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In an unprecedented move for a major streamer in France, Apple has released Steve McQueen’s wartime drama Blitz for a rapid-fire two-day theatrical run on November 9 and 10 before its global release, including in France, on Apple TV+ on November 22.

Apple obtained an “exceptional visa” from the Cnc for a maximum of 500 screenings over a two-day period in French cinemas.that allows films to bypass the country’s strict media chronology course.

Blitz will not now have to wait the mandated 17 months currently required between a film’s theatrical release and streaming launch per France’s existing windowing laws.

The...

In this episode, we discuss cinema as an intense personal drive. Lila Avilés is a Mexican director who debuted in 2018 with La camarista, a film selected for the Toronto, San Sebastian, BFI and Morelia festivals. It was also nominated for the Goya Awards and received nine nominations and one Ariel Award.In 2023, she premiered her second feature film, Totem, as part of the Official Competition at the Berlinale, where it won the Ecumenical Jury Award. Totem was subsequently selected for festivals such as San Sebastian, Toulouse and Telluride. With acute sensitivity, her films expose the vitality, narrative richness and intimacy of minimal universes.On the other hand, Laura Citarella is an Argentine director and producer, co-founder of El Pampero Cine, one of the most prolific production companies in Argentina. Her work has been presented and awarded at festivals such as Rotterdam, Locarno, Venice and Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. She has produced...

Season 3, Episode 35 of “Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese,” titled “The Flower Incident,” airs at 7:30 Am on Friday, August 2, 2024, on Cbbc. This episode promises a blend of humor and adventure as Girl faces a tricky situation involving Ms. Rodriguez’s prized flowers.

The episode kicks off with a mishap when Girl accidentally destroys a beautiful arrangement of flowers belonging to Ms. Rodriguez. Realizing the potential trouble she might face, Girl decides to enlist the help of her siblings to cover up the accident. The ensuing chaos and attempts to fix the situation lead to a series of amusing and inventive schemes.

As Girl and her siblings work together to rectify the situation, viewers are in for a fun ride filled with clever problem-solving and family dynamics. The episode showcases the creative ways in which the characters handle their predicaments, all while maintaining their usual playful charm.

Tune in to...

The Gold Bug.To get to know El Pampero Cine, it would be best to start with their contradictions. Equally screen maximalists and minimalists, they have made some of the biggest small films of the past two decades: consider the ambitious, narrative-hopping epics for which they’re best known, such as La flor and Trenque Lauquen. The collective is impressive as much for the way they finance yearslong productions on shoestring budgets as for their expansive, Borgesian storytelling. Working largely with consumer-grade equipment and refusing most public financing, the spirit of El Pampero Cine is one of limitless creative possibility and roguish independence.Founded in 2002, the group consists of Mariano Llinás, Laura Citarella, Alejo Moguillansky, and Agustín Mendilaharzu, all of whom direct their own projects and work on each other’s in various creative roles. The group came together after the production of Llinás’s first feature, Balnearios (2002), in order to distribute that film,...

Rodrigo Moreno's The Delinquents is screening exclusively on Mubi in many countries.The Delinquents.Words have no owner. They simply are. They live in the speakers of a language, but no one has possession of a verb or a noun. If anyone can come close to such ownership, it is an artist, who puts the word in a complex combination that is theirs alone. A filmmaker's material is not words—though some might say a shot is its equivalent—but rather the world. Through framing, cutting, and duration, the director makes a movie their own, yet what is shot does not obey the will of the filmmaker. The material of the world is the filmmaker's lyrics, and the world does not belong to them.The arrangement and rearrangement of material—whether of words or of the world when it is filmed—into new works of art can be linked...

