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Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Magnet releases “The Quiet Ones” in theaters on February 21, 2025.

There are fun heist movies and there are serious heist movies, and Frederik Louis Hviid’s skeletal but gripping “The Quiet Ones” — based on the biggest Danish robbery ever committed — immediately and unambiguously identifies itself as the latter. It starts in Sweden in 2006, where we ride along with two security guards inside an armored truck as they make an early morning cash delivery. She’s a battle-tested veteran who’s seen it all, he’s a rookie with a new child at home, and both of them will be shot to death within minutes when the latter tries to flee the gang of militarized thieves who ambush their vehicle.

These criminals are not fucking around, and when they resurface in Copenhagen two years later with an eye...

February is a time for lovers. Romance, as well as the hope to find it are abound and what better place to seek it out than at your local repertory cinema. Sure, a dark theater full of strangers may seem like an odd space for finding a potential suitor, but who knows what can happen at the concession stand or under the marquee? One thing’s for sure: There’s nothing quite like the allure of the big screen.

This month’s offerings across New York and Los Angeles feature a whole host of fare designed to fill audience’s hearts, not just in the sense of discovering love, but also reaching to the soul. Starting January 31 and running through March 5, Film at Lincoln Center will be hosting a career retrospective titled “Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution” that is sure to envelop newcomers to the documentarian’s hypnotic work, as well as longtime fans.

Lenny Borger, who served as Variety‘s Paris correspondent and film reviewer throughout the 1980s and who championed French cinema for decades as a researcher and subtitle expert for numerous films including Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” died Dec. 23 in Paris. He was 73.

Producer Serge Bromberg reported that he died after a long illness.

Borger was raised in Brooklyn, and moved to Paris in 1977 to work on his doctoral thesis. Abandoning his academic work, he began covering the French film scene for Variety and served as a correspondent and film reviewer from 1978 to 1990.

During that time he also began working on providing the English subtitles for French films, and Bertrand Tavernier gave him his first subtitling job for the 1980 “A Week’s Vacation.”

Film critic and Amazon executive Scott Foundas called Borger “a kind of medium, channeling the linguistic spirit of a given film and making it live anew for English-speaking audiences the world over.

New York-based Rialto Pictures is gearing up for the release of Studiocanal’s 4K restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 musical comedy “A Woman Is a Woman.”

The film, Rialto’s first release of 2025, stars Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The film will hit selected U.S. theaters on Feb. 7.

The new restoration, which premiered this year in Locarno, was made from the negative 35mm original copy, digitized by Paris-based post production company Hiventy and realized by Studiocanal with the collaboration of France’s National Center of Cinema (Cnc).

Rialto’s biggest success this year was the 75th anniversary of “The Third Man,” Rialto Co-President Adrienne Halpern told Variety at the Lumière Film Festival’s International Classic Film Market (Mifc) in Lyon, France.

‘The Third Man’

The 4K restoration of Carol Reed’s 1949 classic, starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, was carried out by Deluxe Restoration on behalf of Studiocanal.

In “Hollywood Black,” a four-part docuseries streaming on MGM+, director Justin Simien chronicles the vast and untold history of the Black experience in Hollywood. Inspired by historian Donald Bogle’s book by the same title, the series unearths parts of film history that don’t get taught in film school, and puts into historical, cultural, and societal contexts those performers and films that did break through to the mainstream. When Simien was a guest on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, he talked about how he was inspired to make the series by his own recent discovery of films, filmmakers, and rich periods of Black cinema that he was previously unaware of and wasn’t taught in film school.

“I am so shocked because it’s not what you think, it’s not what you were conditioned to believe,” said Simien. “What you finally uncover is some of the work is so sophisticated,...

The Toronto International Film Festival’s Discovery sidebar is the festival’s launchpad for emerging directors, and just a few in its alumni stable include the likes of Alfonso Cuarón, Yorgos Lanthimos, Christopher Nolan, Barry Jenkins, Maren Ade, and Emma Seligman.

A filmmaker to watch this year is Danish director Frederik Louis Hviid with “The Quiet Ones,” a true-story heist thriller debuting in the Discovery section alongside films like Durga Chew-Bose’s “Bonjour Tristesse” with Chloë Sevigny. “The Quiet Ones” is inspired by a real crime that took place in 2008 amid Europe’s swelling financial crisis, and IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for the film below.

TIFF’s programming notes on “The Quiet Ones” compare Hviid’s first solo directing feature to crime thrillers from the likes of Jules Dassin, William Friedkin, and Michael Mann. “Working with a larger canvas and benefitting from Anders Frithiof August’s tightly written screenplay...

