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As we roll up to July, we can hear the first rumblings of the fall festival season. Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, starring Daniel Craig as detective Benoit Blanc, will see its world premiere in Toronto during the forty-seventh edition running from September 8 through 18. Shot and set in Greece, Johnson’s fresh tale of murder most foul features Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline, Kate Hudson, and Dave Bautista.
Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, directed by Matthew Warchus (Pride) and starring Emma Thompson, will open the sixty-sixth BFI London Film Festival on October 5. The truly exciting news out of London, though, is next summer’s launch of the BFI Film on Film Festival, a showcase of new and archival prints—16 mm, 35 mm, and 70 mm as well as the rare and highly combustible nitrate.
The Viennale has just rolled out a preview of its sixtieth anniversary edition running from October 20 through November 1. There will be strands devoted to Elaine May, Med Hondo, Argentine film noir, and Austrian documentaries; a celebration of Werner Herzog’s eightieth birthday; two new issues of Textur, one dedicated to Kazakh director Darezhan Omirbayev, the other to Alain Guiraudie; and the first round of features includes Hong Sangsoo’s The Novelist’s Film, Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Tori and Lokita.
Among the films in the Karlovy Vary lineup are highlights from Berlin, such as Mitra Farahani’s See You Friday, Robinson, which is centered on a long-distance dialogue between Jean-Luc Godard and Iranian filmmaker and writer Ebrahim Golestan; Lukas Dhont’s Close, a critical favorite in Cannes; and restored classics, including Jaromil Jireš’s The Joke (1968). The fifty-sixth edition opens on Friday with Paolo Genovese’s Superheroes and closes on July 9 with George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing.
- Speaking of George Miller, there’s a version of Contact (1997) that he directed screening in some parallel universe. In a fantastically engaging oral history of the twenty-year development and eventual making of the film ultimately directed by Robert Zemeckis, Jodie Foster—who stars as the first human to commune with aliens—tells Vulture’s Rachel Handler that Miller’s film was “very different. It was an incredibly long script—like, 200 pages. It was crazy. It felt a little bit more like Lorenzo’s Oil or had even moments of, like, Eraserhead.” Zemeckis “did a bang-up job,” says producer Lynda Obst. “But I wish I could have seen George’s movie.”
- Wim Wenders is in London, talking with the BFI’s Samira Ahmed and Little White Lies’ David Jenkins about the restorations of his films currently screening in Kino Dreams, a season presented by Curzon. Retrieving the luster of Henri Alekan’s black-and-white cinematography in Wings of Desire (1987) was quite a feat, explains Wenders. The challenge presented by Paris, Texas (1984) was “to find that Kodachrome feel again,” he says. “It all goes back to the light of the American west. It is the brightest, most primary-colored skyline on Earth. So Robby Müller, the DoP at the time, did amazing work to remain true to that light, contrasting it with some of the sunlight of the evenings or the morning, and using fluorescence that had this kind of poisonous green/yellow touch to it . . . He loved that combination.”
- MUBI Podcast has launched its second season with an episode that tracks the history of the Cinémathèque française, focusing in particular on the role of the institution and its founder, Henri Langlois, in sparking the French New Wave. Host Rico Gagliano talks with Luc Moullet, Louis Menand, Amy Nicholson—and Barbet Schroeder, who turns out to have had so much to say that the interview has spilled over onto its own page. “In my group,” says the director, “there were about ten people. Bertrand Tavernier was there, and we had discussions every night about all the movies. I always disagreed with him. Jean Eustache had an always very deep and sensitive point of view on the movies. And of course, the discussions ended up on the sidewalks or in cafés.”
- Alice Diop’s We, which won the top award in the Berlinale’s Encounters program last year, is an exploration of French identity and a string of vignettes shot at various points along a commuter rail line running from a Parisian suburb, through the city, and back out again. “I make films in a permanent search, permanent experimentation,” Diop tells Forrest Cardamenis at Filmmaker. “I make forms coexist in my films, which are always political films but always different. I never wrote, directed, and edited a film in the same way as another. That’s why I love Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman: they’re not just formalists; they are people who are searching, who are inventing.” With We, “I was able to have, in one film, this diversity of documentary film, the documentary that I love from direct cinema to Akerman to Duras to Jean Rouch, all in one film, trying all the forms and a plurality of approaches and narratives.”
- As he prepares to shoot Strange Way of Life in August, Pedro Almodóvar tells IndieWire’s Eric Kohn that the half-hour western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal “could be like my answer to Brokeback Mountain,” a project he turned down. “I think Ang Lee made a wonderful movie, but I never believed that they would give me complete freedom and independence to make what I wanted.” Almodóvar’s next feature will be drawn from A Manual for Cleaning Women, a collection of stories by Lucia Berlin, and will star Cate Blanchett. “The way the main character behaves is very close to my heroines,” he says. “So that’s why I decided to do it.”
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