Laura Citarella’s lengthy romantic conundrum refuses to tie up its many loose ends but her film-making language ensures that cult status beckons

Laura Citarella’s movie is a coolly unhurried four hours-plus, split into two parts of around two hours each; it is from the same producer, in fact, as Argentinian auteur Mariano Llinás’s legendary 13-and-a-half hour film La Flor. Compared with that, Trenque Lauquen – whose title means “round lake” and is a city in Buenos Aires province – is a mere cine-haiku; but it is still a domestic epic, a giant puzzle, a whopping solutionless mystery and a meandering shaggy dog story with a hint of Borges or As Byatt’s Possession. And Citarella might have mixed these influences with Lynch or even David Robert Mitchell’s divisive noir Under the Silver Lake. Yet for all its deadpan charm, there is something here which I couldn’t quite make friends with,...

Lost in the Night (Amat Escalante).The more familiar one becomes with Cannes, the less one comes to expect anything like aesthetic coherence from it. Even if one accepts its nominal (or self-proclaimed) status as the standard-setter for international arthouse cinema, there’s still a fair amount of variation within its vast program. Which is to say that while one can lament the general calcification of festival-circuit aesthetics, the arbitrary programming decisions of Thierry Frémaux, or the often perplexing set of awards handed out each year, there are always films worth seeking out. In 1982, the French critic Serge Daney remarked that Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman and Godard’s Passion were part of cinema’s “secret factory”: that is, films which wouldn’t receive awards, but from which future directors would draw inspiration in years to come. The challenge with each edition, of course, is to discover which films those are.

While many films through the summer movie season will boast of their epic scope, we imagine the results will pale in comparison to a fall festival highlight that is now arriving in theaters. As a producer of Extraordinary Stories and La Flor, Laura Citarella is well-versed in telling tales on a large canvas. Her latest feature––the two-part, four-hour Trenque Lauquen––will open on April 21 at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center and April 29 at LA’s American Cinematheque. Ahead of the release from Cinema Guild, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the new trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: The search for a missing woman unspools in two unexpectedly interconnected parts in Laura Citarella’s playful new feature. The missing woman is Laura (Laura Paredes), a biologist cataloging plant species in and around the Argentinean city of Trenque Lauquen. The men searching for her: Rafael, her boyfriend, and Ezequiel, a...

During production on the second season of Netflix’s “Russian Doll,” Natasha Lyonne become obsessed with filming a pivotal finale sequence at a location that was her “kind of kink” — the underground cisterns in Budapest.

“I have two churches in my life: science and the movies. And what I love about science is that it is so conclusively bigger than me,” Lyonne told Variety during an interview on the upstate New York set of “Poker Face,” her upcoming Rian Johnson-created Peacock series. “I have a real intuitive understanding of the language of cinema and literature and music. That is my very organic love language, for lack of a better word. I can really see the beauty and horror of life, the magic of life, I can see it so clearly there. And then with science, I was able to really to start latching my brain onto ideas that were...

The Parrot and the Swan

“The film is an excuse for a more important thing.”—The Gold BugWatching the films of Alejo Moguillansky can often feel like playing a children's game—the rules are constantly being invented and reinvented on the fly, cinematic conventions are bent into whatever shape produces the most fun. Watching films like The Parrot and the Swan (2013) where the main character is also the film’s boom operator and the film’s soundtrack is tethered to how he moves across the frame, it’s easy to think of the overly playful 1960s work of Jean-Luc Godard wherein the discovery of cinema’s many possibilities becomes the driving reason for the film itself.And, like Godard, this unbridled pursuit of cinematic freedom also comes hand in hand with a sense of political curiosity—namely, in Moguillansky’s case, a Marxist exploration of artistic labor in a capitalist system.

“Show, don’t tell,” says conventional wisdom. “Conceal, conceal, conceal” responds director Andreas Fontana, whose debut feature “Azor” paints a portrait of fear using palpable gaps in conversation. As a Swiss banker, Yvan (Fabrizio Rongione) follows in the footsteps of his missing colleague, and Fontana’s self-assured filmmaking captures a chilling atmosphere against the backdrop of Argentina’s Dirty War. The film seldom wavers from its singular idea and feeling; tonally, it’s a stroll across a plateau by design, but it teeters constantly over that plateau’s edge.