The Hollywood Blacklist ruined dozens of lives. United States-based artists who were sympathetic to, or even curious about, communism were demonized as traitors to their country and, due to hysterical pressure from The House Committee on Un-American Activities (aka Huac), banned from working in the industry. Disgraced and unemployed, blacklisted individuals were forced to leave the country if they wanted to continue working or, if they could not afford to relocate, find a line of work where being an alleged communist wasn't frowned upon. This latter option was, of course, dismally unlikely. The mental and financial burden of being completely shunned from one's industry was so unbearable that it led actor Philip Loeb to die by suicide.

This put Hollywood at war against itself. Anyone suspected of having communist ties was pressured to come clean and, if they wanted to continue working, name names (a cowardly practice savaged by films...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.NEWSUntil Branches Bend.Amidst a widespread debate on the merit of U.S. state financial incentives for film and television productions, a Georgia bill that would have limited the sale of tax credits was rejected by the Senate Finance Committee. In recent years, those credits have exceeded $1 billion despite findings that the state makes back only 19¢ on the dollar. Four of the thirteen labor guilds bargaining with IATSE have now reached tentative agreements with the AMPTP: Locals 600 (cinematographers), 729 (set painters), 800 (art directors), and 695. IATSE president Matthew Loeb has threatened to strike if a new contract is not in place when the current one expires on July 31.Due to financial constraints, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival will be...

Cinephiles will have plenty to celebrate this April with the next slate of additions to the Criterion Channel. The boutique distributor, which recently announced its June 2024 Blu-ray releases, has unveiled its new streaming lineup highlighted by an eclectic mix of classic films and modern arthouse hits.

Students of Hollywood history will be treated to the “Peak Noir: 1950” collection, which features 17 noir films from the landmark film year from directors including Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Huston.

New Hollywood maverick William Friedkin will also be celebrated when five of his most beloved movies, including “Sorcerer” and “The Exorcist,” come to the channel in April.

Criterion will offer the streaming premiere of Wim Wenders’ 3D art documentary “Anselm,” which will be accompanied by the “Wim Wenders’ Adventures in Moviegoing” collection, which sees the director curating a selection of films from around the world that have influenced his careers.

Contemporary cinema is also well represented,...

April’s an uncommonly strong auteurist month for the Criterion Channel, who will highlight a number of directors––many of whom aren’t often grouped together. Just after we screened House of Tolerance at the Roxy Cinema, Criterion are showing it and Nocturama for a two-film Bertrand Bonello retrospective, starting just four days before The Beast opens. Larger and rarer (but just as French) is the complete Jean Eustache series Janus toured last year. Meanwhile, five William Friedkin films and work from Makoto Shinkai, Lizzie Borden, and Rosine Mbakam are given a highlight.

One of my very favorite films, Comrades: Almost a Love Story plays in a series I’ve been trying to program for years: “Hong Kong in New York,” boasting the magnificent Full Moon in New York, Farewell China, and An Autumn’s Tale. Wim Wenders gets his “Adventures in Moviegoing”; After Hours, Personal Shopper, and Werckmeister Harmonies fill...

Alexei Navalny’s sacrifice for democracy is being recognized in the place where the concept of government by the people first flourished.

Greece’s Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival programmed the documentary Navalny in honor of the Russian opposition leader and democratic reformer, who died in an Arctic prison in northern Russia on February 16. The film directed by Daniel Roher won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature almost exactly a year ago.

Navalny examines the anti-corruption crusader’s effort to investigate an incident in 2020 in which he fell grievously ill after being secretly dosed with the neurotoxin Novichok. With help from a Bulgarian investigative journalist, Navalny determined the assassination plot had been implemented by Kremlin agents. After recuperating in Germany, Navalny made the fateful decision to return to Russia in 2021, whereupon he was immediately arrested and later tried and imprisoned.

Alexei Navalny in Moscow’s City Court on May 24, 2022

The TiDF program writes,...

The Janus-headed The Facts of Murder looks back to the earlier neorealist docudramas of director, co-writer, and star Pietro Germi, while also presaging the sharply observed satirical outlook of films like Divorce Italian Style and Seduced and Abandoned. In the film, the comedic elements are mostly limited to the broad, almost caricatural handling of bumbling secondary characters. The primary storyline, involving an investigation into two ostensibly related crimes, is handled more like a police procedural along the lines of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City, albeit without that film’s authoritative narration.

The Facts of Murder’s central location is an apartment block. Quickly sketching in a number of characters and their relationships in the aftermath of the opening burglary, the film codes the victim, Commendatore Anzaloni (Ildebrando Santafe), as gay, and it’s suggested that the criminal might’ve been one of his pickups. But the focus of...

