News

Steven Spielberg is considered by many to be one of the greatest directors of all time. Experimenting with diverse genres ranging between horror, musicals, thrillers, and drama, Spielberg has done it all and still contributes creatively and logistically to improve the medium and craft of filmmaking.

While he is known for inciting numerous ‘first-of-its-kind’ innovations in filmmaking and screen culture, perhaps no contribution surpasses his involvement in creating the summer blockbuster. The money-minting international sensation that Hollywood is today is credited mainly to the summer blockbuster, a larger-than-life action-filled genre predominantly catered for family audiences that requires limited cerebral investment but delivers maximum engrossment. Of the many summer blockbusters Spielberg has worked on, none is perhaps as groundbreaking as his third film, Jaws (1975).

Terrifying, gory, anxiety-inducing but fun nonetheless, Jaws amassed $100 million at the box office in 61 days, the first ever film to do so. It has been picked apart...

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

Film at Lincoln Center

In the Mood for Love and its never-before-seen epilogue In the Mood for Love 2001 begin playing while a restoration of Christiane F. continues.

Museum of Modern Art

A Theater Near You includes films by Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Claire Denis, and more.

Brooklyn Academy of Music

Remakes, Ripoffs & Reinterpretations begins.

Anthology Film Archives

A survey of Jean-Claude Rousseau, including Ruggles of Red Gap on 35mm, begins; a J. Hoberman-curated series on New York avant-garde continues.

Roxy Cinema

Jupiter Ascending and Wigstock: The Movie screen on 35mm, while Carny shows on 16mm this Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

Pursuant to the question of our time––is Tom Cruise evil?––a career-spanning retrospective continues with The Color of Money on 35mm; Blade Runner 2049 and Fleshpot on 42nd Street screen Saturday.

Film Forum

Apocalypse Now‘s “roadshow edition” continues screening,...

Note: This interview was originally published as part of our 2024 NYFF coverage. Afternoons of Solitude opens in theaters on June 27.

When J. Hoberman placed game 6 of the 1986 World Series on his Village Voice year-end list, we had one of the first, most convincing attempts to enshrine live sports as cinema. And while a game can carry the compressed rise and fall, and dramatis personae, of a great narrative, you can further hone in on visual grammar: a televised match is also a spectacle of live editing––close-ups and masters seamlessly stitched together, rules of offscreen space and eyeline-matching also respected.

To make a UK-centric reference: Albert Serra’s new film Afternoons of Solitude is more akin to two hours of Sky Sports than you’d expect from the guy who once made Story of My Death. Following the rules, if not the spirit, of ever-festival-fashionable observational and direct cinema, we...

With summer time upon us, it is fitting to begin with the most sun-drenched feature of Wes Anderson’s career, followed by a gem from J. Hoberman, an essential biography of James Gandolfini, and plenty more to read while working on your tan.

The Wes Anderson Collection: Asteroid City by Matt Zoller Seitz (Abrams)

The Wes Anderson Collection from Matt Zoller Seitz and the folks at Abrams is, quite simply, an indispensable series for film lovers. In fact, one of the (many) joys of seeing a new Anderson creation is the knowledge that, a few months later, we will have a new Wes Anderson Collection release to break it all down. An Asteroid City deep dive is especially useful, as the 2023 film is one of the director’s most ambitious. As film historian David Bordwell astutely points out in his foreword, Asteroid’s two storylines––a 1955 black-and-white TV program and a widescreen color film––“mark,...

To paraphrase Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis: Wasn’t I lucky to come of age in my favorite city? For one thing, my impressionable undergraduate years fell during J. Hoberman’s tenure as lead film critic of the Village Voice, and his approach––which I would characterize as treating movies as artifacts or maybe symptoms of overlapping artistic, social, and political zeitgeists––was tremendously influential to me, as it has been to other critics attempting, for better or worse, to locate art in the world and maybe understand the world through art. A wag once observed that Hoberman’s year-end top 10 list was the rare opportunity to find out which movies he actually liked, but I can’t imagine having received a better education than the encouragement, implicit in his work, to set aside aesthetic hierarchies in favor of networks of associations and draw my own conclusions.

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

Museum of Modern Art

A Theater Near You includes films by Chantal Akerman, Bertolucci, Aldrich, and more.

Anthology Film Archives

A J. Hoberman-curated series on New York avant-garde begins.

Roxy Cinema

Barry Lyndon and Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette screen on 35mm.

Museum of the Moving Image

Pursuant to the question of our time––is Tom Cruise evil?––a new, career-spanning retrospective gets underway; The Muppets Take Manhattan plays this weekend.

Film Forum

Apocalypse Now‘s “roadshow edition” begins screening; the 4K restoration of Shall We Dance?, debuting Masayuki Suo’s cut, continues; The Wiz plays on Sunday.

Film at Lincoln Center

A survey of Jordan Peele’s Us, featuring films by Orson Welles, Jan Švankmajer, and Robert Zemeckis, begins, while a restoration of Christiane F. starts.

