News

The love affair between Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund and the Cannes Film Festival continues.

The 48-year-old director will return to the scene of his recent triumph, as it was just last year that his “Triangle of Sadness” came away with the coveted Palme d’Or, the top prize at the most prestigious festival in world cinema. (Don’t tell Venice I said that.)

“I am happy, proud, and humbled to be trusted with the honor of jury president for this year’s competition at the Festival de Cannes,” he wrote in an announcement released by the festival early Tuesday morning. “I am sincere when I say that cinema culture is in its most important period ever,” he continued.

Östlund’s “Triangle” is, of course, currently a long-shot Oscar candidate in three categories: Best Director (a nomination for Östlund), Best Original Screenplay (another nomination for Östlund), and Best Picture (a nomination...

Annette Bening is simply glorious as one of the title characters in 20th Century Women. (Note to the Academy, make sure that Best Actress nomination happens.) She plays Dorothea Fields, a divorced mother facing enormous changes, social and personal, at the last summer of the 1970s. Specifically, she has a 15-year-old son to raise – that would be Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), with whom she shares a Santa Barbara boarding house that requires repair and renovation. She doesn't know how to guide Jamie through puberty. So she asks for help. One boarder – Abbie,...

Author Gay Talese has denounced his upcoming book, “The Voyeur’s Motel,” due to what he considers a credibility crisis. The book chronicles the strange story of Gerald Foos, who allegedly spied on guests at his Colorado motel from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s. But Talese says he began to doubt Foos after property records revealed that he sold the motel, located in Aurora, Colorado, in 1980 and didn’t reacquire it until eight years later, the Washington Post reported. The time gap raised questions as to whether Foos told the truth about other key facts. Also Read: Alvin Toffler,...

Alvin Toffler, the author of the nonfiction best-seller “Future Shock,” has died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87 and no cause of death was given, The New York Times reported. His death was confirmed by his consulting firm, Toffler Associates, which is based in Reston, Virginia. Published in 1970 when U.S. society was in chaos amid riots over the Vietnam War, “Future Shock,” sold millions of copies and was translated into dozens of languages, catapulting Toffler to international fame. The book presciently forecast how people and institutions of the late 20th century would contend with the immense strains and.

No record of the history of techno is complete without a mention of the Belleville Three. Berlin may be have emerged as the genre’s unofficial capital for the last decade and a half of its history, but Detroit DJ/producers Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson and Juan Atkins are largely cited as its original pioneers.

Be that as it may, during an era in which techno’s popularity is at an all-time high, the Belleville Three have been somewhat removed from the conversation.

As we recently touched on in our Movement 2016 coverage, May, Atkins and Saunderson met as teenagers in the rural Detroit suburb of Belleville. For having taught the other two how to produce electronic music, Atkins is often referred to as “The Originator.” In addition, he’s credited for coining the term “techno” itself with the 1988 compilation Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, which he adopted from...

"I never think of the future — it comes soon enough." – Albert Einstein

Welcome to October 21st, 2015, or as it used to be known: "the future."

Forever memorialized in Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future Part II, today is the date on which Doc Brown, Marty McFly, and his girlfriend Jennifer Parker step out of the DeLorean and into the Hill Valley of the future (or as it's currently known: "the present").

You may have heard about this. People are pretty excited about. At the risk of being hyperbolic, you...

On June 14th, prolific cult filmmaker Larry Cohen’s (It’s Alive, Maniac Cop) wonderfully eclectic horror comedy The Stuff will celebrate its 30th anniversary. Released during the heyday of Reaganomics, Cohen’s playful take on modern consumerism explored society’s growing compulsions for fast food and other potentially (or even directly) harmful products that we were all happily consuming without any real knowledge of just what we were putting inside our bodies. It may not be as well-known as some of its genre peers, but The Stuff has always been a favorite of mine, especially considering the amount of ambition and passion Cohen displays onscreen from start to finish.