I honestly never expected Steven Spielberg in a Criterion Channel series––certainly not one that pairs him with Kogonada, anime, and Johnny Mnemonic––but so’s the power of artificial intelligence. Perhaps his greatest film (at this point I don’t need to tell you the title) plays with After Yang, Ghost in the Shell, and pre-Matrix Keanu in July’s aptly titled “AI” boasting also Spike Jonze’s Her, Carpenter’s Dark Star, and Computer Chess. Much more analog is a British Noir collection obviously carrying the likes of Odd Man Out, Night and the City, and The Small Back Room, further filled by Joseph Losey’s Time Without Pity and Basil Dearden’s It Always Rains on Sunday. (No two ways about it: these movies have great titles.) An Elvis retrospective brings six features, and the consensus best (Don Siegel’s Flaming Star) comes September 1.

While Isabella Rossellini...

The first film in Fernando Di Leo’s so-called Milieu trilogy, Caliber 9 explores the criminal underbelly of Milan, a city more typically associated with the modish institutions of high finance and haute couture. The film’s full Italian title, Milan Caliber 9, emphasizes the centrality of location, while also referring to a collection of stories by crime writer Giorgio Scerbanenco, several of which Di Leo loosely adapted for the film. Generically, Caliber 9 is a fascinating mashup of the gritty poliziotteschi genre and stylish neo-noirs in the vein of Jean-Pierre Melville. Its tight-lipped protagonist certainly seems patterned after Alain Delon’s buttoned-down hitman in Le Samouraï, right down to the brown trench coat.

Di Leo’s film opens with a brilliantly executed pre-credits sequence that details a laundered currency handoff gone wrong, as well as the mob’s violent reprisals, along the way providing a handy cross-section of Milan’s criminal demimonde,...

Every year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives out shiny gold Oscar statuettes to actors in four categories: Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. But believe it or not, what they don't do, anywhere in the Oscar rulebook, is clearly define what the difference is between a lead performance and a supporting performance.

In the end, they leave that decision up to the Academy voters, who can sometimes make weird calls. How the heck they thought Viola Davis was just "supporting" Denzel Washington in "Fences" is anyone's guess, for example. But the thing is, one rule the Academy does have for these categories, is that you are absolutely not allowed to be nominated for Best Lead and Best Supporting for the same performance, in the same film, in the same year.

At least, not anymore. Because someone already did get nominated for...

Hungry for those wet Parisian streets, the city lights, and cadavres en lambeaux in the pale moonlight? Enter three highly atmospheric, star-studded Crime Noirs, one of which is a stealth classic of Gallic Pulp. Stars Jean Gabin, Jeanne Moreau, Lino Ventura, Marcel Bozzuffi, Gérard Oury, Sandra Milo, and Annie Girardot bring the tales of à sang froid malice and mayhem to life. The films featured are Gilles Grangier’s Speaking of Murder (Le rouge est mis) and Édouard Molinaro’s Back to the Wall (Le dos au mur) and Witness in the City (Un Témoin dans la ville). Beware of French husbands when cucklolded — they show no pity. Bonne chance, victimes!

French Noir Collection

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1957-59 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen, 1:37 Academy / 265 minutes / Street Date November 29, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 49.95

Starring: Jean Gabin, Jeanne Moreau, Lino Ventura, Marcel Bozzuffi, Gérard Oury, Sandra Milo, Annie Girardot, Paul Frankeur,...

Jules Dassin’s powerful picture was a hit in Europe but remained mostly obscure here, despite featuring the great Melina Mercouri and a score of Continental stars. Adapted by two blacklistees in exile it doesn’t try to hide its revolutionary aims — Nikos Kazantzakis’s uncompromised storyline places The Church as a main obstruction to social progress, justice, and life & liberty. It’s no wonder it wasn’t ‘movie of the week’ in 1957. It’s been beautifully remastered at its original CinemaScope width, uncut.

He Who Must Die

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1957 / B&w / 2:35 widescreen / 128 122 min. / Street Date September 6, 2022 / Celui qui doit mourir / Available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Jean Servais, Carl Möhner, Grégoire Aslan, Gert Fröbe, René Lefèvre, Lucien Raimbourg, Melina Mercouri, Roger Hanin, Pierre Vaneck, Nicole Berger, Maurice Ronet, Fernand Ledoux.

Cinematography: Gilbert Chain, Jacques Natteau

Production Designer: Max Douy

Film Editors: Roger Dwyre, Pierre Gillette

Original Music: Georges Auric

Written by Ben Barzman,...

Gritty inner city crime pix don’t get any rougher than this — I witnessed the walk-outs personally. Barry Shear and a crack crew filmed in Harlem for this downbeat crime pic that could be called ‘Every Thief For Himself.’ Paul Benjamin just wants to score some mob money and leave the mean streets behind — but a single slipup brings the worst of the Mafia and the black mob down on his neck. It’s neither a ‘stick it to whitey’ saga nor a plea for justice: it’s story 8 million and 1 in The Naked City. Stars Anthony Quinn, Anthony Franciosa and Yaphet Kotto provide more acting fireworks, with solid assistance from Gloria Henry, Antonio Fargas and Marlene Warfield.