Paris Theater

The career-spanning Hitchcock series continues.

IFC Center

Ran continues in a 40th-anniversary restoration; Dogtooth,...

1940 US six-sheet for The Grapes of Wrath. Art by Thomas Hart Benton.In Henry Fonda for President (2024), Alexander Horwath’s brilliant disquisition on acting, politics, and America, Fonda recalls how he tied himself to a seven-year contract with Darryl F. Zanuck in order to get the lead role in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). “I’d worked with Zanuck several times,” Fonda says, in audio taken from the last interview he gave before his death. “I’d done a lot of films there [at 20th Century-Fox], and he was always after a contract, and I wasn’t interested until Grapes of Wrath, and that was bait. He said, ‘I’m not going to let you play Tom Joad if I can’t control you.’ I did Grapes of Wrath, and I followed it with some of the worst shit I’ve had to do in film.”Horwath’s documentary also shows an...

I’m old enough to remember when Jacques Rivette films were the domain of dark-web networks and substandard DVD rips, a conspiratorial network worthy of his cinema. It’s still a little strange seeing that April will feature a 10-film, one-short Criterion Channel program that combines of his canonized masterpieces with decidedly lesser-seens––plus Va Savoir, which I really hope is the recently unearthed four-hour cut for which there’s no substitute. Penélope Cruz is also subject of a retrospective in April, which––more than making me pine for a Rivette collab that never was––will include both Abre Los Ojos and Vanilla Sky, some Almodóvar, and another in the Channel’s ongoing let’s-add-a-Woody-Allen-movie campaign, Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

For themed series, J. Hoberman has curated a series on the dangers of ’60s and ’70s New York that runs from Michael Roemer’s recently restored The Plot Against Harry and...

From his father, a Holocaust survivor, cartoonist Art Spiegelman learned how to best utilize the limited space in a suitcase, knowledge that he then applied to his hand-drawn panels, where information has to be conveyed in a concise manner. An eminence in the realm of comics, Spiegelman is best known for “Maus,” the two-volume graphic novel about the Shoah — where the Nazis are depicted as cats and the Jews mice — based mostly on his dad’s firsthand recollections and Spiegelman’s need to grapple with the trauma he inherited from both of his parents. The subsequent, almost inescapable acclaim for “Maus” would in turn become another source of anguish for Spiegelman.

From co-directors Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, the documentary “Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse” is a linear account of how his career in comics evolved from underground publications to mainstream recognition. Constructed from talking-head conversations with Spiegelman and his friends and family,...

The science fiction genre in cinema is roughly one hundred and twenty-five years old, with Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon frequently cited as the film industry's first major work within the genre. While the silent era produced many influential science fiction movies, such as Metropolis, The Lost World, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, for most of the twentieth century, science fiction movies were predominantly B movies.

That all changed in 1977 when Star Wars lit the box office on fire. Ever since, science fiction has remained arguably the most profitable genre at the box office. Currently, 14 of the 25 highest-grossing movies of all time are science fiction movies. However, despite the immense popularity of the science fiction genre, many iconic sci-fi films continue to fly under the radar and have been forgotten by modern audiences. Each film included in this article has under 100,000 ratings on Letterboxd.

Related10 Best Modern...

De Martin Scorsese a Walter Hill.

© mundoCine | Filmin | Universal Pictures

Hay películas que piden a gritos ser devoradas al filo de la medianoche, en alguna mohosa sala de arte y ensayo y rodeado de dudosas compañías. Cintas cuyo celuloide se quemaría cual vampiro maldito bajo la engañosa luz del día y que bajo ningún concepto deben ser contempladas mediante el uso (y abuso) de las nuevas tecnologías, sino con la deliciosa melodía de fondo de un proyector de 35 milímetros y una polvorienta moqueta bajo nuestros pies. Películas que nos envuelven con su atmósfera nocturna y canalla, que entran por nuestras pupilas y llegan a las venas mucho antes que al cerebro. Y es que la definición de “Películas de medianoche” ya la adoptaron J. Hoberman y Jonathan Rosenbaum en su fundacional libro Midnight movies en 1983 para referirse a las llamadas sesiones “golfas”, donde todo era posible dentro de una sala...

Godzilla premiered in November of 1954, eight months to the day after the United States set off its first hydrogen bomb. Indebted to but distinct from pioneering giant monster movies like 1925’s The Lost World, 1933’s King Kong, and 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the seminal Japanese kaiju film is more than just another special effects-driven creature feature. Working from a story by Shigeru Kayama, writer-director Ishirō Honda and co-writer Takeo Murata provide an outlet for post-war Japan’s fears.

In the atomic age parable, an ancient, 164-foot creature dubbed Gojira ravages Tokyo after being awakened from its deep-sea hibernation by nuclear testing. Scientist Daisuke Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), salvage ship captain Hideto Ogata (Akira Takarada), paleontologist Kyohei Yamane, and his daughter Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kōchi) are tasked with fulfilling their social obligations to stop the seemingly indestructible beast.

The decision to use an actor (Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka) in a...

