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French film industry to explore Vr at first edition of public festival running June 17-18 at Paris’s Forum des Image.

Claire Denis, Stéphane Brizé, Tony Gatlif and Rithy Panh will be among filmmakers exploring virtual reality at the first edition of the Paris Virtual Film Festival.

They are set to participate in a Vr Lab aimed at cinema professionals taking place within the public festival running June 17-18 at the Forum Des Images.

Michel Reilhac, the former Arte Cinema chief-turned-transmedia and Vr pioneer, initiated and is co-curating the entire festival.

He says the idea for the lab was born...

At the halfway point of December, there are, to put it lightly, many end-of-year lists hitting the web, and few publications have round-ups as consistently excellent as Film Comment‘s. (“Consistently excellent” translates to “aligns with my specific taste,” of course.) Their 20-film selection represents the year rather nicely, from the widely seen and frequently listed (e.g. Mad Max: Fury Road and Inside Out) landing among some of our limited-release favorites, including Timbuktu, The Assassin, and Jauja. As editor Gavin Smith says, “That balance, which happens to be encapsulated in the top five in micro form, feels about right for the agenda of this magazine, which, since the very beginning, has been to champion the best in cinema wherever it hails from, all creatures great and small. Since we managed to run features on 11 of these and sung the praises of another five, it’s a pleasure to close...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.Above: Jim Jarmusch photographed by Wim Wenders.The lineup for the 2015 Locarno Film Festival has been revealed, and includes new films by Hong Sang-soo, Andrzej Zulawski, Chantal Akerman, Athina Rachel Tsangari.A sad ending to an ambitious enterprise: The online, Us-based film publication The Dissolve has had to fold after only two years. Best of luck to their talented staff of editors and writings.Some good news from the online-film-criticism scene: the Norweigan film magazine Montages has launched its English-language international edition.!Portuguese great Manoel de Oliveira passed away last April at the age of 106. The documentary short Um Século de Energia, above, seems to be his final film.Critic Mike D'Angelo, a contributor to The Dissolve among many other publications, has written in defense of the "first-person review."If you were annoyed,...

We are saddened to hear of the passing of Time's inimitable critic, Richard Corliss (1944 - 2015), pictured above. Visit David Hudson's roundup at Keyframe Daily for coverage. In the past week there's been more additions to the Cannes Film Festival lineup, including new movies by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Naomi Kawase and Gaspar Noé.When Manoel de Oliveira died earlier this month, word spread that he had made a film that would be released only upon his death, Memories and Confessions. Now word has come that its premiere screening will be on the 4th of May in Porto.Above: We're on the fence whether we should be excited for this, but the trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's The Visit certainly has us intrigued.New York's essential film listing site Screen Slate has turned to Kickstarter to help fund its project. Speaking of New York, this May the Museum of the Moving...

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...

Jacques Rancière, Philippe Lafosse and the public in conversation about Straub-Huillet after a screening of From the Clouds to the Resistance and Workers, Peasants

Monday, February 16, 2004, Jean Vigo Cinema, Nice, France

Above: From the Clouds to the Resistance.

Philippe Lafosse: It seemed interesting to us, after having seen twelve films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and talked about them together, to ask another viewer, a philosopher and cinephile, to talk to us about these filmmakers. Jacques Rancière is with us this evening to tackle a subject that we’ve entitled “Politics and Aesthetics in the Straubs’ Films,” knowing that we could then look into other points.

Jacques Ranciere: First, a word apropos the “and” of “Politics and Aesthetics”: this doesn’t mean that there’s art on the one hand and politics on the other, or that there would be a formal procedure on the one hand and political messages on the other.

The second annual Migrating Forms experimental media festival will descend on the Anthology Film Archives in NYC on May 14-23 featuring the world’s greatest experimental videos, cultural documentaries, some that are a little of both; plus, several filmmaker retrospectives, some classic films and the endearingly popular Tube Time! video tournament.

Migrating Forms is such an entirely different beast than its predecessor, the New York Underground Film Festival, that we don’t have to keep saying this new event arose from the Nyuff’s ashes, do we? Ok, we’ll just say that one more time. Next year we won’t mention it because, even in it’s first year, Migrating Forms proved itself to be a completely unique arena in the field of experimental media making.

A couple of highlights from the lineup below: The new feature film by cultural explorer Kevin Jerome Everson, Erie, which captures life in...

I didn’t know what I was missing until I saw it right in front of me. Beaten and exhausted by 8 days at Rotterdam, I decided to end the festival on a high genre note with Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong “new wave” third film, Dangerous Encounters: 1st Kind. After being neck-deep in contemplative films for a brief but intense period of viewing, I had forgotten what the influx of young blood into Hong Kong at that time (including John Woo and Ann Hui, the latter of whom has a quite good film at the festival) meant: hunger. Hark’s screed—as it indeed can only be described as that—is a blood-shot, parasitic work of extreme angry energy and invention, fueled by MTV new aesthetics and Hong Kong problem solving, and ends up thrillingly shoving the our faces in the nihilistic and extremely bitter and paranoid culture of youth...

• The jury composed of Walter Carvalho, Saverio Costanzo, Irène Jacob, Jia Zhang-ke, Romuald Karmakar and Bruno Todeschini gave out a bunch of leopards on the weekend. Masahiro Kobayashi (see pic above) won the Golden Leopard for his film Ai no yokan (The Rebirth). Best Director was awarded to Capitaine Achab by Philippe Ramos (France) and the Special Jury Prize went to Memories (Jeonju Digital Project 2007) by Pedro Costa, Harun Farocki and Eugène Green. Spanish actress Carmen Maura and the French actor Michel Piccoli both received an Excellence Award (Michel Piccoli also received the prize for best actor in Sous les toits de Paris, joint winner was Michele Venitucci in Fuori dalle corde). And finally (and not surprisingly), Death at a Funeral (the Brit comedy by Frank Oz) won the audience award – this making it the 5th or 6th time that it has walked away from an international festival with such honors.

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