Across 110th Street

Region-Free Blu-ray

Viavision [Imprint] 120

1972 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 102 min. / Street Date April 27, 2022 / Available from / Aud 34.95

Starring: Anthony Quinn, Yaphet Kotto, Anthony Franciosa, Paul Benjamin, Ed Bernard, Antonio Fargas, Richard Ward,...

Jean-Pierre Melville in 4K? That’s an inviting idea. All of Melville crime pictures are memorable, and this is one of his best-remembered, a traditional caper drama with a wordless heist scene that lasts almost half an hour. The color production stars three big French actors and one Italian. Alain Delon and Gian Maria Volonté are the career thieves, joined by the conflicted Yves Montand as an alcoholic ex-cop. Comedian Bourvil is enlisted in a surprise role as the completely serious and less-than-ethical police inspector on their trail. We have to admire producer-writer-director Melville’s skill — he achieves a high-budget sheen with a minimum of production resources.

Le cercle rouge

4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 218

1970 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 140 min. / The Red Circle / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date March 15, 2022 / 49.95

Starring: Alain Delon, Bourvil, Gian Maria Volonté, Yves Montand, Francois Périer, Ana Douking, Paul Crauchet, Paul Amiot, Pierre Collet,...

Less talked about than film noir is its lighter cousin film gris, an artistic movement from the 1940s and 1950s founded to specifically criticize the American class system through the eyes of struggling criminals, thieves, and con men. Unlike film noir, which focused on a hardboiled world absent of heroes, film gris was more analytical, taking place in a more realistic version of the world, viewing crime not as a societal aberration but a natural outcropping of failed capitalism. Connecticut born filmmaker Jules Dassin was at the forefront of this movement, having made the notable film gris crime movies "Thieves' Highway" and "Night and the City" in 1949...

The post Rififi's Famous Safecracking Scene Was a Little Too Realistic appeared first on /Film.

There’s always somebody new in the rat race trenches whose motto is ‘how to make friends and deceive people.’ Howard Duff’s photographer uses his camera to extort money from criminals while polishing his image as a grabber of Pulitzer-worthy news photos. But how long can he maintain his charade with mobsters Brian Donlevy and Lawrence Tierney, and how soon will his kissing partners Peggy Dow and Anne Vernon see through his lies? This efficient noir was the first feature directing job from the prolific Joe Pevney.

Shakedown

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1950 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 80 min. / Street Date March 29, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Howard Duff, Brian Donlevy, Peggy Dow, Lawrence Tierney, Bruce Bennett, Anne Vernon, Peter Virgo, Charles Sherlock, Rock Hudson, Roy Engel, Gregg Martell, Joseph Pevney.

Cinematography: Irving Glassberg

Art Director: Robert Clatworthy, Bernard Herzbrun

Film Editor: Milton Carruth

Music director: Joseph Gershenson

Screenplay by Alfred Lewis Levitt,...

Bookended by a near-identical juxtaposition of sound and fury, directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom” starts and ends like a messy, wannabe Jules Dassin cityscape film seen through a grunge filter. “Manhattan crowds with their turbulent musical chorus, Manhattan faces, and eyes, forever for me,” our narrator reads as we see riotous anger take to the streets. Following the evolution and rise of several now-legendary groups (in select circles) such as The Strokes, Interpol, TV on the Radio, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and LCD Soundsystem, ‘Bathroom,’ chronicles the journey of those in a musical movement who felt they were “slipping out of existence” and “didn’t have a place to play,” finding new direction and fame with the rise of the “anti-folk scene” in New York spots like the Mercury Lounge and Sidewalk Café.

Continue reading ‘Meet Me In The Bathroom’ Review: NYC 2000s...

Retro-active: The Best From The Cinema Retro Archives

Review – Naked City: The Complete Series

Rlj Entertainment / 6,063 minutes

By Harvey F. Chartrand

Naked City was like no other TV series before or since – Michel Moriarty, star of Law and Order, once told this reviewer.

Inspired by Jules Dassin's 1948 film of the same name, Naked City centers on the detectives of the NYPD’s 65th Precinct, but the criminals and New York City itself often played as prominent a role in the dramas as the series regulars. Like the film it was based on, Naked City (1958- 1963) was shot almost entirely on location. The first season ran as a half-hour show under the title The Naked City, starring James Franciscus and John McIntire playing, respectively, Detective Jimmy Halloran and Lieutenant Dan Muldoon—the same roles essayed by Don Taylor and Barry Fitzgerald in the film.

The Naked City also starred Harry Bellaver as Det.

The November 12, 1958 edition of The Village Voice featured the first installment of the column “Movie Journal” by Jonas Mekas.