Nicolas Cage’s status as a national treasure is being cemented by the Metrograph.

The New York City-based theater has announced a “Nicolas Uncaged” festival to honor the acclaimed star. The 10-film retrospective opens November 8 at Metrograph In Theater, and will feature 35mm showings of “Con Air,” “Moonstruck,” “The Wicker Man,” and “Wild at Heart.”

“Heaped with praise and panegyrics as one of the finest screen actors of his generation, pilloried and parodied as an anything-for-a-paycheck hambone with a weakness for weird wigs and prostheses, Nicolas Cage is a one-man sideshow, a mixture of Marlon Brando, Robert Mitchum, Lon Chaney, and a stick of TNT who takes back ‘serious thespian’ prestige whenever he wants to, dives into grindhouse material and Academy Award hopefuls with the same mad enthusiasm, and never seems to be having anything less than a total blast in front of the camera,” the Metrograph press statement reads.

Louise Brooks’s famous bobbed hairstyle guaranteed her eternal inimitability, its razor-sharp aesthetic a marker of her essence. G.W. Pabst understood this, which is why when Brooks’s doomed flapper from Pandora’s Box flees a courtroom after a murder conviction, she cuts her hair to become almost unidentifiable—to be like other women, except perhaps for the curly-blond gal pal who longs for her affections. (One sign of the film’s coolness is its refusal to waltz Alice Roberts into the celluloid closet.) It’s an act of desperate self-preservation in a film wickedly chockablock with exciting displays of amorous exaltation and domination.

This 1929 German silent drama is a stirring vision of the world gripped by a sinister moral vice—a nosedive into a carnal abyss of despair lined with visionary chiaroscuro sights and thorny mythological reference. With a voracious Lulu at the gilded controls, the vibrantly in-the-moment Pandora’s Box...

A present-tense record of nation-splitting turmoil, Patricio Guzmán’s monumental documentary The Battle of Chile remains a landmark of activist cinema. Chronicling the events leading to the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist regime by a conservative military coup, it offers a staggering blend of history and narrative.

“The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie,” the first of the film’s three parts, opens in the excitement of the 1970 election and closes in terror, as the street clashes between workers, students, and soldiers yield to bullets. Violence intensifies in the second part (“The Coup d’Etat”) as Allende’s government is besieged by business-controlled strikes and finally taken down by the Nixon/Kissinger-backed 1973 junta that placed Augusto Pinochet in power.

Edited from bits of often risky coverage taken during the period, the first two parts have the force of an early Roberto Rossellini picture. Attuned to the active political engagement of the Chilean people,...

Tim Burton rose during a very peculiar time in popular culture. The terse, depressive adult dramas of the 1970s had given way to the ultra-slick, spectacle-heavy blockbusters of the 1980s as a new generation of adventure films entered the marketplace, helmed by precocious filmmakers who spent their youths in actual film schools. At the same time, the financial and cultural conservatism of the Reagan administration had amplified the voices of rebellious punkers and enterprising artistic weirdos who wanted nothing to do with the commercial world. The odd circumstances -- an increase of money paired with a general antiestablishment malaise -- were just right for anti-mainstream freaks to break into the public eye.

All of a sudden, filmmakers like David Lynch, Tobe Hooper, and Paul Verhoeven could make big hits, and Tim Burton could be embraced by the public at large. Burton, in particular, could not have risen to fame in any other epoch.

Despite the silent era producing renowned gangster films such as The Penalty and Underworld, the gangster genre did not strike a chord with mainstream audiences until the pre-Code years of the early 1930s. Just prior to the implementation of the Production Code, gangster films like The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, and Scarface revolutionized cinema with their vicious protagonists and unprecedented screen violence. Ever since, for better or worse, audiences have seemed fascinated with cinematic representations of criminal life.

In the twenty-first century, gangster films continue to be a viable international genre. Martin Scorsese expanded upon his gangster movie legacy with The Departed and The Irishman. Hong Kong cinema has produced memorable gangster thrillers such as Infernal Affairs and the Election series. In Europe, auteurs like Jonathan Glazer, Jacques Audiard, and Matteo Garrone directed significant gangster works such as Sexy Beast, A Prophet, and Gomorrah. The best gangster films of the...

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.NEWSThe Delinquents.The start of the Academy Awards ceremony was delayed by hundreds of protestors obstructing the red carpet to call for a ceasefire in Gaza.Asghar Farhadi has been cleared of plagiarism charges by an Iranian court after allegations were leveled by a former student, who accused him of stealing the idea for A Hero (2021) from her documentary on the same subject, produced in his 2014 filmmaking workshop.Meanwhile, Alexander Payne has been accused of plagiarizing The Holdovers (2023) “line-by-line” from a screenplay by Simon Stephenson he appears to have read on spec.Thailand is planning to reform its national film industry as part of a “soft power” program, which may include increased production funding, more rebates for foreign productions, and a reduction of state censorship domestically.