A false tropical backdrop and washed-out footage of a well-dressed man with a forced smile yank us into the story and its permeating sense of artifice. Perhaps this man is Yvan’s missing business partner, or perhaps he is the idea of an influential outsider under the thumb of vastly more influential local forces. This is the world Yvan enters with...

"Act as simple as you can, my dear." Mubi has released an official trailer for an intriguing film titled Azor, which first premiered at the 2021 Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. It's described as a "political thriller" but it's unlike any other political thriller. Yvan De Wiel, a private banker from Geneva, goes to Argentina in the midst of a dictatorship to replace his partner, the object of the most worrying rumours, who disappeared overnight. It's set during a tumultuous time in Argentina in the 1970s, all about the power play of money. "In his remarkably assured debut, Swiss director Andreas Fontana invites us into this seductive, moneyed world where political violence simmers just under the surface." It's co-written by Argentinian filmmaker Mariano Llinás (La Flor), and is "a riveting look at international intrigue worthy of John le Carré or Graham Greene." Starring Fabrizio Rongione, Stéphanie Cléau, Elli Medeiros, and Alexandre Trocki.

Continuing their tradition (assuming La Flor and Dead Souls comprise a tradition) of epic-length arthouse fare, Grasshopper Film will release next month The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin), an eight-hour Japanese-Swedish feature from C.W. Winter and Anders Edström. By most accounts (including a top prize at last year’s Berlinale) the picture earns its 480 minutes, having pulled raves from Cinema Scope and Film Comment—the latter claiming it “speaks to the power, beauty, and necessity of the theatrical experience.”

That theatrical experience begins July 16 at Film at Lincoln Center as part of their NYFF58 Redux series, ahead of which comes a sparse, intriguing trailer of remarkable still photographs. Whatever that does (or doesn’t) convey about this eight-hour experience, consider us deeply in its thrall already.

Watch the preview and find two posters below:

The post U.S. Trailer for Acclaimed The Works and Days...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Afrofuturism

Curated by Ashley Clark, The Criterion Channel is putting the spotlight on Afrofuturism in a new series exploring, as Ytasha Womack writes, films that “combine elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs.” Along with a handful of shorts, the features include Space Is the Place (1974), Born in Flames (1983), The Brother from Another Planet (1984), Ornette: Made in America (1985), Yeelen (1987), Welcome II the Terrordome (1995), The Last Angel of History (1996), An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012), White Out, Black In (2014), Crumbs (2015), Once There Was Brasilia (2017), and Supa Modo (2018).

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

City Hall (Frederick Wiseman)

In the opening shot of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery,...

Closing out a year in which we’ve needed The Criterion Channel more than ever, they’ve now announced their impressive December lineup. Topping the highlights is a trio of Terrence Malick films––Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The New World––along with interviews featuring actors Richard Gere, Sissy Spacek, and Martin Sheen; production designer Jack Fisk; costume designer Jacqueline West; cinematographers Haskell Wexler and John Bailey; and more.

Also in the lineup is an Afrofuturism series, featuring an introduction by programmer Ashley Clark, with work by Lizzie Borden, Shirley Clarke, Souleymane Cissé, John Akomfrah, Terence Nance, and more. There’s also Mariano Llinás’s 14-hour epic La flor, Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time, Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, plus retrospectives dedicated to Mae West, Cary Grant, Barbra Streisand, and more.

Check out the lineup below and return every Friday for our weekly streaming picks.

