Danielle Darrieux's Centennial, Bergman Loves Sex and the City
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- To celebrate the centennial birthday of iconic French actor Danielle Darrieux, Dan Callahan has written an ode to her breathtaking work in the films of Max Ophuls and Jacques Demy. Of her performance in The Earrings of Madame de . . ., he writes: “She had it in her to be the unfinished woman who is finished by love, and that will seal her cinematic immortality along with her very pleasing personal longevity.”
- For more on French cinema, read Celluloid Liberation Front’s piece at MUBI Notebook on director Jean-Pierre Melville, whose crime films depict human relations that are “always transactional, propelled by a self-interested melancholy leading to an existential dead-end.”
- Over at Fandor, watch a new video essay that details the far-reaching influence of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai on films as disparate as The Magnificent Seven, A Bug’s Life, and Mad Max: Fury Road.
- We knew Ingmar Bergman was an avid TV viewer, but we had no idea how much he loved Sex and the City. In an article about an opening for Sophie Calle’s latest public artwork, Sarah Nicole Prickett recounts how she shared a cab ride home with actor Kim Cattrall, who revealed that the Swedish auteur was a fan of the show and of her character, Samantha, in particular.
- In a new feature for Hazlitt, Abhrajyoti Chakraborty chronicles Satyajit Ray’s contentious experience in Hollywood and his unrealized script for The Alien, whose plot is strikingly similar to that of E.T.
- The paranormal tales of Daphne du Maurier have made their way to the screen in classics such as Rebecca and Don’t Look Now. With Roger Michell’s take on her novel My Cousin Rachel coming to theaters this year, Little White Lies explores the writer’s relationship to film adaptations of her work.
- In her program notes for a screening of Terrence Malick’s Badlands at the New Beverly Cinema, Kim Morgan gets personal about her love for the film, which she calls “so special, so enchanted, so truly transcendent that it clings to your very soul, a palimpsest on the brain.”
- The May/June issue of Film Comment has arrived, with a special section on Robert De Niro, the latest recipient of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Award. Also highlighted in the magazine: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1972 miniseries Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, Errol Morris’s interviewing style, and the resurgence of musicals in contemporary cinema.
- If you’re looking for what’s on the horizon for American independent film, check out the just-announced lineup for BAMcinemaFest 2017, which includes New York premieres of work by Michael Almereyda, Gillian Robespierre, Alex Ross Perry, Michael Showalter, and David Lowery.
