News

The already-incredible line-up for the 2016 New York Film Festival just got even more promising. Ang Lee‘s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk will hold its world premiere at the festival on October 14th, the NY Times confirmed today. The adaptation of Ben Fountain‘s Iraq War novel, with a script by Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), follows a teenage soldier who survives a battle in Iraq and then is brought home for a victory lap before returning.

Lee has shot the film at 120 frames per second in 4K and native 3D, giving it unprecedented clarity for a feature film, which also means the screening will be held in a relatively small 300-seat theater at AMC Lincoln Square, one of the few with the technology to present it that way. While it’s expected that this Lincoln Square theater will play the film when it arrives in theaters, it may be...

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the Retrospective section of the 54th New York Film Festival, an ambitious two-part lineup that is both headlined and directly inspired by Bertrand Tavernier’s documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema.” Nyff will screen Tavernier’s doc — which clocks in at a hefty and informative 190 minutes — along with a selection of French classics that feature prominently in the film. Additionally, Nyff will play home to a 12-film exploration of the films of Henry Hathaway, one of Tavernier’s favorite American directors. What follows is a feast of French cinema and a crash course in the works of Hathaway.

Read More: New York Film Festival Announces James Gray’s ‘The Lost City of Z’ As Closing Night Selection

Highlights of the “A Brief Journey Through French Cinema” section, as it’s being quite charmingly billed, include Jean Renoir’s revolutionary epic “La Marsellaise,...

Looking back at 2012 on what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2012—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2012 to create a unique double feature.

All the contributors were asked to write a paragraph explaining their 2012 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch in that perfect world we know doesn't exist but can keep dreaming of every time we go to the movies.

How would you program some...

“We are still coming to terms with Robert Bresson, and the peculiar power and beauty of his films,” Martin Scorsese said in the 2010 book “A Passion For Film,” describing the often overlooked French filmmaker as “one of the cinema’s greatest artists.”

But while he may be revered by some as the finest French filmmaker bar Jean Renoir, outside hardcore cinephile circles he and his films are virtually unknown (perhaps regarded as too opaque or nebulous). Just consider the fact that almost every definitive book on the elusive director was published during the aughts to feel the full truth of Scorsese's statement about how we're still in the process of appreciating and understanding his life and work. Even Bresson’s actual birthdate is contested, adding further the ambiguities surrounding the director.

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen,” the meticulous Bresson once famously said, hinting at...

Right now is not a bad time for admirers of Robert Bresson. A traveling retrospective has made its way across numerous cities, and people who'd never gotten a chance to glimpse Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) now get to watch it on the big screen in a proper print. Furthermore, the critical and cinephilic culture surrounding Bresson's work is probably more alive now than it has been in a long time. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than the wider interest in (and affection for) the director's late color films, earlier misunderstood and dismissed in some quarters as odd aberrations which lacked the spiritual clarity or asceticism of the black-and-white work. It's for this reason that film culture can welcome a second, revised edition of James Quandt's crucial anthology, Robert Bresson.

There is simply no more essential book of material on Bresson to be found in the English language, unless...

Robert Bresson: The Over-Plenty of Life is a series we've been running in conjunction with the complete retrospective of Bresson's work that'll be touring North America through May. I thought I'd supplement Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's essays, Daniel Kasman's observations and Adrian Curry's collection of posters with a roundup of pointers to pieces on Bresson that have appeared over the past month or two. One of the occasions of the series, as I mentioned in the entry on the initial announcement (with its basic schedule of cities and dates) is the publication of an expanded and illustrated edition of series curator James Quandt's collection, Robert Bresson (Revised), so let's open this go round with notes on another book, Tony Pipolo's Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film. Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted his review for the Summer 2010 issue of Cineaste, in which he calls it…

one of the most careful and...

Asked by Sight & Sound to name the ten greatest films of all time, Robert Bresson submitted the following, somewhat notorious list:

1. City Lights

2. City Lights

3. The Gold Rush

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

There are two ways in which Robert Bresson is rarely spoken about: as a comic filmmaker (though, as the above demonstrates, he could be pretty damn funny) and as someone whose work displays the influence of other directors.

Let's begin with that second point. Going back to some of the earliest defenses—as well as the earliest dismissals—of his work, Bresson has largely been described as a filmmaker "without precedent;" his detractors from the 1940s to the 1960s complained that his films didn't work the way movies were supposed to, and his supporters were more than happy to praise his films for the exact same reasons (Jacques Becker, for one, took the pages of L'Écran français to defend the poorly-received Les dames du Bois de Boulogne...

A tonic for the New Year: for the next two weeks Film Forum is running a near-complete retrospective of the films of Robert Bresson programmed by the Tiff Cinematheque. The posters for Bresson’s films are a fascinating grab-bag of styles, verging from melodrama to minimalism to symbolism to the wildly inappropriate (see the Italian Mouchette), as designers tried to express and occasionally subvert Bresson’s celebrated and increasing austerity. My favorite may well be this lovely, witty French grande for Pickpocket, illustrated by the great Christian Broutin (best known for his iconic Jules and Jim posters). But there are plenty of other standouts, most especially Raymond Savignac’s series of playful cartoons for Bresson’s final three films: Lancelot du Lac, The Devil, Probably and L’Argent, and the stunning Czech surrealism for Une femme douce.

I present my favorite Bresson posters, a couple per film if possible, in chronological order.

The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson will be the first complete retrospective of Bresson's work in North America in 14 years. Tiff Cinematheque has announced today that the series "features a restored print of his acclaimed first feature Les Anges du péché (1943), a metaphysical thriller set in a convent, and new prints of key titles struck especially for the occasion of this retrospective such as the controversial Le Diable probablement (1977), which was prohibited to viewers under the age of eighteen in France as an incitement to suicide; A Man Escaped (1956), a work of resolute beauty that rigorously elevates the gruelling routines of prison life; Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), legendary for being unavailable in North America for almost two decades; and his last masterpiece, L'Argent (1983), a terse and chilling indictment of capitalism and modernity."

While the retrospective will run at Tiff Bell Lightbox from February 9 through March 18, it'll...