“Movie Journal” would become what the Underground Film Journal would argue was the most significant organizing tool of avant-garde cinema created by Jonas, even more so than the Film-makers’ Cooperative and the Anthology Film Archives he helped found. But what was the column like before it gained such notoriety?

Well, we don’t have to guess. The book collection Movie Journal doesn’t start reprinting Jonas’s columns until 1959, but the entire archives of the Voice are online.

As a weekly publication, the Voice only published twelve “Movie Journal” columns in 1958. The Underground Film Journal has read all twelve and extracted what films Jonas reviewed each week; as well as made notes of significant avant-garde film happenings.

Jonas reviewed only a few avant-garde films those first two months, including Maya Deren...

Most film noirs are notable for their low budgets and scrappy attitude but producer Mark Hellinger’s hard-boiled detective drama is Tiffany-level moviemaking all the way. Jules Dassin, director of art house favorites like Rififi and Phaedra, is at the helm, Barry Fitzgerald stars and the Oscar-winning cinematography is by Hollywood veteran William Daniels.

The post The Naked City appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

As 2021 mercifully winds down, the Criterion Channel have a (November) lineup that marks one of their most diverse selections in some time—films by the new masters Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Garrett Bradley, Dan Sallitt’s Fourteen (one of 2020’s best films) couched in a fantastic retrospective, and Criterion editions of old favorites.

Fourteen is featured in “Between Us Girls: Bonds Between Women,” which also includes Céline and Julie, The Virgin Suicides, and Yvonne Rainer’s Privilege. Of equal note are Criterion editions for Ghost World, Night of the Hunter, and (just in time for del Toro’s spin) Nightmare Alley—all stacked releases in their own right.

See the full list of October titles below and more on the Criterion Channel.

300 Nassau, Marina Lameiro, 2015

5 Card Stud, Henry Hathaway, 1968

Alone, Garrett Bradley, 2017

Álvaro, Daniel Wilson, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandra Lazarowich, and Chloe Zimmerman, 2015

America, Garrett Bradley, 2019

Angel Face, Otto Preminger, 1953

Angels Wear White,...

Above: 1981 French grande for Stalker. Art by Bougrine.It’s been six months since I last did one of these round-ups of the most popular posters featured on my Movie Poster of the Day Instagram (previously Tumblr).With some 3,349 likes to date, this rare French poster for Tarkovsky’s Stalker, posted just last month, outstripped the pack and is in fact the second most “liked” poster I’ve ever posted, just a couple of hundred likes shy of Andrew Bannister’s UK poster for Parasite which I posted over a Pandemic ago. With art signed by one “Bougrine” the poster is currently offered for sale at Posteritati. Though the style and signature don’t quite look right, there was a Vladimir Bougrine (1938-2001) who was a prominent Soviet dissident painter who ended up in Paris in 1977 where, according to Wikipedia, “the French Ministry of Culture introduced him to...a community of writers,...

Sunshine and noir are antithetical, as probably anyone who knows even a word of French could tell you. Sunshine and film noir, nearly as much so. Yet summer’s here and the time is right for skulking in the murderously foggy streets, thanks to a three-day festival of vintage ’40s and ’50s crime dramas being presented this weekend at the newly reopened Hollywood Legion Theater by the Film Noir Foundation.

In a year that hadn’t started off with a pandemic in full force, or wasn’t continuing with Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre being closed for renovations, noir fans would have already something close to their fill with the annual Noir City festival that’s usually co-sponsored by the American Cinematheque every March or April. But with the absence of that 22-year-old standby leaving a doom-shaped hole in L.A. repertory moviegoers’ hearts, the Noir Foundation has stepped in with a shorter,...

Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh is no stranger to heist movies. Remember 1998’s “Out of Sight,” 2001’s “Ocean’s Eleven” and 2017’s “Logan Lucky”? And he’s returned to the popular genre with this latest film “No Sudden Move,” which landed on HBO Max July 1 after having premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Set in Detroit in 1954, “No Sudden Move” around a group of small-time hoods who are hired to steal a document. Though they consider it to be a straightforward job, it turns out to be anything but when the gig goes wrong. While the crooks try to figure out who hired them and way, they are lead down a rabbit hole of twists and turns involving racial prejudice, corporate greed in the auto industry and even the mob. “No Sudden Move,” which stars Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, David Harbour, Jon Hamm, Brendan Fraser, and Ray Liotta, is currently at...

Eleni Karaindrou set to perform with the Brussels Philharmonic.

Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou is set to receive the lifetime achievement award at the 21st World Soundtrack Awards.

The ceremony is the traditional closing night event of the Film Fest Ghent (October 12-23) and is scheduled to take place as a physical event this year. It will be held at the opera house in Ghent for the first time.

Karaindrou is best known for her long-time collaboration with Greek director Theo Angelopoulos. The pair have worked together on eight films including Palme d’Or winner Eternity And A Day and Oscar nominee The Weeping Meadow.

