julianne Moore into the mix as a sympathetic ear.

Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence and Stanley Tucci as Cardinal Bellini in ‘Conclave’ (Photo Courtesy of Focus Features. © 2024)

The 51st Telluride Film Festival announced its lineup just days ahead of the festival’s opening on Friday, August 30, 2024. The festival, which runs through Monday, September 2nd, will include the world premieres of Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, Edward Berger’s Conclave, and Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson.

This year’s festival includes 60 feature films, shorts, and revival programs.

“This brief weekend of cinematic bliss reminds us every year that movies really are magic,” stated Telluride Film Festival director Julie Huntsinger. “The process of assembling our line-up is both daunting and rewarding, and it never fails to bring the most fantastic sense of satisfaction once we’re finished. Our anticipation matches that of the audience. We’re delighted to now share what we found to be the most exciting, interesting and...

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

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

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

The 51st...

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

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

The world premieres of “The Piano Lesson,” “Conclave” and “Saturday Night” will take place at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival, which begins on Friday in the Colorado mountain town.

“The Piano Lesson” is an August Wilson adaptation directed by Malcolm Washington and starring Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington; it will be released by Netflix. “Conclave” is a Focus Features drama set admidst the election of a new pope, and the first film for German director Edward Berger since his Oscar-winning “All Quiet on the Western Front.” And Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night,” a Sony release, tells the story of the first episode of the long-running comedy series “Saturday Night Live.”

Other films in this year’s Telluride lineup include “The End,” a dystopian sci-fi musical starring Tilda Swinton and marking the narrative debut of “The Act of Killing” director Joshua Oppenheimer; “Nickel Boys,” a Colson Whitehead adaptation from RaMell Ross; and “The Friend,...

Edward Berger’s “Conclave,” Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night,” Malcolm Washington’s “The Piano Lesson,” RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys,” and Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The End” will world premiere at the 51st edition of the Telluride Film Festival, fest organizers announced on Thursday.

In addition to the world premieres, several expected awards contenders will have North American bows in the small Colorado town over Labor Day weekend, including Pablo Larrain’s “Maria” (which premieres Thursday at the Venice Film Festival), Sean Baker’s “Anora” (this year’s Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner), and Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez” (a Cannes winner for its ensemble of actresses and a jury prize winner at the prestigious event).

In addition to its lineup of features, Telluride organizers also bestow the Telluride Silver Medallion to “a trio of artists who have made significant contributions to the film industry.” This year’s honorees are the French filmmaker Audiard,...

The official lineup for the 51st Telluride Film Festival has been announced, unveiling a series of world premieres from awards hopefuls.

Highlights include Edward Berger’s religious thriller “Conclave,” RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” film adaptation, Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night,” Joshua Oppenheimer’s apocalyptic musical “The End,” and Malcolm Washington’s film adaptation of the August Wilson play “The Piano Lesson.”

The Colorado-based festival will also honor three distinguished figures in cinema: four-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan, who stars in and produced the drama “The Outrun”; three-time Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker; and French director Jacques Audiard, whose film “Emilia Pérez” will make its U.S. debut after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won best actress for its stars Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz.

Among the U.S. debuts are several notable Cannes selections, including Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner “Anora,...

It's an election year, which means everyone and everything is focused on politics—even the season's major festivals. Colorado's Telluride Film Festival just unveiled its 2024 lineup, and it has as much of an eye toward the White House as anything else this time of year.

According to The Hollywood Reporter,...

A casualty of last year’s strikes, movie event long associated with celebrity is expected to be star-studded affair once again

• Peter Bradshaw’s picks of the 2024 edition

It is hard to think of the Venice film festival without recalling glamorous images of couture-clad stars walking down the red carpet or kicking back in the sun.

From Jean Cocteau enjoying an aperitif on an idyllic waterfront palazzo, to Paul Newman catching a water taxi and Elizabeth Taylor going barefoot on the beach, the world’s oldest film festival has long been associated with celebrity and decadence.

Pedro Almodóvar can now count Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore among his new cinematic muses.

The Oscar-winning Spanish director’s first English-language feature, “The Room Next Door,” was confirmed Tuesday morning as expected to premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival in competition. Timed to artistic director Alberto Barbera’s lineup announcement, the festival has also released a first-look image of the film, which you can see above.