Mariano Llinás' La Flor is showing July and August on Mubi in the United States.1.In the Argentinian film La Flor (2018), a certain kind of sight and a certain kind of sound predominate—spread right across its roughly thirteen-and-a-half hours and six major parts.First, the sight. There are various directors in cinema history known for their stubborn insistence on using a particular camera lens which becomes their veritable stylistic signature: for example, the 25-millimeter lens for deep focus effect in Jacques Rivette; or the split diopter in Brian De Palma. Mariano Llinás takes the exactly opposite position in La Flor: his lens-weapon of choice is a defiantly shallow one, plunging great expanses of any frame into blur. Sometimes there’s a relatively traditional bit of focus-pulling back and forth between two points in a scene. Far more often, it’s a mise en scène based on characters slowly...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Clemency (Chinonye Chukwu)

From Escape from Alcatraz to Cool Hand Luke to The Shawshank Redemption, cinema is rich with not only prison films focused on the plight of the prisoner, but also depicting wardens in an evil light. Clemency, winner of the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival, flips the script in both ways, both turning the spotlight on a warden and painting her in an empathetic, complicated light. Led by Alfre Woodard, she gives a riveting, emotional performance as the Bernadine Williams, a woman who is stuck between the demands of her grueling job and a disintegrating marriage, and can’t give her all to both.

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

Emma. (Autumn de Wilde)

Draw the quick conclusion for why I had little desire to note-take during Emma. (stylized with a period; reasons probably unnecessary), but don’t mistake this limited interest as a dismissal of the entire project. And if whatever compliments it can be paid require meager critical insight, these virtues are nevertheless evident: its ensemble cast befit their talky material with total charm; its design elements, a live-or-die component of 19th-century period pieces, are often exquisite; and notwithstanding slightly anemic aspects to its digital palette, this ornate package is photographed with care. – Nick N. (full review)

Where to Stream: Amazon, Google

La Flor...

The International Cinephile Society is known for going its own way with its annual awards, and its latest edition is no exception. Leading the field for its 17th awards was Pedro Almodóvar’s semi-autobiographical “Pain and Glory,” which won best picture, and best actor for Antonio Banderas.

The Ics is made up of more than 100 accredited journalists, film scholars, historians and other industry professionals. Led by Ics president Cédric Succivalli, each year the Ics honors the finest in American and international cinema.

Best director went to Céline Sciamma for her 18th-century story of obsession “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” while the film’s Adèle Haenel earned the supporting actress prize.

Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” – which is up for six Oscars this weekend – was another hot Ics favorite, winning original screenplay, ensemble and production design awards.

Vitalina Varela won the lead actress prize for her role as a Cape...

La práctica

It’s already been five years since Martín Rejtman’s (one of the key figures of New Argentine Cinema) last film, 2014’s Two Shots Fired. Rejtman has stated his lasted project, The Practice, which will be hist first film shot outside of Argentina, is one he’s been subconsciously prepping for the last two decades. The project became a five country co-production in 2019 between Rosa Films (Portugal), La Unión de los Ríos (Argentina), Forastero (Chile), The Film Kitchen (Netherlands), Pandora Films (Germany), and Interior Xiii (Mexico) and will be headlined by Esteban Bigliardi.…...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

Before we get to our weekly streaming picks, check out our annual feature: Where to Stream the Best Films of 2019.

Cold Case Hammarskjöld (Mads Brügger)

In 1961, Secretary-General of the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld was killed in a plane crash in Africa under mysterious circumstances. Beginning as an investigation into his still-unsolved death, the trail that Mads Brügger follows in Cold Case Hammarskjöld is one that expands to implicate some of the world’s most powerful governments in unfathomably heinous crimes. Without revealing the specifics of the jaw-dropping revelations in this thoroughly engrossing documentary, if there’s any justice, what is brought to light will cause global...