"To me he is a God." –Lars von Trier. Kino Lorber has revealed a new re-release trailer for Nostalghia, one of the last films Andrei Tarkovsky made in the 1980s just a few years before he passed away. This new 4K restoration of the Tarkovsky classic is set to play in limited theaters starting in February & March around the US. "Nostalghia is not so much a movie as a place to inhabit for two hours." –J. Hoberman. A Russian poet and his interpreter travel to Italy researching the life of an 18th-century composer, and instead meet a ruminative madman who tells the poet how the world may be saved. Tarkovsky said at the time that, "my wish was simply to observe a Russian who comes to Italy and discovers unexpected emotions which regard him... the drama emerges precisely from this clash between this innocent vision of the world and the...

Andrei Tarkovsky’s penultimate film, 1983’s gorgeously haunting Nostalghia, also marked new territory for the director. His first film made outside the Ussr, the Cannes Best Director winner (a prize he shared with Robert Bresson for L’Argent), was also a unique collaboration with writer Tonino Guerra, frequent collaborator of Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, and Francesco Rosi. Now restored in 4K in 2022 by Csc – Cinetecanazionale in collaboration with Rai Cinema at Augustus Color laboratory, from the original negatives and the original soundtrack preserved at Rai Cinema, the restoration will begin rolling out on February 21 at NYC’s Film Forum via Kino Lorber and we’re pleased to exclusively unveil the trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Andrei Tarkovsky explained that in Russian the word ‘nostalghia’ conveys ‘the love for your homeland and the melancholy that arises from being far away.’ This debilitating form of homesickness is embodied in the film by Andrei,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSTrenque Lauquen.Absurdly early as it may seem, the Best of 2023 lists are starting to arrive. The New York Times published top tens by Manohla Dargis and Alissa Wilkinson (only her third published piece as the Times’s newest movie critic after an illustrious run at Vox), Vulture shared lists from Bilge Ebiri and Allison Willmore, and Richard Brody unveiled his impossible-to-hem-in roundup at the New Yorker (we’ll return to his list in the Readings section). There are some consensus picks—among them, Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, Showing Up, and Passages—but there’s an exciting sprawl overall. Meanwhile, Cahiers du Cinéma shared their top ten; Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen was their delightful, well-deserved sleeper choice for film of the year. But...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSCapital.The Palestinian Film Institute and several prominent filmmakers—including Sky Hopinka, Miko Revereza, Maryam Tafakory, Charlie Shackleton, and Basma al-Sharif—have withdrawn from the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in response to the festival’s messaging about the war in Gaza. On the festival’s opening night, a group of activists took to the stage holding a banner that read “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”; on November 10, IDFA published a statement apologizing to patrons who may have been offended by this “hurtful slogan.” On November 11, the Pfi and the advocacy group Workers for Palestine Netherlands announced their withdrawal from IDFA: “As the world’s largest documentary film festival, IDFA holds the responsibility to respond to the plight of journalists and documentarians on the ground in Gaza,...

Terence Davies, the Liverpool-born director of autobiographical memory pieces like “The Long Day Closes” and “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” has died. He was 77. The English filmmaker passed away peacefully in his home after a short illness on October 7, as confirmed on his official social media pages.

Davies directed several masterpieces in his lifetime, from the sorrowful “The Deep Blue Sea” starring Rachel Weisz as an eternally unhappy seeker of love to his debut feature “Distant Voices,” built on his own closeted working-class British upbringing. You could even say the same about his last film, “Benediction,” starring Jack Lowden as the queer poet Siegfried Sassoon, wrapped around by a coterie of Bright Young Things. He received great acclaim for films like “A Quiet Passion,” starring Cynthia Nixon as the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, as well as the Edith Wharton adaptation “House of Mirth,” led by Gillian Anderson. Serious actors loved working with him,...

The most rudimentary research into the creative origins of the groundbreaking 1977 sci-fi flick "Star Wars" will reveal to the reader that creator George Lucas was inspired by "Flash Gordon" serials from the 1930s, as well as Akira Kurosawa's 1958 epic "The Hidden Fortress." Kurosawa's film famously opened with two clownish characters (Kamatari Fujiwara and Minoru Chiaki) who aimed to earn their fortune as samurai. After several misadventures, the peasants unwittingly become embroiled in a much larger plot about a missing princess (Misa Uehara), a war, and a brave protective warrior (Toshiro Mifune). "Star Wars" borrowed that film's structure, introducing audiences to its sci-fi action through the eyes (lenses?) of the robotic characters C-3Po (Anthony Daniels) and the non-humanoid R2-D2. 

C-3Po was a prissy, fastidious droid who seemed impatient with the foibles of the organic beings he lived with, and was frequently panicked and afraid. The only time...

Desperate Souls, Dark City and The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy director Nancy Buirski on Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo: “They become appealing because of these wonderful performances by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman.”