Almodóvar has made two short films in English: the Jean Cocteau-inspired breakup tone poem “The Human Voice,” which premiered at Venice in 2020, and gay Western “Strange Way of Life,” starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, which played Cannes 2023. That was all in service of preparing to make his first movie entirely in English, “The Room Next Door,” led by “The Human Voice” star Tilda Swinton as a war correspondent named Martha. Her friend, an author named Ingrid (Julianne Moore), brings various buried...

Typically, when a star has a new movie coming out, they promote it as much as possible. But Whoopi Goldberg once did the exact opposite, taking legal action to prevent one of her movies from ever reaching theaters. And somehow it wasn’t the movie where she solves crimes with the help of a talking dinosaur.

Back in 1988, Goldberg starred in The Telephone, an experimental dramedy about an out-of-work actress who spends most of her time holed up in a small apartment making phone calls. It’s kind of like an avant-garde theater piece (specifically Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice) crossed with a Bob Newhart routine — but not as good as that makes it sound.

Weirdly enough, The Telephone was the only film ever directed by actor Rip Torn, of The Larry Sanders Show, Men in Black and drunkenly breaking into a bank that one time fame. And it...

Warner Bros. Pictures has picked up Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language feature debut, The Room Next Door, starring Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore and John Turturro, for multiple international territories, the studio announced Wednesday.

Warners will release the feature across much of Europe, including in Spain, Italy, Germany and the U.K., as well as across the Nordics and Central and Eastern Europe, excluding Poland. The studio will also bow the film in Latin America and some Asian markets, including Japan.

Sony Pictures Classics has domestic rights to The Room Next Door, the first English-language feature from the Oscar-winning Spanish director. It follows Almodóvar’s English-language shorts A Strange Way of Life (2023), a queer cowboy drama starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, and The Human Voice (2020), a loose adaptation of a Jean Cocteau play, also starring Swinton. SPC released both stateside, screening A Strange Way of Life and The Human Voice as...

First look notwithstanding, details have been few and far between on Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, largely understood to concern the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, making notable a new set report from Les Inrockuptibles. It should’ve been obvious from the jump that America’s premier hangout filmmaker would resurrect cinema’s most-influential group as, well, a group, with Linklater describing his film as (in a somewhat contradictory manner) “the story of a personal revolution in cinema led by one man, and all the people around him,” with the implication of actors playing Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Demy, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, and Jean Cocteau.

Fittingly, Nouvelle Vague will not start with Zoey Deutch’s Jean Seberg (admittedly odd combination of words) filming on the Champs-Élysées, but at least stretches back to the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, where, upon The 400 Blows‘ triumphant debut, Godard “succeeded in convincing producer...

Running April 4-7, the Iff Panama brings to this year’s edition a rich mix of standout director driven titles from Europe, the Spanish-speaking world and beyond, spangled by highlights from Central America, including Panama:

“Bila Burba,” (Duiren Wagua, Panama)

Documentary. Wagua’s debut feature. The Gunadule nation’s ties with the Panamanian government were fraught with territorial and cultural disputes. In 1925, leaders Simral Colman and Nele Kantule, inspired by their warrior ancestors, joined forces to unite their communities in the ‘Dule Revolution’ against police brutality. Today, their descendants honor this legacy through street theater, transforming community streets into stages to commemorate their ancestors’ struggle.

Bila Burba

“Brown,” (Ricardo Aguilar, Panama)

Penned by Aguilar’s regular collaborator, Manolito Rodríguez, the story centers on Teófilo Alfonso, also known as “Panamá Al” Brown, the first Latin American World Boxing Champion. After a fixed fight costs him his title, he retires to Paris.

Long-time friends Tilda Swinton and Pedro Almodóvar are reuniting for the Oscar-winning director’s first English-language feature, “The Room Next Door.”

It’s hard to believe the Scottish high priestess of playing women unmoored from the people and places around her had never collaborated with the Spanish filmmaker before his proper English-language debut, “The Human Voice.” In that sharp shock of a 30-minute film, based on a Jean Cocteau play, Swinton starred as a woman going through a breakup over the telephone, surrounded by expressive Almodóvarian set design on a soundstage, and eventually a fire.