1. The Last Black Man in San FranciscoNo surprises here if you’ve seen my Best of the Decade list, in which this design came in at #4. To be honest, I could almost have filled an entire top ten with Akiko Stehrenberger’s 2019 posters. In the last few weeks alone she has released a stunning alternative art print for Breathless, superb new posters for Honey Boy, Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, and, most notably, a gorgeous minimalist optical illusion for Portrait of a Lady on Fire. But my favorite of the year still remains this miracle. As I said in my decade poll, “this was the second poster by Akiko that A24 released for The Last Black Man in San Francisco. The first was masterful and striking and beautifully painted, but the second one was next level...a conceptual piece that conveys both place (the impossibly steep streets of the titular city...

Further releases include For Sama and Hustlers.

This week sees the release of Universal Pictures’ period drama Downton Abbey, adapted from the enormously popular ITV series that ran from 2010 to 2015.

Michael Engler directed the feature, having helmed several episodes of the series, from a screenplay by its original creator Julian Fellowes. Returning cast members include Hugh Bonneville, Laura Carmichael and Jim Carter. The film sees the Crawley film await a visit from King George V and Queen Mary.

The project is tailor-made for a UK cinema-going audience thanks to the popularity of the series combined with the typical success of...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe word is out: Mubi has acquired the worldwide rights for Luca Guadagnino's luminous short film The Staggering Girl, starring Julianne Moore, Mia Goth, KiKi Layne, Kyle MacLachlan and more. Deadline has the full report.We're very saddened that due to Ontario's arts funding cuts, the essential feminist film magazine cléo has announced their immediate closure. At The Globe & Mail, the magazine's editors and contributors reflect upon their run and the tangible community it fostered.The wait for Apichatpong Weerasethakul's long gestating project with Tilda Swinton, entitled Memoria, is nearly over. The film has finally gone to camera, and Variety provides a glimpse of the set.Recommended Viewing With The Laundromat, it looks like Soderbergh returns to his (welcomed!) comedic register alongside a stellar cast—Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, and Sharon Stone...

Save for the below three texts, written daily and without distance, my thoughts on Mariano Llinás’s La flor are now mostly lost and long gone. Premiered in three parts across three days at the tail-end of the 2018 Locarno Film Festival, this 14-hour film full of endless dead ends remains more memorable for the unique conditions of its viewing than for its many plots. In spite of instructive interludes scattered throughout—Llinás does announce each episode’s excluded beginning, middle, or end, an admonition that promises no unity other than the reliable reappearance and reinvention of its four star performers—any spectator would have every reason to doubt Llinas’s reliability as narrator, inclined instead to approach with caution and see for themselves. And so, with a unique opportunity to embrace uncertainty and be suspended in self-doubt, blindly writing on La flor became as pleasurable as watching La flor. Free...

A decade in the making, Mariano Llinás’ “La Flor” opens this weekend from Grasshopper Film. Clocking in at over 13 hours across six “episodes,” “La Flor” brings a whole new meaning to the concept of binge-watching. Each episode stars Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes. It’s an epic of subplots within subplots, unexpected digressions, and genres on top of genres — from a B-movie to a musical to a spy thriller, a period piece, a remake of a French classic, and, finally, to something altogether metafictional.

Grasshopper promises a “wildly entertaining… adventure in scale and duration” — and quite possibly in patience as well. “La Flor” earns its place among history’s very long movies, from Raúl Ruiz’s “Mysteries of Lisbon,” Jacques Rivette’s “Out 1” and Bela Tarr’s “Sátántangó” to pretty much anything directed by Lav Diaz, the modern master of slow cinema.

Originally, “La Flor...

Regardless of the premise behind the age-old foundation we still call the American Dream, not all are afforded the same prosperous outcome. Only the most powerful are granted the benefit of the doubt — the luxury to fall, reset and ultimately thrive. For the marginalized forced to kick-start their endeavors far behind on the racetrack, it’s a different story. How the intersection of race, gender and class shapes and oftentimes unjustly dictates one’s journey is eloquently examined in “Luce,” the third feature from Nigerian-American filmmaker Julius Onah.