Nancy Buirski’s masterpiece is much more than a documentary on John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, screenplay by Waldo Salt, shot by Adam Holender, costumes by Ann Roth, and starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman with Sylvia Miles, Brenda Vaccaro, Jennifer Salt, and Bob Balaban. Desperate Souls, Dark City And The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy, edited by Anthony Ripoli, features on-camera interviews shot by Rex Miller with Lucy Sante, Brian De Palma, Edmund White, Michael Childers, Charles Kaiser, Jim Hoberman, Ian Buruma, Voight, Vaccaro, Balaban, Holender, and Jennifer Salt.

Brenda Vaccaro with John Schlesinger: “Ann Roth saved my life,” says Vaccaro, “by putting me in that fur coat.”

The evocative, wide-ranging, and evermore timely documentary drops us...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSLeos Carax in Holy Motors (2012).On Monday, SAG-AFTRA members voted 97.9 percent in favor of a strike if their contract negotiations stall. This sets the stage for an industry-wide work stoppage in solidarity with the Writers Guild, even after the weekend’s news that the Directors Guild had reached a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.Away from Hollywood, CG Cinema have confirmed that Leos Carax has wrapped production on a new film, C’est pas moi, set to release in 2024. This is a "free format" self-portrait, spanning the "major stations" of Carax's four-decade career amid "the political tremors of the time." The images shared by CG Cinema feature Denis Lavant in character as Monsieur Merde, made infamous in...

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

Museum of the Moving Image

An Asteroid City-themed series programmed by Wes Anderson and Jake Perlin includes 35mm prints of Some Came Running and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; Blow Out shows on 35mm this Sunday, while Rope plays in a queer cinema series.

Bam

A retrospective of the great Juliet Berto brings Celine and Julie, Godard’s Weekend, and more.

Museum of Modern Art

A tribute to casting directors Ellen Lewis and Laura Rosenthal brings prints of Goodfellas and I’m Not There, as well as Dead Man.

Roxy Cinema

35mm prints of The Fifth Element and Eastwood’s The Gauntlet screen this weekend, while J. Hoberman and Ken Jacobs present a tribute to Jack Smith; 4K restorations of The Trial, The Doom Generation, and Dogville play.

Film at Lincoln Center

Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies continues showing in a long-overdue restoration.

Exclusive: Mvd Entertainment Group has claimed North American rights to the darkly comedic thriller Wrong Reasons, marking the feature debut of writer-director Josh Roush. The film, executive produced by and featuring Kevin Smith, is slated for release on digital, VOD, Blu-ray and DVD on August 15.

Hailing from AntiCurrent Productions, Wrong Reasons watches as an ambiguously intentioned masked man (James Parks) kidnaps a drug addicted punk rock singer (Liv Roush) and triggers a police investigation headed by Detective Charles Dobson (Ralph Garman) as well as a media circus. The film also starring Teresa Ruiz, David Koechner, Daniel Roebuck, Smith and Keith Coogan boasts a punk rock soundtrack with music by Tim Armstrong, L7, Black Flag, The Wipers, Channel 3, William Elliott Whitmore, The Unseen, Bi-Product and more.

After world premiering at Smith’s first annual Smodcastle Film Festival in the fall of 2022, the Liv Roush-produced film...

Exclusive: Kino Lorber and Zeitgeist Films have picked up North American rights to Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy — a new documentary on the making of the iconic John Schlesinger film, from acclaimed documentarian Nancy Buirski (The Loving Story).

Related Story 1091 Pictures Acquires Domestic Distribution Rights To Romantic Drama ‘Under My Skin’ Related Story Locarno Film Festival War Drama 'Tommy Guns' Gets North American Deal Related Story Ralph Fiennes' 'Four Quartets' Gets North American Distribution Deal Ahead Of Stateside Bow At Santa Barbara

Zeitgeist will open the film in North American theaters beginning at New York’s Film Forum in late June and take it nationwide from there, with a digital, educational and home video release on all major platforms via Kino Lorber to follow.

Inspired by Glen Frankel’s 2021 book Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation and the Making of a Dark Classic, Desperate...

The Lady from Shanghai

Blu-ray

Kino Lorber

1946 / B&w / 1.33: 1

Starring Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane

Written by Orson Welles

Directed by Orson Welles

To those who know him, Michael O’Hara “… has got a lot of blarney in him.” That also applies to Orson Welles, the man who created that smooth-talking Irishman and plays him in The Lady from Shanghai, a labyrinthine guessing-game written and directed by Welles in 1946. Welles’s enigmatic co-stars include Everett Sloane as Arthur Bannister, “the world’s greatest lawyer or the world’s greatest criminal”, and Rita Hayworth as Bannister’s wife, an unknowable beauty hiding behind a plutonium hairdo.