If “Io Sì (Seen)” wins the song Oscar on April 25, it will mark only the fourth time in Oscar history that a foreign-language lyric has taken the prize. Diane Warren’s song for “The Life Ahead,” which co-lyricist Laura Pausini sings in Italian, is the 10th song not in the English language to be nominated.

The winners were the title song from 1960’s “Never on Sunday,” in Greek; “Al Otro Lado Del Rio,” from 2004’s “The Motorcycle Diaries,” in Spanish; and “Jai Ho,” from 2008’s “Slumdog Millionaire,” a mix of Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi languages.

One of its strongest competitors is “Husavik,” from “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga,” which is sung partly in Icelandic.

A non-English lyric is not necessarily a handicap. Multiple factors go into an Oscar song win, and it isn’t always just the competition. Manos Hadjidakis’ song “Never on Sunday” — from Jules Dassin...

Cinematographer is Oscar-nominated for The Trial Of The Chicago 7.

It has been an eventful few days for US cinematographer Phedon Papamichael. On Monday he garnered his second Oscar nomination for his work on The Trial Of The Chicago 7, following his first for Nebraska in 2014, just hours before he gave a masterclass as part of the Doha Film Institute’s online Qumra event.

The director of photography, who lives between his native Greece and Los Angeles, recounted how his father had been an art director and production designer who worked with the likes of Jules Dassin and John Cassavetes. “I was...

Cinematographer is Oscar-nominated for The Trial Of The Chicago 7.

It has been an eventful few days for US cinematographer Phedon Papamichael. On Monday he garnered his second Oscar nomination for his work on The Trial Of The Chicago 7, following his first for Nebraska in 2014, just hours before he gave a masterclass as part of the Doha Film Institute’s online Qumra event.

The director of photography, who lives between his native Greece and Los Angeles, recounted how his father had been an art director and production designer who worked with the likes of Jules Dassin and John Cassavetes. “I was...

First, history: In December 1968, almost exactly a year before the murder of Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton by the FBI, Paramount Pictures released what remains one of the most curious artifacts in the history of Hollywood — hardly a hotbed for radical views of black politics. It is a film titled Uptight. Its subject: a black former steel-mill worker played by Julian Mayfield, now an unreliable alcoholic who, in his desperation, in the confused ideological haze that besets him upon the death of Martin Luther King Jr., does an extraordinary thing.

“There are eight million stories in the naked city,” went the voiceover in Jules Dassin’s classic Big Apple-set film noir. Two such stories make up the crux of the documentary Five Years North, which follows a pair of New Yorkers who couldn’t be more incompatible, even if their lives are connected in larger, more meaningful ways.

On the one hand there’s Luis, an undocumented teen who’s come to the city to find a job and send money home to Guatemala. And on the other there’s Judy, an Ice officer with Cuban and Puerto Rican roots who patrols the very streets ...

“There are eight million stories in the naked city,” went the voiceover in Jules Dassin’s classic Big Apple-set film noir. Two such stories make up the crux of the documentary Five Years North, which follows a pair of New Yorkers who couldn’t be more incompatible, even if their lives are connected in larger, more meaningful ways.

On the one hand there’s Luis, an undocumented teen who’s come to the city to find a job and send money home to Guatemala. And on the other there’s Judy, an Ice officer with Cuban and Puerto Rican roots who patrols the very streets ...

On Nov. 8, Norman Lloyd will celebrate his 106th birthday, which is just one more accomplishment for a man whose nearly-100-year career is filled with amazing milestones. Lloyd worked as an actor, director and/or producer in theater, the early days of radio, film and TV. He wasn’t a household name, but he has always been well known and respected within the industry — not only for his work, but for the people he worked with. That list includes Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Elia Kazan, Jean Renoir, Robin Williams, Martin Scorsese, Denzel Washington, Mark Harmon, Cameron Diaz, Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer.

As his contemporary Karl Malden summed up in 2007, “He is the history of our industry.”

Lloyd was born Norman Perlmutter Nov. 8, 1914, in Jersey City, N.J. He took singing and dancing lessons and was a paid professional by the age of 9. He performed with...

The November 2020 lineup for The Criterion Channel has been unveiled, toplined by a Claire Denis retrospective, including the brand-new restoration of Beau travail, along with Chocolat, No Fear, No Die, Nenette and Boni, Towards Mathilde, 35 Shots of Rum, and White Material.

There will also be a series celebrating 30 years of The Film Foundation, featuring a new interview with Martin Scorsese by Ari Aster, as well as a number of their most essential restorations, including films by Jia Zhangke, Ritwik Ghatak, Luchino Visconti, Shirley Clarke, Med Hondo, and more.