This cumulatively unnerving psychodrama, where everyone harbors a deep secret, couldn’t be more relevant to today’s America of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and a severely biased allocation of power. But co-writers Onah and Jc Lee (who wrote the stage play on which the film is based) take matters a step further. Their handsomely dynamic script continually pits various high-stakes qualms against each other,...

The first thing to know about “La Flor” is that it’s 14 hours and 28 minutes long. The second is that it more than justifies that intimidating runtime, which is divided into six episodes.

Each discrete story unfolds according to the dictates of a different genre, which is to say that Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás’ unique achievement is a B-movie, a musical mystery, a spy thriller, a self-reflexive metafiction, a black-and-white riff on Renoir’s “A Day in the Country,” and a vague dramatization of an 18th-century Englishwoman’s account of being abducted by Native Americans — all at once. The same quartet of actresses star in all but one episode, lending the affair much-needed continuity.

Llinás himself opens the film to introduce his ambitious project, mapping out the structure on a sheet of paper in a way that explains the title: Four of the stories have a beginning but no end; the fifth,...

"An astonishment." Grasshopper Film has unveiled an official trailer for an intriguing cinema project titled La Flor, made by Argentinian filmmaker Mariano Llinás. A decade in the making, La Flor is a 14-hour long film that is being shown in four parts. La Flor "robs" the cinema in six episodes. Each episode corresponds to a cinematographic genre. The first is a "B-series", as the Americans used to do. The second is a musical melodrama with a hint of mystery. The third is a spy movie. The fourth is an abyss of cinema. The fifth revisits an old French film. The sixth speaks of captive women in the 19th century. These six episodes, these six genres have one thing in common: their four actresses. Starring Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes. This is really only for die-hard cinema nerds who feel the need to sit through it, because...

Joining the rarified pantheon of expansive cinematic storytelling occupied by the likes of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks, and any number of Lav Diaz films comes Mariano Llinás’ 14-hour epic La Flor. Following a festival tour including Locarno, New York, and Toronto, Grasshopper Film will now unleash the cinematic event of the year starting next week in New York City and we’re pleased to premiere the trailer.

A decade in the making and shot across three continents, the film stars Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa, and Laura Paredes across six episodes, each bringing a different genre to the table, from a bonkers B-movie about mummies to a musical to a spy thriller to a Renoir remake and beyond. Llinás, who burst onto the international filmmaking scene with 2008’s four-hour Extraordinary Stories,...

Film won the Caligari Prize in the Berlinale Forum section this year.

Thomas Heise’s Heimat Is A Space In Time, the feature documentary chronicling three generations of the filmmaker’s family, set against the backdrop of dramatic events in German and global history dating back more than a century, has been picked up by UK distributor/exhibitor Ica Cinema.

The outfit struck the deal with sales representative Deckert Distribution and is planning to release the title on November 22.

The documentary premiered at the Berlinale this year, winning the Caligari Prize in the Berlinale Forum section. It also won the...

‘Little Monsters’.

The Melbourne International Film Festival (Miff) has unveiled the first 29 films on its line-up this year, including the world premiere of Good Thing Productions and Passion Pictures’ The Australian Dream which will open the festival August 1.

The documentary, written by Stan Grant and directed by Brit Daniel Gordon, looks at race, identity and belonging from the perspective of former Sydney Swans captain and Indigenous rights activist Adam Goodes, who in 2013 sparked a national conversation about racism after requesting a 13-year-old Collingwood supporter be removed from the ground after calling him an “ape”.

“The Australian Dream is a compelling kickstart both to our festival this year, and to a national conversation,” said Miff artistic director Al Cossar.

‘The Australian Dream’.

“It’s an accomplished piece of documentary filmmaking that tackles broader questions of who we are as a nation, together, in deeply affecting terms. It’s a film for all Australians,...

