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Loc Agency, a brand and talent management service founded by Jessica Hoy and Teddy Duvall, has launched to offer strategic advisory and creative services for films, personalities and more.

Loc Agency works with a range of feature films, brands and high-profile talent to deliver brand management, public relations, special events and sponsorship sales and brand activation services.

Their clients have included companies such as Robert Schwartzman’s Utopia, which remains a client following the film company’s growth in the independent film industry, for their films including “Shiva Baby” and “Holy Spider.” Loc has also supported film campaigns for titles such as “Down With the King,” starring Freddie Gibbs, “Venus as a Boy,” starring Olivia Culpo, Mubi’s Paris premiere of the Dash Snow documentary “Moments Like This Never Last” in partnership with Dover Street Market and the KT Tunstall-produced short film “Gutterpunk.”

The agency’s clients also include NFL Super Bowl winner Martellus Bennett,...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Double Walker (Colin West)

If one is looking for some post-Halloween chills, Colin West’s micro-budget ghost story Double Walker mostly fits the bill, albeit with a few stumbles. Approaching the supernatural with a more grounded feel akin to Paul Harrill’s Light From Light and David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, the film tracks a woman in specter form (a stand-out Sylvie Mix) who tracks down those responsible for her murder. While the production’s limitations can be painfully clear at times, with flat cinematography and flashbacks that feel far too on the nose, the film eventually coheres into a compelling look at the sins of humankind and what may come after death.

Where to Stream: VOD

Happy Hour and Asako I & II...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Dean Stockwell in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)The actor Dean Stockwell, remembered for his performances in films like The Boy with the Green Hair (1948), Paris, Texas (1984), Blue Velvet (1986), and many more, has died at the age of 85. As Sheila O'Malley mentions in her tribute, Stockwell's career was marked by numerous disappearances. He didn't always love acting, but "he lived long enough to be able to not just appreciate but feel the love that people had for him, the way audiences fell in love with him for 70 years." A newly discovered memoir by Paul Newman will be published next year by Knopf. Based on Newman's conversations with screenwriter Stewart Stern, the book aims to tell the legendary actor's story in his own words. Following the exit of Robert Pattinson and Taron Egerton, Joe Alwyn...

Cheryl Dunn's Moments Like This Never Last is showing exclusively on Mubi starting November 6, 2021 in many countries in the series Portrait of the Artist.The seeds of this film came about through a discussion with Dash’s friends about protecting his story. Two years after he passed people were coming around downtown New York asking shooters and friends if they had any footage of Dash because they were making a film about him. I did not know these people and neither did anyone else here. I had seen this happen before, someone comes from the outside to make a film about a scene, a place that they had nothing to do with, which is fine sometimes but in this case I didn’t think so.This film is about community, it’s about a close-knit family of friends that found each other in post-9/11 downtown NYC when there was...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

China Lost and Found: Eight Films by Jia Zhangke

One of the greatest directors to emerge in this young century, Jia Zhangke has captured his native country like few others. The Criterion Channel is now spotlighting his stellar body of work, including the new restoration of his debut Xiao Wu (1997), along with Platform (2000), Unknown Pleasures (2002), The World (2004), Still Life (2006), 24 City (2008), A Touch of Sin (2013), and Mountains May Depart (2015). Also playing is the documentary Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang from 2014.

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas)

In the quarter-century since its debut, Olivier Assayas’ hilarious, mischievous, altogether unclassifiable Irma Vep stands merrily uninterested in many things contemporary movies are meant to be interested in—not ultra-sophisticated narrative gimmickry...

Brooklyn-based Utopia has picked up worldwide sales rights to Hayley Garrigus’ “You Can’t Kill Meme,” a documentary feature which drills down on the political meme warfare enshrined by Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016.

The acquisition comes just ahead of the film’s world premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival this month. An on demand release in North America is planned for this fall, Utopia announced Monday.

“You Can’t Kill Meme” explores the rise of political meme instrumentation, anticipated by a 2004 visionary non-fiction book by Kirk Packwood called “Memetic Magic: Manipulation of the Root Social Matrix and the Fabric of Reality.”

The film sees Garrigus interview Packwood and other figures in the meme magic world to trace the emergence of figures such as Pepe the Frog, originally a comic book slacker, and Kek, an Egyptian deity of darkness before dawn, in order to understand their centrality for alt-right advocacy.

Robert Redford’s The Redford Center has elected both Dylan Redford and Jannat Gargi as co-chairs to its Board of Directors, the environmental nonprofit organization announced Thursday.

Dylan Redford is the son of the late James Redford, the co-founder of the organization who died at 58 last month. He joins Gargi, a co-chair since 2019 and vice president and head of documentaries for Vice Studios.

Together Redford and Gargi will lend their expertise to The Redford Center’s goal of producing impact-driven film and media in the fight for environmental justice, protection and repair.

“I am honored to be working alongside Jannat Gargi and the distinguished leaders of The Redford Center to further execute the mission set forth by my father and grandfather,” Dylan Redford said in a statement. “As a young filmmaker, my goal is to inspire the next generation of storytellers and drive the immediate action needed to protect the environment.