In “The Room Next Door,” also being released by Almodóvar’s perennial North American distributor Sony Pictures Classics, she’s a woman named Martha grappling with a strained relationship with her mother, and helped by a friend named Ingrid.

Swinton was embargoed from saying too much about the film, now in pre-production and shooting in Madrid next week,...

Grief is a concept that everyone with a heart can relate to, but it’s not always something that everyone with a brain can deal with. Riffing on Jean Cocteau’s 1950 classic Orphée and giving it a very modern makeover, French writer-director Jérémy Clapin explores that very paradox with Meanwhile on Earth, a strange, poetic, and endearingly surreal meditation on the counterintuitive ways in which we react when confronted with loss.

In a very literal way, Clapin has been here before, with his acclaimed and surprisingly poignant 2019 animated film I Lost My Body, in which the disembodied hand of a pizza delivery boy goes on a journey to find the rest of itself. This much more cryptic follow-up pushes the notion a whole lot further, and whether it works or not will be in the eye of the beholder.

The loss this time is felt by Elsa (Megan Northam), who...

Swimming Home is an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2011 novel, written and directed by debut UK flmmaker Justin Anderson.

The UK-Dutch co-production premiered in the Tiger competition of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

The film centres around a war reporter played by Mackenzie Davis, on a family holiday with her husband (Christopher Abbott), a poet, and their teenage daughter. Returning home to their villa with a friend (Nadine Labaki) they find a naked stranger, Kitti (Ariane Labed) floating in the pool. Invited to stay, Kitti’s presence comes to emphasise the tensions within the family.

Anderson studied...

Swimming Home is an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2011 novel, written and directed by debut UK flmmaker Justin Anderson.

The UK-Dutch co-production premiered in the Tiger competition of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

The film centres around a war reporter played by Mackenzie Davis, on a family holiday with her husband (Christopher Abbott), a poet, and their teenage daughter. Returning home to their villa with a friend (Nadine Labaki) they find a naked stranger, Kitti (Ariane Labed) floating in the pool. Invited to stay, Kitti’s presence comes to emphasise the tensions within the family.

Anderson studied...

Did Beauty kill the Beast? Or was it the other way around? Or maybe they lived happily ever after? Writer-director Caroline Lindy plays with classical expectations in her enjoyable debut feature Your Monster. Actress Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera) is just out of surgery when the film starts. We quickly learn she’s survived some unnamed cancer and, in the tough year of treatments, her theater-director boyfriend of five years Jacob (Edmund Donovan) broke up with her. To make matters worse, he also moved forward with producing a Broadway musical that they developed together, one with a lead role he’d promised to Laura.

Her only friend is fellow actress Mazie, played well by Kayla Foster, who lifts up a thinly written supporting character. Mazie’s unreliability leaves Laura alone in her transient mother’s New York City apartment, crying and eating pies. Until, that is, an upstairs neighbor reveals himself.

Artist Ulya Stuzhuk digitally transforms Gaston from Beauty and the Beast into a shockingly accurate live-action form. Stuzhuk uses a digital drawing technique to bring the character to life, making him even more handsome than his animated appearance. While the character starts off looking somewhat animated, as more details are added, he becomes increasingly real.

Beauty and the Beast's Gaston has been transformed into a shockingly accurate live-action form in new art. The 1991 Disney musical is based on the Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont fairy tale of the same time and follows a young woman named Belle who is imprisoned in the castle of a prince who has been cursed to be a beast, but eventually falls in love with the man behind the monstrous visage. The foil for the Beast is the hunter Gaston, who is handsome but cruel, ruthlessly seeking Belle's hand in marriage because she is valuable based on her looks alone.

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,...

Writer, director, and producer Ridley Scott has been making movies for decades, but one of his earliest features was also apparently one of his most difficult. The man behind "Napoleon" (read our review!) is no stranger to directing historical epics, real-world dramas, and even existential science-fiction, but in an interview with Wired in 2007, he revealed that the most difficult film to create was his 1982 science fiction classic, "Blade Runner." Loosely based on the 1968 Phillip K. Dick novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," "Blade Runner" is a noirish sci-fi starring Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, who hunts down renegade android "replicants" in his job as a blade runner. In the course of hunting down a handful of such replicants that escaped from an off-world labor camp, he starts to question the very nature of humanity. It's heady, moody stuff, but it's also a deeply beloved film that inspired both a sequel and an animated series.