Cannes — Argentina’s La Unión de los Ríos, Portugal’s Rosa Films –a co-producer on Albert Serra’s Un Certain Regard entry “Liberté”– Chile’s Forastero, Netherlands’ The Film Kitchen, Germany’s Pandora Films and Mexico’s Interior Xiii have teamed to co-produce “The Practice” from Argentine director-screenwriter and writer Martín Rejtman.

A pedigree multi-lateral international co-production is often these says a sign of prominent big art film – think Lucrecia Martel’s “Zama” – on which producers will seek to finance via partners’ equity finance rather than pre-sales.

The five-country co-production agreement was signed Monday in Cannes. A naturalistic comedy about the drama of approaching middle age, “The Practice” follows Gustavo, an Argentine yoga instructor living in Chile who recently lost his wife and home while an injury prevents him from continuing with his yoga practice.

“It’s a comedy about the yoga world. It’s been over 20 years since I...

The world of documentary filmmaking is as diverse as that of its fiction sibling, although what’s regularly shown on television or in larger theater chains may lead you to believe otherwise. While fiction is seemingly freer to imagine different stories and forms, the culturally dominant approach to nonfiction cinema hardly suggests its possible dynamism. Since documentaries are often hamstrung by notions ironically imported from mainstream fiction filmmaking—character arcs, straight-forward storytelling, satisfying conclusions—the kind of nonfiction movies that achieve broader cultural interest tend to be neatly packaged delivery vehicles for information one could easily glean much more quickly from an article. This approach while most visible is hardly the norm, and the world is far too messy and filmmakers far too adroit at being inspired by this terrific confusion to be limited to the commercial standards of truth-telling. After all, while the truth is a necessary component of living,...

Deserting a festival’s official competition for a thematic retrospective can feel somewhat awkward, especially at an extravaganza so rich in new voices as the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr). Yet the decision proved most fruitful with “The Spying Thing,” a sidebar Iffr devoted to “espionage as a way of filming and the camera as a spying weapon.” A 21-strong lineup offered timeless classics as well as some of the world cinema's latest offerings (László Nemes’ Sunset and Yoon Jong-bin’s The Spy Gone North). Yet “The Spying Thing” started—according to Gustavo Beck, who co-curated it alongside Gerwin Tamsma—with the second of Mariano Llinás’ monumental 3-part, 14-hour epic La Flor. I shall not attempt to dwell into Llinás’ opus magnum—Ross McDonnell already did an egregious job for the Notebook reviewing it at its Locarno premiere last August. Suffice it to say that La Flor’s second chapter...

In today’s film news roundup, Michael B. Jordan’s “The Silver Bear” finds a director, biopic “Running for My Life” is in the works, Fox is using new trailer compliance software and the 14-hour “La Flor” gets distribution.

Director Attachment

Gerard McMurray, director of “The First Purge,” will write and direct Michael B. Jordan’s thriller “The Silver Bear” from Lionsgate, Nickel City Pictures and Jordan’s Outlier Society.

McMurray was a producer on Jordan’s 2013 breakout drama “Fruitvale Station.” Jordan became attached to the “The Silver Bear” in October.

“The Silver Bear” is based on the book series by Derek Haas, the screenwriter for “Wanted” and “3:10 to Yuma.” The novel centers on an assassin named Columbus — called the Silver Bear by some — who tracks a powerful politician with presidential aspirations.

Project Launch

Film Roman Productions, best known for producing “The Simpsons,” is starting production of its first non-animated feature film,...

Rotterdam has a unique position in the festival circuit, avoiding the simultaneous frenzy of premieres in Sundance and the jockeying for major titles at Berlin, Cannes and Venice, and instead taking chances on under the radar discoveries from around the world. The Bright Future competition focuses on unique, emerging filmmakers but across all the sections you’ll find work that fits that mandate. This edition’s best films announced an exciting group of filmmakers that deserve your attention. Here are 10 standout world premieres from Iffr to look out for in 2019.

