News

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) is to hold retrospectives of Croatian-German documentarian Katja Raganelli and Ukrainian auteur Sergii Masloboishchykov as part of its 2025 Focus programme.

Katja Raganelli’s work on public television, often aired only once and now largely faded from view, focused on the history of women in filmmaking. It includes: Margery Wilson – Vom Stummfilmstar Hollywoods zur Filmregisseurin (1996), Valie Export – Portrait einer Filmregisseurin (1981), and Die Liebe ist ein Mythos – Delpine Seyrig (1978).

The Focus programme will also present Raganelli’s portraits of figures like Agnès Varda, Márta Mészáros, Valie Export, Alice Guy-Blaché and Lotte Reiniger.

Sergii Masloboishchykov’s retrospective...

U.S. indie filmmaker Alex Ross Perry’s long-awaited work Videoheaven, celebrating video stores in Hollywood cinema, will world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

The film, which has been more than a decade in the making, comes hot on the heels of Pavements, which debuted at Venice this year, and follows festival hits such as Listen Up Philip and Her Smell.

The Videoheaven world premiere was announced by Rotterdam as part of one of four Focus strands in its 54th edition, running from January 30 to February 9, 2025.

The film will be unveiled in a Focus strand entitled “Hold Video in Your Hand”, celebrating the community spirit of VHS culture.

Other works in the selection include Rotterdam filmmaker Gyz’s Videotheek Marco, an investigation into local video store history and connected audiovisual activities like community television.

The program also includes Indian documentary Videokaaran (2011) and David Cronenberg’s latest work The Shrouds...

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.News Office Space.Some Hollywood insiders are blaming post-pandemic work-from-home policies—rather than rampant financialization and an overinvestment in stale intellectual-property tentpoles—for the industry’s recent decline.A coalition of human-rights groups have penned an open letter to Netflix demanding the renewal of its “Palestinian Stories” collection, which expired earlier this month after three years on the platform.Workers in RadicalMedia’s nonfiction division have launched a union drive, having collected an “overwhelming majority” of signature cards from the 65-person bargaining group. They plan to join the Writers Guild of America East.China will not have an Oscar entry this year, after the Academy deemed the documentary The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru (2023) ineligible for the Best Foreign Picture award,...

No two ways about it: April’s a great month for the Criterion Channel, which (among other things; more in a second) adds two recent favorites. We’re thrilled at the SVOD premiere of Hamaguchi’s entrancing Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, our #3 of 2021, and Bruno Dumont’s lacerating France, featuring Léa Seydoux’s finest performance yet.

Ethan Hawke’s Adventures in Moviegoing runs the gamut from Eagle Pennell’s Last Night at the Alamo to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, while a 14-film John Ford retro (mostly) skips westerns altogether. And no notes on the Delphine Seyrig retro—multiple by Akerman, Ulrike Ottinger, Duras, a smattering of Buñuel, and Seyrig’s own film Be Pretty and Shut Up! That of all things might be the crown jewl.

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

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3 Bad Men, John Ford, 1926

Aar paar, Guru Dutt,...

For the last five months, Film Comment — the house organ of Film at Lincoln Center, a repository for erudite film coverage, and a thought leader in specialty film — has existed in limbo. It’s not dead; while the staff was put on hiatus in March, publisher Eugene Hernandez is working to determine next steps. It’s not in print; its last physical edition was March/April. It’s not quite digital: Content for the May/June issue is available at the Film Comment site and at Zinio, but any internet consumer knows that online publications can’t survive on bimonthly updates.

From the critical brickbats of Pauline Kael vs. Andrew Sarris to defining identities for seminal filmmakers like Max Ophüls, John Huston, and Martin Scorsese, Film Comment has been at the center of a vital global film conversation for 58 years. Embraced by cinephiles and academics, it also saw the art...

For the last five months, Film Comment — the house organ of Film at Lincoln Center, a repository for erudite film coverage, and a thought leader in specialty film — has existed in limbo. It’s not dead; while the staff was put on hiatus in March, publisher Eugene Hernandez is working to determine next steps. It’s not in print; its last physical edition was March/April. It’s not quite digital: Content for the May/June issue is available at the Film Comment site and at Zinio, but any internet consumer knows that online publications can’t survive on bimonthly updates.

From the critical brickbats of Pauline Kael vs. Andrew Sarris to defining identities for seminal filmmakers like Max Ophüls, John Huston, and Martin Scorsese, Film Comment has been at the center of a vital global film conversation for 58 years. Embraced by cinephiles and academics, it also saw the art...

On December 14, 1977, the American artist Chris Burden embarked on an approximately six-month-long relationship that would be characterized by a dysfunctional cycle of desire, adventure, instability, and eventual remorse. What began as an angry rebound following a breakup with his girlfriend and frustration with his New York art dealer became an obsession that would result in accusations of stolen property, a hit-and-run accident, and insurance claims involving the Los Angeles Police Department and California Highway Patrol.However, the object of Burden’s fixation was not a person, but a thing: a 16,000-pound 1952 Ford tractor-trailer that he nicknamed “Big Job.” He would later recall of the vehicle: “It was a bad truck and I wanted it.”Chris Burden, Big Wrench, 1980 (still), single-channel video, color, sound, 15:12 minutesBurden first laid eyes on Big Job on the side of Lincoln Boulevard in Venice, California, where it had been parked with a “For Sale” sign in the window.

Real comedy still happens on late night, we can prove it. If you like Conan comedy gold, Fallon friendliness, cutesy Corden, list-making Letterman, kneedy Kimmel, and all the rest, I hope you’ll enjoy this column too.