The Stuff is centered around a mysterious, fluffy food product known only as, well, “The Stuff.” Discovered bubbling up from the grounds in a remote mining area, the highly addictive substance is quickly marketed out as pretty much the greatest...

The best and most telling scene in tonight’s episode of The Americans is the one following the moment that gives “I Am Abassin Zadran” its namesake. Gabriel and Claudia (Margo Martindale, returning the only way she can: triumphantly) meet in a restaurant to discuss how operation Turn the Paige is proceeding. “14 types of omelettes, 20 kinds of hamburgers. How does one choose?” Gabriel wonders, a dilemma Claudia dubs “the paradox of being American.” “Isn’t this a Greek diner?” he continues, a little tilt of his head saying more than he has to about how well they’ve adjusted to their adopted home. Claudia and Gabriel have been doing this job for decades, but the land of too many opportunities is still foreign to them.

The burden of choice was something Alvin Toffler wrote about in 1970’s Future Shock. Toffler theorized that there may one day come a point where...

Orson Welles’s voice is so distinctive that the creators of the '90s animated series “Pinky and the Brain” based the voice of the titular Pinky on the famed director. So yeah, Welles had a great set of pipes and it’s no wonder he started his career on the radio, or why director Alex Grasshoff tapped Welles to drop some narration on a short documentary. Open Culture shared Grasshoff’s 45-minute-long documentary “Future Shock,” and before Y2K, there was this. The short doc is based on futurist Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book on his conjectures of what the future of technology will bring for us as a society—Spoiler: nothing good. Basically, Toffler put forth the notion back then that things were changing too quickly, and that humans simply weren't prepared to deal with such rapid technological growth. Maybe it's a good thing he didn't live to see...

We're like demented twitchers, ticking off movie titles – but how many of these films do we actually need to see?

I was halfway through Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman's perceptive and entertaining book about horror cinema since the 1960s, when I had my first anxiety attack. Spawn of the Slithis? Trail of the Screaming Forehead? All those horror movies, 95% of which the author estimates he has actually watched! He and I are of the same generation, and started reviewing films around the same time, in the early 1980s. So how come he's seen so many more than me?

Ideally, one would be able to explain the discrepancy by dismissing Newman as the sort of otaku who never shifts from the sofa in front of his DVD player, but that just isn't true; all the signs are he leads a full and active social life, certainly fuller and more active than mine.

They predicted the “electronic frontier” of the Internet, Prozac, YouTube, cloning, home-schooling, the self-induced paralysis of too many choices, instant celebrities, and the end of blue-collar manufacturing. Not bad for 1970.

In the opening minutes of Future Shock, a 1972 documentary based on the book of the same name, a bearded, cigar-puffing, world-weary Orson Welles staggers down an airport’s moving walkway, treating the camera like a confidante. “In the course of my work, which has taken me to just about every corner of the globe, I see many aspects of a phenomenon which I’m just beginning to understand,” he says. “Our modern technologies have changed the degree of sophistication beyond our wildest dreams. But this technology has exacted a pretty heavy price. We live in an age of anxiety and time of stress. And with all our sophistication, we are in fact the victims of our own technological strengths –-...

<

This week, as befits a child of the English Midlands (not to be confused with Middle Earth, no Orc or Hobbit, I), I thought I'd get all Shakespearean on your asses. First, I'd just like to state that my editor, the bounteous Tyler, says I need to get to the point more quickly, so here we are [Ed note: I trimmed this a bit]. This week's topic is the tricky subject of meetings. Where the jiggins do you meet when you work from home? Maybe you designate the utility room as a conference room, with Danish pastries and coffee on top of the ironing board. If it's a "my place or yours?" scenario, you might want to opt for the latter. There's also the option of your local café, or joining a members' club--all options that we will explore in full. Shakey's iambic pentameters coming up in a bit.

I have spent the past three years working...