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Autumn Classics, Corman on the Future, Kent Jones Remembers Welles

  • To celebrate the beginning of autumn this week, the BFI has published a list of ten films set during the season, including Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Yasujiro Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon, Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, and Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata.
  • Also at the BFI, read an analysis of five key elements that define the work of Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.
  • In an interview for Film Comment, critic Nick Pinkerton talks with the legendary Roger Corman about the demise of the mid-budget genre movie, the future of the film industry, and Corman’s early mentorship of directors like Irvin Kershner and Francis Ford Coppola.
  • Taking stock of both industrial and aesthetic concerns, David Bordwell debunks alarmist claims that cinema is dead.
  • On Sunday, New York’s Museum of the Moving Image will kick off an Agnès Varda series, screening three of her films in conjunction with Reverse Shot’s new symposium on the director.
  • For the Village Voice, Melissa Anderson surveys Woman With a Movie Camera: Female Film Directors Before 1950, a series at New York’s Anthology Film Archives that “advances what should by now be a self-evident truth: Women filmmakers aren’t a footnote in the history of cinema; they are its authors.”
  • In anticipation of an upcoming TIFF Cinematheque series highlighting Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s favorite films, senior programmer James Quandt examines the auteur’s cinephilic affinities: “The 1950s was his favorite decade, no doubt because its nuclear anxiety, Cold War paranoia, familial fissures, and social constriction made American cinema prone to the florid and corrosive. Excess and artifice are crucial to Fassbinder’s taste and directorial style, and few films embodied those qualities more thrillingly than the ’50s Hollywood classics included here.”
  • In the Metrograph Edition, critic and New York Film Festival director Kent Jones shares his earliest memories of seeing Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons: “When I saw this desecrated masterpiece for the first time at the age of thirteen, I could actually feel where Welles’s footage stopped and RKO’s began: Ambersons is such a profoundly physical experience that the difference is plain.”
  • In the Library of America’s latest Moviegoer column, Carrie Rickey sings the praises of Barry Levinson’s 1984 take on the Bernard Malamud novel The Natural.
  • The thirtieth annual AFI Fest will honor Dorothy Dandridge, Ida Lupino, and Anna May Wong in its Cinema’s Legacy section this November.
  • Watch the new trailer for the fifty-fourth annual New York Film Festival, which opens next Friday:


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