Hayworth is not the only one wearing a disguise—like any noir, everyone has two or more personas, but Welles’s film is no ordinary noir, and for better and for worse, The Lady from Shanghai is no ordinary movie. The film, both haphazard...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.News*Corpus Callosum (Michael Snow, 2002).Michael Snow, Canadian artist and avant-garde filmmaker best known for Wavelength and La Région Centrale, has died at the age of 94. Via Sabzian, Snow’s 2020 email exchange with Brandon Kaufman is a worthy read; the artist reflects on a life of filmmaking, painting, and playing jazz piano. “Though I’ve had an interesting life, I don’t think I’m particularly nostalgic,” he types. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Francis Ford Coppola's long-gestating, self-funded passion project Megalopolis is in mid-production peril, with a number of key collaborators departing as the budget expands.Recommended Viewinga new restoration for Hou Hsiao-hsien’s turn-of-the-century classic Millennium Mambo (2001) is in US cinemas now. Metrograph have shared a trailer for the 4K...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.Newsrrr.First: Notebook is launching a weekly email newsletter in 2023! Sign up here to keep up with our latest writing in this precarious digital age.At a recent screening of Rrr in Chicago, S.S. Rajamouli mentioned that his father and screenwriting partner V. Vijayendra Prasad is beginning to draft a sequel. In the meantime, Rajamouli is preparing an untitled film starring Mahesh Bubu, set to begin filming in the spring.In this Willamette Week article about George Saunders’s new short story collection Liberation Day, there is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mention of a film project. Richard Ayoade will direct an adaptation of Saunders’s 2012 short story “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” set to begin filming next year. Though Ayoade stole the show in both parts of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, this will be his...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSKing Lear.Jean-Luc Godard, groundbreaking French-Swiss filmmaker across six decades, died last week at age 91. In the week since, a number of tributes have been shared: among them, Blair McClendon in n+1, J. Hoberman in The Nation, Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, and Richard Hell in Screen Slate. Alternatively, you can find a 2002 essay on Godard by filmmaker and theorist Peter Wollen on Verso's blog, watch a 1988 conversation between Godard and critic Serge Daney, or read this list Godard contributed to the British film journal Afterimage in 1970. Shadow and Act founder Tambay Obenson is fundraising to launch Akoroko, a new platform devoted to African film and television. The platform intends to combine film journalism with “consultation, cataloging, and curated film streaming.”Two posters (below) for the 61st New York Film Festival feature photographs taken by Nan Goldin.

In 1970, a scruffy repertory theater—led by the visionary Ben Barenholtz—quietly placed a print ad in the Village Voice, advertising midnight screenings of a Spanish-language Western they claimed was "too heavy to be shown any other way." The movie was Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo, and it'd kick off the "Midnite Movie" craze that changed moviegoing.Hear the history of the Elgin Theater and its legendary, weed-soaked screenings of El Topo, featuring commentary from ex-Voice critic J. Hoberman, Amy Nicholson of the podcast "Unspooled," ex-Elgin programmers Chuck Zlatkin and Steve Gould...and Jodorowsky himself.The second season of the Mubi Podcast titled “Only in Theaters” tells surprising stories of individual cinemas that had huge impacts on film history, and in some cases, history in general.Listen to episode 2 below or wherever you get your podcasts: Apple PodcastsStitcherSpotifyGoogle PodcastsMore...

Pink Flamingos

Blu ray

Criterion

1972 / 1:66:1 / 93 Min.

Starring Divine, Mink Stole, Edith Massey

Written by John Waters

Directed by John Waters

In 1980, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum began an exploration into those elusive films that could only be seen at the witching hour—a time when most theaters were closed and, it was implied, most decent people were home in bed. Published in 1983, their book was a catalogue of curios that defied categorization until Rosenbaum and Hoberman named them: Midnight Movies. But even alongside renegade efforts like Jodorowsky’s El Topo and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, John Waters’ Pink Flamingos stood out as the tarnished gold standard for transgressive entertainment; it felt then, and it feels now, like a genuinely lawless movie—as of this writing, it remains banned in the town of Hicksville, New York.

A gender-bending satire of a great republic’s rush to the bottom,...

Distributor and streaming platform Mubi’s award-winning audio-documentary series “Mubi Podcast” kicks off Season 2 today.

IndieWire can exclusively announce that the “Mubi Podcast,” hosted by Wall Street Journal journalist Rico Gagliano, returns today, Thursday, June 30 with its first episode of the second season, “Only in Theaters.” The podcast will focus on the surprising stories of individual cinemas that had a huge impact on film history, ranging from the Cinémathèque Française to the Westgate in Minneapolis.

Guests for Season 2 include filmmakers Mary Harron (“American Psycho”), Barbet Schroeder, Peter Strickland (“The Duke of Burgundy”), Nick Broomfield (“Kurt & Courtney”), and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Film writers J. Hoberman, Amy Nicholson, Louis Menand, Danny Leigh and more also add insights and commentary. Episodes are released every Thursday.

The first episode, available now on all major podcast platforms and via Mubi’s Notebook, centers on the Cinémathèque Française and the public uproar for the brief firing of...

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

Roxy Cinema

A 35mm-heavy David Cronenberg retro is underway, with Dead Ringers playing Friday and Naked Lunch on Sunday; a print of The Blair Witch Project plays Saturday; on Sunday a 16mm double-bill programmed by J. Hoberman will screen.