There’s also David Lynch’s new restoration of The Elephant Man, retrospectives dedicated to Ngozi Onwurah, Nadav Lapid, and Terence Nance, a new edition of the series Queersighted titled Queer Fear, featuring a new conversation between series programmer Michael Koresky and filmmaker and critic Farihah Zaman, and much more.

See the lineup below and learn more on the official site.

Anthony Chisholm, whose long acting career spanned Broadway, film and television, died today at age 77. No cause was given by The Katz Company, his talent management.

Chisholm earned a 2007 Tony nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his role in August Wilson’s play Radio Golf.

He was born on April 9, 1943 in Cleveland, Ohio, and was drafted by the US Army in the 1960s, serving as a platoon leader for the 4th Armored Calvary, 1st Infantry Division in the Vietnam War. Upon returning to the US, Chisholm performed in The Boys from Syracuse and The Threepenny Opera at Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio.

He made his film debut in the 1968 Uptight, directed by Jules Dassin. That launched a career that saw him in such films as Putney Swope in 1969 and Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1970.

In 1987, Chisholm’s Vietnam War experiences were the inspiration for the HBO television series Vietnam War Story.

The Lumiere Film Festival paid homage to Greek actress, singer and politician Melina Mercouri this week with a mini-retrospective on what would have been the centenary of her birth.

The centerpiece event was a screening Thursday of “Never on Sunday,” the 1960 musical drama directed by and co-starring her regular collaborator, husband Jules Dassin, who was put on the Hollywood Blacklist for being a member of the Communist Party, and moved to Europe.

Mercouri and Dassin met at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955 when Dassin was starring in “Rififi,” and Mercouri in “Stella,” a retelling of “Carmen.” They would work together many times, most famously on “Pheadra” (1962), “Topkapi” (1964), and “10:30 P.M. Summer” (1966).

Their 1960 collaboration, “Never on Sunday,” remains their most famous partnership. They would reprise their roles of Ilya and Homer in a Broadway production, “Ilya Darling,” that opened in April 1967.

Set in the Greek port city of Piraeus, the...

Liam Neeson may have been a late-blooming action star, but if “Honest Thief” is the best he can muster now, those days are now behind him. As Tom, a notorious bank robber with a conscience, Neeson does his best with the material at hand, but he can only do so much when it reduces everything around him to a bland formulaic exercise.

Directed by “Ozark” co-creator Mark Williams, the movie lacks the sense of unpredictability from the hit Netflix show, where a high-stakes criminal enterprise endangers one family’s long-term future. That happens, here, too — but in much more familiar terms. Williams and co-writer Steve Allrich have constructed your typical tale of personal vindication, spreading it across a formulaic saga that teems with the expected mano-a-mano skirmishes, and by-the-numbers car chases, while centering it all on one man’s mission to make things right for the sake of (what else?...

If you have to name One movie that’s not likely to ever be screened in a prison, this one’s a good bet. In his sophomore starring outing Burt Lancaster leads a group of rebel convicts on a do-or-die bust-out against Hume Cronyn’s utter Nazi of a warden Captain. Richard Brooks’ script and Jules Dassin’s direction don’t sugarcoat the sadistic goings-on and producer Mark Hellinger pushed the result through the Production Code office. Sure, sure, plenty of noirs are violent … but this one must have been quite a head-spinner in ’47.

Brute Force

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 383

1947 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 98 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date September 8, 2020 / 39.95

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford, Yvonne De Carlo, Ann Blyth, Ella Raines, Anita Colby, Sam Levene, Jeff Corey, John Hoyt, Jack Overman, Roman Bohnen, Sir Lancelot, Howard Duff, Art Smith, Whit Bissell.

Cinematography: William Daniels...

As Disney quietly disappears huge swathes of film history into its vaults, I'm going to spend 2020 celebrating Twentieth Century Fox and the Fox Film Corporation's films, what one might call their output if only someone were putting it out.***Above: Darrly F. Zanuck.Garson Kanin once wrote a script for Twentieth Century-Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck intended to show a single character, a girl, living three different lives, branching out in separate paths depending on which of three couples adopted her as a child. A novel alternate-universe idea, perhaps ahead of its time for the fifties. To Kanin's dismay, however, Zanuck ruled that because he didn't have one big star who could carry a picture, he would cast three different starlets, one for each timeline. Kanin declared that this was the exact way to ruin the movie."Jesus Christ," responded Zanuck, "I thought you were different. But you're not.

By the mid-1940s, “Film Noir” was thoroughly established stylistically, though not yet by name. Undeniably, there was a prevailing mentality rooted in postwar societal darkness, and it had permeated Hollywood studio filmmaking. The movies’ inherent propensity for light and shadow proved a perfect medium to express the alienation and pent-up aggression that was festering on multiple fronts in a changed world. The lonely men of Noir- wandering souls, most of them, corruptible and/or hair-trigger by way of conditioning- time and time again found themselves hopelessly trapped. Whether it was true it not, there was a collective perception that the figurative walls were closing in on the battle-scarred men of America (and beyond). Few were as adept as bottling these tensions onto celluloid as director Jules Dassin. In...