Last night on late night, Letterman talked about retirement with President Obama, Conan sat down with Avengers’ Jeremy Renner and Silicon Valley‘s T.J Miller, Fallon made an 80s music video with Jack Black, James Corden did a 5 minute “best scene” green screen of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movies with him, Kimmel talked about being Manny Pacquiao’s very own “Justin Bieber”, and at The Daily Show, producer Brian Grazer shared his thoughts on his book and career.

Late Show with Dave Letterman

“Hoping for a pardon”, “Down to the bitter end” With his time at CBS almost up, Dave is doing some pretty fun things, like sitting down with Obama and joking about playing dominos in retirement.

Liam Gillick in New York on Exhibition: "The problem is essentially a crisis in representation. These people in the film thought they were beyond difference." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

A married couple live in a fantastic house in London designed by late architect James Melvin. Their relationship to each other and to the building, their work as artists and how it relates to their bodies are exposed by Joanna Hogg in Exhibition.

Liam Gillick and I continue our conversation with an examination of a crisis in representation, the influence of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, and how Valie Export and early Marina Abramovic informed Viv Albertine's portrait of the artist D. Ed Rutherford's cinematography, Liam's future in acting and the meaning of bare feet are also explored.

Anne-Katrin Titze: Where did you first see the finished film?

Liam Gillick as H on his belly in the grass with...

Vienna-based sales agent EastWest Distribution has picked up six new titles including Rotterdam premiere Whispers Behind The Wall.

Speaking exclusively to ScreenDaily at this week’s When East Meets West in Trieste, EastWest’s Sasha Wieser said that two of these titles will be screening in the festival programmes of Rotterdam and Berlin.

Polish-born Grzegorz Muskala’s dark psychological thriller Whispers Behind The Wall - a young law student falls for the charms of his enigmatic Berlin landlady with terrifying consequences - will have its international premiere in Rotterdam tomorrow in the Bright Future programme.

The feature debut is the first full in-house production of Sol Bondy’s Berlin-based One Two Films and Muskala’s graduation film from the German Film & Television Academy Berlin (dffb). It had its world premiere at the Filmfest Oldenburg last September and won the prize for Best Musical Score at the Kinofest Lünen in November.

Bondy was one...

Vienna-based sales agent EastWest Distribution has picked up six new titles including Rotterdam premiere Whispers Behind The Wall.

Speaking exclusively to ScreenDaily at this week’s When East Meets West in Trieste, EastWest’s Sasha Wieser said that two of these titles will be screening in the festival programmes of Rotterdam and Berlin.

Polish-born Grzegorz Muskala’s dark psychological thriller Whispers Behind The Wall - a young law student falls for the charms of his enigmatic Berlin landlady with terrifying consequences - will have its international premiere in Rotterdam tomorrow in the Bright Future programme.

The feature debut is the first full in-house production of Sol Bondy’s Berlin-based One Two Films and Muskala’s graduation film from the German Film & Television Academy Berlin (dffb). It had its world premiere at the Filmfest Oldenburg last September and won the prize for Best Musical Score at the Kinofest Lünen in November.

Bondy was one...

The Bradford International Film Festival is typically an underground-friendly fest. This year appears to be no exception with two very special experimental film retrospectives, as well as a few modern underground-type flicks.

The 19th annual Biff will roll on April 11-21 at several locations around Bradford and Leeds in England, including the National Media Museum, Hebden Bridge Picture House, Hyde Park Picture House and other venues.

Biff is hosting a tribute to Stan Brakhage this year by screening the prolific filmmaker’s magnum opus, Dog Star Man, as well as a selection of his short films, from 1963′s legendary Mothlight to 1994′s Black Ice. There’s also going to be an epic-sized tribute/retrospective of experimental films from Austria, a country with a proud avant-garde filmmaking tradition that’s typically overlooked.

From Austria, Biff is, of course, screening two works from one of the experimental film world’s biggest masters,...

A look at what's new on DVD today:

"And Soon the Darkness"

Directed by Marcus Efron

Released by Anchor Bay Entertainment

A remake of the 1970 British thriller of the same name, director Marcos Efron transplants the story from France to Argentina where two friends' bike ride across the mountains takes a turn for the disastrous when one mysteriously disappears. "All the Boys Love Mandy Lane" star Amber Heard and "The Unborn"'s Odette Yustman bring their collected screaming ability to this horror film. Karl Urban and "Babel"'s Adrianna Barraza co-star.

"The American"

Directed by Anton Corbijn

Released by Universal Home Video

Ahh, Focus might've suckered unsuspecting moviegoers at the multiplex with an amped-up action ad campaign for this elegaic account of the last assignment of a hit man (George Clooney) - "The American" scored an impressive D- from Cinemascore as it became the number one film at the box...

A look at what's new on DVD today:

"$5 a Day" (2008)

Directed by Nigel Cole

Released by Image Entertainment

A refugee of the bankrupt Capitol Films, this dramedy starring Christopher Walken as a raconteur who claims he's able to live a full life on the titular Lincoln bill is finally seeing the light of day after premiering at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival. Alessandro Nivola co-stars as his son who drives him to New Mexico when he falls ill. Sharon Stone and Amanda Peet are along for the ride.

"2:22" (2008)

Directed by Phillip Guzman

Released by Inception Media Group

A quartet of thieves scheme to rob a boutique hotel on New Year's Eve, but find out that what's waiting for them on the inside is even colder than the snow-caked streets outside. Just as he did for his 2006 crime thriller "Played," star/co-writer Rossi called upon famous pals Gabriel Byrne and Val Kilmer...