Film Forum

A restoration of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant has begun, while Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva continues on 35mm and Kiki’s Delivery Service screens this Sunday.

IFC Center

Johnnie To’s The Heroic Trio plays in a restoration as the Gaspar Noé retrospective continues; the new restorations of Inland Empire and Mississippi Masala continue; Mulholland Dr., Perfect Blue, Scanners, and Paprika have late-night showings.

Japan Society

Terror of Yakuza and Untamagiru play in the incredible new series “Okinawa in Focus,” which you can see a trailer for here.

Museum of the Moving Image

The great Dp James Wong Howe...

In an article appearing in a 2018 issue of The New York Times, film critic J. Hoberman argued that understanding a cinematic undertaking is entirely separate from enjoying it. In his words, "the visual language of some movies is so personal and hermetic that interpreting it could be compared to reading a novel written in hieroglyphics."

Related: 10 Strange Movie Adaptations Of Famous Books

Yet, artistic ambiguity is what draws many to the genre. Far removed from the cut-and-dry, easily-anticipated narratives of most popular movies, experimental films ask viewers to dissect and determine their own understandings. While it's not a genre for everyone, a film should not be passed up simply due to its avant-garde nature.

Ahed’s Knee, Nadav Lapid’s latest feature, takes its title from the teenage Palestinan activist who became a media sensation (and was then imprisoned) for squaring off against Israeli soldiers in 2017. Heralded for his Gold Bear-winning Synonyms and The Kindergarten Teacher, a tw0-hander that produced a Netflix-distributed American remake, Lapid’s work remains consistently critical of, and in opposition to, the oppressive Israeli government. Even so, he remains, in J. Hoberman’s eyes, “the most internationally acclaimed Israeli filmmaker in recent memory…and perhaps ever.” While promoting The Kindergarten Teacher in 2018, Lapid was invited by Israel’s Ministry of Culture to participate in a […]

The post “A Boxing Contest Between the Movie and the Viewer”: Nadav Lapid on Ahed’s Knee first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Ahed’s Knee, Nadav Lapid’s latest feature, takes its title from the teenage Palestinan activist who became a media sensation (and was then imprisoned) for squaring off against Israeli soldiers in 2017. Heralded for his Gold Bear-winning Synonyms and The Kindergarten Teacher, a tw0-hander that produced a Netflix-distributed American remake, Lapid’s work remains consistently critical of, and in opposition to, the oppressive Israeli government. Even so, he remains, in J. Hoberman’s eyes, “the most internationally acclaimed Israeli filmmaker in recent memory…and perhaps ever.” While promoting The Kindergarten Teacher in 2018, Lapid was invited by Israel’s Ministry of Culture to participate in a […]

The post “A Boxing Contest Between the Movie and the Viewer”: Nadav Lapid on Ahed’s Knee first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: David Dalaithngu in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout.Renowned Aboriginal film actor David Gulpilil Ridjimiraril Dalaithngu has died. David Dalaithngu was seen as a trailblazer for his early roles in Walkabout (1971) and Storm Boy (1976), and later performances in films like the semi-autobiographical Charlie's Country (2013). He rose to prominence as an actor and traditional dancer during a time in which Indigenous roles were frequently played by non-Indigenous actors, often in blackface. In his own words, he described acting as a "piece of cake." Steven Soderbergh, Channing Tatum, and writer Reid Carolin have joined forces for the next installment in the Magic Mike franchise, entitled Magic Mike's Last Dance. "The stripperverse will never be the same," Channing Tatum said. First Cow takes the number one in Cahiers du cinéma's top ten list for 2021! The list...

The once-prestigious Jason Reitman has remarked that after five consecutive box office bombs he felt the need to make his own Ghostbusters to finally confront the legacy of his father Ivan. If we take this statement at face value and not as a wholly disingenuous about-face, perhaps Reitman Jr. should’ve just done the “confrontation” in-person at Reitman Sr.’s long-gone downtown Toronto restaurant where the gimmick was that the chicken was uncooked or whatever. It may have humiliated far fewer people in the process.

Bringing us another franchise entry after the all-girls reboot from a half-decade ago performed slightly under expectations, Ghostbusters: Afterlife trades in bustling New York for the Canadian province Alberta doubling as rural Oklahoma, and it can certainly be said that the movie is as much of a bummer as a move to a small town would be for city kids—they being Phoebe (Mackenna...

“They say you can see the whole universe in opals, that’s how old they are.”

Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems will be available on 4k and Blu-ray November 23rd as part of The Criterion Collection

This jolt of pure cinematic adrenaline affirmed directors Josh and Benny Safdie as heirs to the gritty, heightened realism of Martin Scorsese and John Cassavetes. Adam Sandler delivers an almost maniacally embodied performance as Howard Ratner, a fast-talking New York jeweler and gambler in relentless pursuit of the next big score. When he comes into possession of a rare opal, it seems Howard’s ship has finally come in—as long as he can stay one step ahead of a wife (Idina Menzel) who hates him, a mistress (Julia Fox) who can’t quit him, and a frenzy of loan sharks and hit men closing in on him. Wrapping a vivid look at the...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSFollowing the launch of the English-language podcast earlier this month, yesterday we revealed our upcoming original Spanish-language podcast! In the first season of the Mubi Podcast: Encuentros, co-produced by Mubi and La Corriente del Golfo Podcast, leading voices in Latin American film and culture come together to think about their own methods and processes for approaching the craft, talk about personal experiences, and reflect on films and filmmakers that have inspired their work. We begin with Gael García Bernal (Mexico) and Carolina Sanín (Colombia) as the guests of the first episode, entitled The Ritual of the Masks. The first season of Encuentros consists of in-depth conversations among colleagues, an encounter between two people who share their love for cinema. Check out the trailer above and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts here.Andrea Arnold...

“I consider Shoah to be the greatest documentary about contemporary history ever made, bar none, and by far the greatest film I’ve ever seen about the Holocaust.”

– Marcel Ophuls

Ten years after IFC Films theatrically re-released the epic documentary, Shoah arrives on demand platforms in the United States & Canada in March 2021. Check out this new trailer:

Fc Films announced today that they will be digitally releasing Claude Lanzmann’s landmark Holocaust documentary Shoah on March 2, 2021, marking the first time that the film will be available to own digitally and for rent in the United States and Canada.

Twelve years in the making, Shoah is Lanzmann’s monumental epic on the Holocaust and features interviews with survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators in 14 countries. The film does not contain any historical footage but rather features interviews which seek to “reincarnate” the Jewish tragedy and also visits places where the crimes took place.

Some films are not meant for the era in which they’re made. Such was the case with Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, a sci-fi epic from the provocative filmmaker whose first feature, Donnie Darko, premiered in 2001. Arriving five years into President Bush’s presidency, Kelly’s second feature debuted in Competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where it was received much like Bush’s tumultuous War on Terror. “More film maudit than the basis for a midnight cult,” film critic J. Hoberman observed in the Village Voice, his review being one of the few positive notices to follow the film’s disastrous world […]

The post "God Bless Dwayne Johnson": Richard Kelly on Southland Tales, 15 Years Later first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Some films are not meant for the era in which they’re made. Such was the case with Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, a sci-fi epic from the provocative filmmaker whose first feature, Donnie Darko, premiered in 2001. Arriving five years into President Bush’s presidency, Kelly’s second feature debuted in Competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where it was received much like Bush’s tumultuous War on Terror. “More film maudit than the basis for a midnight cult,” film critic J. Hoberman observed in the Village Voice, his review being one of the few positive notices to follow the film’s disastrous world […]

The post "God Bless Dwayne Johnson": Richard Kelly on Southland Tales, 15 Years Later first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber. (Click on the images for magnified detail)

Jack London was befuddled by the reception of Martin Eden. He intended the novel to be a sharp critique of individualism and was surprised when the public took his protagonist as something of a libertarian hero. Though as J. Hoberman points out in his extremely perceptive reading, the novel is more of a “tragic celebration” than a bitter condemnation. And perhaps the “misreading” of an antihero is always inevitable, the unintended seduction of an unexpected contingent of the audience.

This tension has followed Martin Eden into the 21st century. Pietro Marcello’s new adaptation moves the story from California to Italy and places it outside of time, replenishing some of the aesthetic mystery that is inevitably lost when a novel is cast, shot and projected onto a screen. The production design helps, contributing to the atmosphere at both high and low registers.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe on-demand success of Trolls: World Tour, and subsequent comments made by NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell, has led to a significant development in the friction between studios and cinemas: AMC Theatres announced it will no longer play any Universal movies. The ongoing dispute speaks to the many changes likely to take place as response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Recommended VIEWINGThe Walker Art Center has made available more than 60 "in-depth portraits of directors, actors, writers, and producers who were celebrated in the Walker Cinema at pivotal moments in their careers." This abundant archive includes Bong Joon-ho, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Stan Brakhage, Julie Dash, and even Tom Hanks. Grasshopper's official trailer for Dan Sallitt's Fourteen, which stars Tallie Mehdel and Norma Kuhling as two long-time friends in New York. Read our review of the film here.

Spoken today, such a statement might arouse contention and debate, but it is far from unthinkable or even impertinent—as it might have been, say, in 1954, the year that Truffaut penned his politique; or in 1966, when Jean-Pierre Léaud played a man named “Donald Siegel” in Godard’s Made in U.S.A.; or even in 1968, when Siegel was the subject of a career retrospective at London’s National Film Theatre and an entry in the “Expressive Esoterica” section of Andrew Sarris’ landmark The American Cinema. In a 1971 issue of Film Comment, film critic Jim Kitses was still able to dismiss Siegel as “a good commercial director, no more and no less,” relegating the “subversive idea—that the French... consider Siegel to be Hollywood’s most gifted filmmaker” to the purview of gossip columnist Joyce Haber (“nobody really believes that kind of thing in this town”). But the filmmaker’s reputation in the U.