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Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on-demand, vintage, and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalog titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This biweekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.

Charlie Kaufman is back to rearrange your brain, Kelly Reichardt is back to reconfigure your toxic masculinity, Universal is back to sell you those Hitchcock movies all over again (and they will), and Criterion is back to see you those Jules Dassin movies all over again (ditto).

Continue reading The 8 Best Movies To Buy Or Stream This Week: ‘First Cow,’ ‘I’m Thinking Of Ending Things’ & More at The Playlist.

Jules Dassin’s most popular pre-exile crime thriller is many things: a cracking good police tale, a drama of human struggle and weakness, and an amazing cinematic time machine of New York’s distinctive hustle and bustle circa 1948. Mark Hellinger’s final production bristles with a ‘these are the facts’ narration, a voiceover personifying a city ‘with eight million stories.’ The filmed-on-location classic always looked okay, but this new restoration sources better elements for picture and sound, improving the show substantially.

The Naked City

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 380

1948 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 96 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date September 8, 2020 / 39.95

Starring: Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don Taylor, Ted de Corsia, House Jameson, Anne Sargent, Adelaide Klein, Tom Pedi, Enid Markey.

Cinematography: William Daniels

Film Editor: Paul Weatherwax

Original Music: Miklos Rozsa, Frank Skinner

Written by Albert Maltz, Malvin Wald

Produced by Mark Hellinger

Directed by Jules Dassin...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history. Above: Detour “The Americans made [film noir] and then the French invented it.”—Marc VernetIn a world of uncertainty, where the lines between good and bad are routinely blurred and peril lurks behind every hesitant corner, film noir had—and still has—a spellbinding way of cutting through the banalities of ordinary existence. Noir tarnishes the superficial sheen of domestic stability, peace and prosperity, and the naïve, sanguine euphoria of one’s best-laid plans. It revels in a realm of desperation, despair, and dread, leading audiences down long, lonely streets and engineering an entertaining and engaging descent into humanity’s dark side. While there remains some question about what defines film noir, and even more debate concerning whether or not the form is a genre or a movement (or something of the two...

The Academy has chosen its film scholars this year and is not letting the coronavirus pandemic get in the way of one of AMPAS’ most important programs, at least in terms of serious studies relating to the film industry. Fittingly, considering Oscar’s drive toward greater diversity, both projects involve issues revolving around movies and their depictions of the Black community.

Racquel Gates and Rebecca Prime have been chosen as 2020 Academy Film Scholars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Their respective book projects, Hollywood Style and the Invention of Blackness and Uptight!: Race, Revolution, and the Struggle to Make the Most Dangerous Film of 1968, explore in depth the topic of race in Hollywood. The Academy’s Educational Grants Committee will award Gates and Prime $25,000 each on the basis of their proposals.

Established in 1999, the Academy Film Scholars program is designed to support significant new works of film scholarship.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has given its 2020 Film Scholars Grants to two women who are working on books that deal with issues of race in Hollywood, AMPAS announced on Thursday.

The two recipients of the $25,000 grants are Racquel Gates, whose book project is titled “Hollywood Style and the Invention of Blackness”; and Rebecca Prime, whose project is “Uptight!: Race, Revolution and the Struggle to Make the Most Dangerous Film of 1968.” The grants were awarded on the basis of proposals submitted to the Academy.

Gates is an associate professor at the College of Staten Island, Cuny and the author of “Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture.” Her book, said the Academy in a press release, “will argue that the formal conventions of the Classical Hollywood era defined the stylistic terms for blackness on screen and continue to impact how cinematic blackness gets represented, understood,...

The producer of Narcos takes us on a walk through some of the movies that made him.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Contagion (2011)

Panic In The Streets (1950)

Rififi (1955)

Night And The City (1950)

Thieves’ Highway (1949)

Never on Sunday (1960)

The Karate Kid (1984)

The Game (1997)

The Dirty Dozen (1967)

The Great Escape (1963)

Children of Men (2006)

Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory (1971)

If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969)

Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (2005)

The Wild Bunch (1969)

The Godfather (1972)

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Animal House (1978)

An American Werewolf In London (1981)

Trading Places (1983)

Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

Fellini Satyricon (1969)

The Beastmaster (1982)

Sheena (1984)

High Risk (1981)

Ghostbusters (1984)

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Piranha (1978)

Gallipoli (1981)

Witness (1985)

The Killing Fields (1984)

Mad Max (1980)

Max Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)

Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975)

The Last Wave (1978)

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

The Lord of the Rings (1978)

The Hobbit (1977)

The Return of the King (1980)

Class (1983)

The Great Santini (1979)

Fast Times At Ridgemont High...