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Anthology Film Archives

The films of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project are screening, while a Jean Cocteau program runs in Essential Cinema.

Film Forum

Michael Powell’s career-killing masterwork Peeping Tom plays in a long-overdue restoration, while Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil continues; “Hitchcock’s ’50s” runs through arguably the director’s greatest decade; Kirikou and the Sorceress plays this Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

Reverse Shot celebrates its 20th anniversary with a months-long programming run, continuing this weekend with the Before trilogy on 35mm and Feast of the Epiphany; prints of They Live and Holiday show this weekend.

Roxy Cinema

The Josh Safdie-presented The Gods of Times Square plays on Sunday, while The Long Day Closes and Dogtooth show on 35mm; “City Dudes” returns on Saturday.

IFC Center

Distant Voices, Still Lives continues its run while Ocean’s Twelve,...

November 1st is a tough day for horror hounds. The decorations are still up, the air remains crisp, but the spirit has seemingly moved on, perhaps vanquished by the sun. Alamo Drafthouse says to hell with all of that and has announced two month’s worth of genre joy that’ll take you from Dia de los Muertos to Christmas Eve with minimal whiplash.

Terror Tuesday is a weekly slash-and-thrash through the world of horror, and they’ve booked a number of holiday-tinged forever classics mixed in with new canon-busting entries, many of which are screening from new, sparkling scans. Highlights include Lake Mungo, Tales from the Hood, The Changeling, and a pre-Thanksgiving feast with the Sawyers.

Weird Wednesday is similarly a weekly exploration of exploitation, pop oddities, and underloved gems. (Think of it as channel-surfing a transmission from a better dimension). And like Terror Tuesday, they’ve loaded it...

Rock Brynner, who escaped the shadow of his iconic actor father Yul Brynner to launch a multifaceted career, died Oct. 13 in Salisbury, Connecticut. He was 76 and was in hospice battling complications of multiple myeloma, according to family friend Maria Cuomo Cole.

Like many children of major celebrities, Rock Brynner tried to carve his own path. That included time spent as a road manager for The Band, bodyguard for Muhammad Ali, farmer, pilot, street performer, novelist, and professor of constitutional history at several universities.

Rock Brynner attended Yale, Trinity College Dublin, and Columbia, where he received a doctorate in American history in 1993 before teaching for more than a decade at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

His life was filled with intriguing stints in various roles. He wrote a one-man play based on French playwright Jean Cocteau’s addiction memoir, “Opium,” which he performed briefly on Broadway in 1970. Cocteau was Brynner’s godfather.

Mubi has unveiled their November 2023 lineup, featuring notable new releases such as Ashley McKenzie’s Queens of the Qing Dynasty and Alain Gomis’ Thelonious Monk documentary Rewind & Play. Also in the lineup is three stellar earlier films from Christian Petzold––Yella, Jerichow, and The State I Am In––along with John Cassavetes’ Husbands and Gloria, a Hayao Miyazaki short, and a retrospective dedicated to Argentinian-born, French-educated filmmaker and theorist Nelly Kaplan.

Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

November 1

A Very Curious Girl, directed by Nelly Kaplan | A Mischievous Rebellion: Films by Nelly Kaplan

The Pleasure of Love, directed by Nelly Kaplan | A Mischievous Rebellion: Films by Nelly Kaplan

Charles and Lucie, directed by Nelly Kaplan | A Mischievous Rebellion: Films by Nelly Kaplan

Papa the Little Boats, directed by Nelly Kaplan | A Mischievous Rebellion: Films by Nelly Kaplan

Yella, directed by Christian Petzold | Phantoms Among Us: The Films of Christian Petzold

Jerichow,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSLa Práctica.The New York Film Festival has announced its Main Slate. Alongside a good showing of Cannes prizewinners, the festival will present new films from Radu Jude, Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrew Haigh, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Hong Sang-soo (x2 this year), Raven Jackson, Martín Rejtman, and the feature debut from playwright Annie Baker.In an interview with Indiewire, Ira Sachs shared that he and Ben Whishaw are preparing a new film about the photographer Peter Hujar, titled Peter Hujar’s Day (and presumably inspired by Linda Rosenkrantz’s book of the same name).Recommended VIEWINGIn memory of William Friedkin, who died this week at the age of 87, revisit Christopher Small and James Corning’s video essay about his films’ deftly constructed endings. “Over the course of Friedkin's films,” they write in their introduction, “our perspective...