“Again Once Again”

Written and directed by Romina Paula, known best as a regular in the films of Matías Piñeiro and seen most recently in Mariano Llinas’ 13-hour-epic “La flor,” this assured first feature was the most impressive debut at the festival. A docu-fiction, the film stars Paula as herself as she and her four-year old boy Ramón stay with...

Zhu Shengze’s ’Present.Perfect.’ takes Tiger award.

International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr) has announced the award winners for its 48th edition, with Zhu Shengze’s Present.Perfect. taking the Tiger Award, with €40,000 accompanying prize.

The Tiger jury, comprised of Alfredo Jaar, Daniela Michel, Susanna Nicchiarelli, Katriel Schory and Pimpaka Towira, described it as ”a daring film that takes us to places where we have never been…brings to light characters that want and need to be seen.”

Ena Sendijarević’s Take Me Somewhere Nice received the special jury award in the Tiger competition, praised by the jury as “a...

One of the best-curated year-end lists every year comes from the long-running Film Comment magazine and their poll featuring around 100 of their contributors. This year’s list is no different, topped by Lucrecia Martel’s astounding Zama (now on Amazon Prime!) and also featuring Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, Valeska Grisebach’s Western, Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In, Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls, and more.

Along with their top 20, they also give a list of the best undistributed films of the year, from Mariano Llinás’s 14-hour epic La Flor to Jodie Mack’s gorgeous feature debut The Grand Bizarre to new films from Carlos Reygadas, Tsai Ming-liang, Lav Diaz, Roberto Minervini, and more. So, distributors take note, and check out both lists below.

Film Comment’s Top 20 Films Released in 2018:

1. Zama Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Brazil/Spain

2. Burning Lee Chang-dong, South Korea

3. First Reformed Paul Schrader,...

Sight & Sound has unveiled its annual film poll, and the winner is unlikely to come as a surprise: “Roma,” whose awards-season dominance continues unabated. Alfonso Cuarón’s black-and-white drama, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and has also been named the best film of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association, has emerged as 2018’s most well-received cinematic offering — at least among critics.

Rounding out the top five are Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” (which wasn’t released in the UK until this year), Lee Chang-dong’s “Burning” (which was Lafca’s Best Picture runner-up), Paweł Pawlikowski’s “Cold War,” and Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed.”

More than 160 critics, programmers, and academics participated in the poll. The full results:

1. “Roma”

2. “Phantom Thread”

3. “Burning”

4. “Cold War”

5. “First Reformed”

6. “Leave No Trace”

7. “The Favourite”

= “You Were Never Really Here...

A decade ago Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás released his four-hour drama Extraordinary Stories, which was only a taste of what to expect when it came to his follow-up. Clocking in at an epic fourteen hours, La Flor is split up into three parts and six episodes, and after a decade-long production, it finally saw the light of day this year. Following four actresses in a variety of stories, from B-movie to musical melodrama to spy movie and more, the film screened at Locarno, Tiff, and Nyff, and now it will get a release in France in March. The first trailer has now arrived, which features no dialogue but rather a selection of enticing images from the various parts.

Leonardo Goi said in his review from Locarno, “I am starting this review of La Flor from a segment that in the film’s Borgesian labyrinthic narrative would probably go unnoticed, because...

At the 56th New York Film Festival there were titles that have intrigued, beguiled, and challenged viewers, perhaps none more so than Mariano Llinás’ fourteen-hour grand experiment La Flor and Orson Welles’ posthumously released The Other Side of The Wind. The former will be lucky to achieve any life after the festival; the latter will be widely available through Netflix next month. These are both films of grand ambition, creativity, and reflexivity. Quite coincidentally, both feature films within films that underscore this reflexivity, center the process of filmmaking for viewers, and show Llinás and Welles unlocking a kind of creative freedom that very few are privileged to make and be seen in such a way.

How does any filmmaker justify a fourteen-plus hour runtime? In the case of the Argentine Llinás, it is to express or at least give the impression of self-awareness in his massive undertaking with La Flor,...