Goings On: Day-Lewis, Miyazaki, and More


New York. The series All or Nothing: The Fearless Performances of Daniel Day-Lewis is on at the Quad Cinema through December 24 and, in the Village Voice,Bilge Ebiri writes: “He doesn’t just do the work; he shows us the work. Watching him can be exhausting, and exhilarating.” Ebiri argues that there’s a “visceral quality” to the actor’s very presence. “And it’s one of the reasons why, no matter the protestations of promo copy, he never quite disappears—why he retains something of himself even under piles of makeup and research and period detail. We never quite forget that it’s him up there.” And “for Daniel Day-Lewis, it is perhaps his greatest strength—a high-wire act of engagement and distraction, of immersion and repulsion, that has resulted in one of the most unfathomably brilliant acting careers ever to grace our movie screens.”

Contributors to the Playlist revisit some of Day-Lewis’s “most essential roles.” The image at the top here is from Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), screening tonight and tomorrow—and coming out on DVD and Blu-ray in March.

A new 4K digital restoration of Red Desert (1964) screens this afternoon as part of MoMA’s Michelangelo Antonioni retrospective running through January 7. Writing for Film Journal International,Maria Garcia looks back on a visit Antonioni and Monica Vitti paid to Mark Rothko in New York in 1962 and notes that it “was the elemental and shimmering colors of Rothko’s imbricated style that inspired the mise-en-scène of Antonioni’s first color film.”

“Just two years after its release, Carol has become something of a Christmas classic,” writes Ben Kenigsberg in the New York Times. “And in another new tradition, the Metrograph is showing it on film, from the cinematographer Ed Lachman’s stunning personal print.” Todd Haynes’s film starring Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett screens from Tuesday through December 25.

“A hybrid documentary by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli made in close collaboration with its subject and star Em Cominotti, Empathy [2016] is an artful and intimate portrait/self-portrait of Em, a professional escort from Pittsburgh struggling to overcome a heroin addiction and survive from gig to gig,” writes Kazu Watanabe for Screen Slate. Tonight at Anthology Film Archives.

And from Tuesday through Friday, Anthology will be celebrating the birthday of its artistic director and one of its co-founders with the series Jonas Mekas: 95 and Counting.

Los Angeles. The New Beverly’s all in for the holidays. Here’s Whitney Seibold on Brian Henson’s The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) with Michael Caine and Richard Donner’s Scrooged (1988) with Bill Murray and Robert Mitchum, both screening on Thursday; Kim Morgan on Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Friday and Saturday; and Marc Edward Heuck on Christmas Evil (1980)—writer and director Lewis Jackson will be there for the midnight screening.

Chicago. The last Cine-List of the year covers goings on in the city all the way through January 4. From December 26 through January 4, the Music Box will present A Tribute to Studio Ghibli, a series of seven films by Hayao Miyazaki, all on 35 mm, and so at the top of the “Crucial Viewing” section of the Cine-List, we find capsule previews of Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Porco Rosso (1992), Princess Mononoke (1997), Spirited Away (2001), and Ponyo (2008).

Austin. The Film Society’s Home for the Holidays series is on from Friday through December 30.

Paris. The Cinémathèque française’s George A. Romero retrospective is on through December 30.

Frankfurt. “Elvira Notari, the earliest Italian woman filmmaker, worked between 1906 and 1930 in Naples, where she managed the production company Dora Film together with her husband Nicola Notari. She wrote, directed and produced around sixty feature films and a hundred documentaries and short films.” The interdisciplinary symposium Echoes of Parthenope: Elvira Notari's Cinema and Neapolitan Popular Culture is happening today through Tuesday at the Goethe-Universität.

Doha. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Gianfranco Rosi, and Andrey Zvyagintsev will be giving masterclasses and mentoring sessions during Qumra 2018 (March 9 through 14), presented by the Doha Film Institute. Nick Vivarelli has details in Variety.

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