Seven years ago this month, in the aftermath of the attack on Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, one call to action rose above the din: “Say their names.” New Yorkers chanted it steps from the Stonewall Inn. The mother of a child gunned down at Sandy Hook penned it in an open letter. The Orlando Sentinel printed the names. Anderson Cooper recited them. A gunman, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, murdered 49 people and wounded 53 others in the wee hours of that awful Sunday, massacring LGBTQ people of color and their allies in the middle of Pride Month, and the commemoration of the dead demanded knowing who they were. “These,” as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell urged his viewers, “are the names to remember.”

The titles on our list of the best LGBTQ movies of all time are a globe-spanning, multigenerational testament to our existence in a world where our erasure is no abstraction. From...

Kenneth Anger, the avant-garde filmmaker whose surrealistic queer compositions Fireworks and Scorpio Rising made him a pioneer of underground cinema and a target for censorship, has died. He was 96.

Anger’s death was announced Wednesday by the Sprüeth Magers art gallery. “Kenneth was a trailblazer,” it said in a statement. “His cinematic genius and influence will live on and continue to transform all those who encounter his films, words and vision.”

No details of his death were immediately available.

In 1959, Anger authored the smutty exploitative book Hollywood Babylon — banned after its U.S release in 1965 — and followed it up with a sequel in 1984.

Anger’s work spanned the years 1941 to 2013 yet totaled just eight hours, a kaleidoscope of symbolism, homoeroticism and the occult found in his 36 dialogue-free short films (some complete, others fragmented) by THR‘s count.

His collage Scorpio Rising (1963), a pastiche of pop songs plastered over homoerotic biker imagery,...

“Time is all we have and every second that ticks away is one less second we’re alive,” Kenneth Anger told an interviewer from The Guardian 16 and a half years before his death this May at the age of 96. “The sands of time are going through the hourglass but it doesn’t frighten me.”

If Woody Allen’s Zelig was found rubbing elbows with the storied and famous of the ’20s and ’30s, starting in the 1950s Anger was for some decades more than a match for him. His legacy is poised between the pathbreaking cinematic auteur who made such avant-garde shorts as “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (1954) and “Scorpio Rising” (1963) and the purveyor of at times fictionalized Hollywood scandal in the sensational and frequently updated “Hollywood Babylon” (1959).

He was not immune from his own brushes with dark history — the very bikers he incorporated in some of his middle-period work...

Every time two cowboys point their guns at one another on screen, there’s something homoerotic at play. Hollywood Westerns may be loath to admit as much, but not so Pedro Almodóvar, who casts Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as lonesome cowboys reunited after 25 years in “Strange Way of Life.” Commissioned by Saint Laurent Productions (which is also premiering a Jean-Luc Godard short at Cannes), this half-baked half-hour serves as a sexy showcase for creative director Anthony Vaccarello’s latest designs, while barely delivering on the promise that an Almodóvar-made “gay cowboy” movie conjures in the imagination.

At the Cannes premiere, the Spanish director described “Strange” as his response to a question posed by “Brokeback Mountain”: What can two men do on a ranch? Silva (Pascal) gives Jake (Hawke) his answer in the final seconds of the short, and it’s sweet, though it turns out Almodóvar is misremembering Ang Lee’s 2005 Western.

Rebecca (Margaret Qualley) is here for legal counsel. But her questions for Hal Porterfield (Christopher Abbott) are getting inappropriate, and fast. She wants to know about the frequency of his masturbation, how much he drinks, if he’s capable of taking on the herculean task of running his father’s massive hotel monopoly. And Hal is getting annoyed. After all, this isn’t the script that he had written for Rebecca to perform.

Rebecca isn’t a lawyer, nor an actress. Not really. She’s a hired dominatrix in a no-contact sexual relationship with Hal, who really is set to step in as CEO of his recently passed father’s company, and who really does write extensive scripts to support his unusual sexual proclivities.

Zachary Wigon’s Sanctuary is a two-hander that sees a power play through the prism of performance, class, and sexual dynamics. As Hal prepares to be...