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With Cannes good and wrapped, the groundwork is being laid for the second half of the year. Toronto has announced that the documentary portrait John Candy: I Like Me, directed by Colin Hanks and produced by Ryan Reynolds, will open its fiftieth edition (September 4 through 14). Emma Thompson will be in Locarno (August 6 through 16) to receive a Leopard Club Award and attend the premiere of Brian Kirk’s The Dead of Winter, in which she plays a widow who interrupts the kidnapping of a teenager during a blizzard in Minnesota.
FIDMarseille (July 8 through 13) will premiere new work from Rita Azevedo Gomes, Nicolás Pereda, Pierre Creton, and Caroline Golum and host a retrospective dedicated to the work of Radu Jude. BlackStar, running from July 31 through August 3 in Philadelphia, has lined up ninety-two films for its fourteenth year. Sarajevo (August 15 through 22) will pay tribute to Paolo Sorrentino, and Zurich (September 25 through October 5) will present a career achievement award to composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, who won an Oscar for her score for Todd Phillips’s Joker (2019) and worked with Todd Field on Tár (2022).
The full lineup for the eighteenth edition of Japan Cuts is out. From July 10 through 20, Japan Society in New York will screen thirty features, including four by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the recipient of this year’s Cut Above Award. At the Film Stage, Nick Newman recommends Saki Michimoto’s “formally flexible, emotionally attuned debut feature See You Tomorrow” and Daihachi Yoshida’s Teki Cometh, “easily the best title from last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival.” This evening, Newman is hosting the first of two fundraising screenings for The Jag, a forthcoming new play written by Robin Schavoir (The Plagiarists) and directed by Paul Felten (Slow Machine).
When Monica Vitti passed away in 2022, we traced the unlikely trajectory of her career. Known first and foremost as the beautiful yet inscrutable face of modernist alienation in four films directed by Michelangelo Antonioni—L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961), L’eclisse (1962), and Red Desert (1964)—she switched to light comedies directed by Mario Monicelli, Alberto Sordi, and Ettore Scola. From today through June 19, Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà present Monica Vitti: La Modernista, the first North American retrospective dedicated to her work. Six of the fourteen films in the series are recent restorations.
This week’s highlights:
- Chantal Akerman would have turned seventy-five today. As a tribute, Sabzian has posted a conversation between Akerman and André Delvaux, a fellow Belgian filmmaker who taught a class Akerman attended when she was seventeen. The recently rediscovered exchange runs just over an hour, took place in 1996—a few months after Akerman had completed A Couch in New York—and very quickly delves into how Akerman sees framing as it relates to idolatry and the Second Commandment.
- In a roundabout way, Akerman was an influence on the new video Mike Mills (20th Century Women) has made to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Talking Heads. Saoirse Ronan stars in “Psycho Killer” as a woman going through some things. “This is pretentious,” Mills tells Mitchell Beaupre at Letterboxd, but the video and Jeanne Dielman (1975) are “talking about the power and coercion and the control that these seemingly banal environments have on human life. They’re both a critique of the oppression of these banal places.” Further touchstones: Dziga Vertov, Roy Andersson, Jørgen Leth, and of course, Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense (1984) and David Byrne’s True Stories (1986).
- Wes Anderson has been telling Letterboxd about the films that were on his mind when he was making The Phoenician Scheme, and in Cannes, he spoke with Sharmila Tagore, who starred in Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), and Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, the founding director of the Film Heritage Foundation who—working with The Film Foundation, Janus Films, and Criterion—restored the film. Anderson is clearly thrilled to be able to ask seemingly long-harbored questions about Ray, Soumitra Chatterjee, and much more. You can read or watch this delightful conversation moderated by the Hollywood Reporter’s Anupama Chopra.
- Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this evening and tomorrow as her debut feature, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024), begins a weeklong run. Césaire was a Surrealist writer often overshadowed by her husband, Aimé, and in one sense, Hunt-Ehrlich’s film is “a rescue mission,” writes Erika Balsom at 4Columns. “Where the biopic imitates, Hunt-Ehrlich evokes; where it sutures cause to effect, she wreaks gentle havoc on chronology. Within a loose metafictional frame of a film shoot taking place in a park, she creates a calm yet kaleidoscopic swirl of palm fronds, words voiced from creased paper, a baby’s cries, amorous camaraderie, and the vocation of anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggle.”
- “There have been many projects I’ve participated in that have died on arrival,” writes Callie Hernandez. Fortunately, Invention (2024), cowritten with director Courtney Stephens, and this year’s The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, coproduced with director Pete Ohs, are not among them. Hernandez’s marvelous piece for Talkhouse begins with a segue from a dream to a Cadbury commercial directed by Jonathan Glazer which “features a devilish, chocolate-wielding Denis Lavant painted red in black leather pants, a black plastic wig, dancing along the ledge of a marble fountain, toward a dozen desperate female angels, waiting like dogs at the bottom of the stairs—it’s absurd. It’s brilliant. And it was immediately canceled.”
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