A Last Note

Dec 10, 2017 — Awards season brings us not only lists and prizes but also roundtables. The Los Angeles Times’ Mark Olsen’s recently led a conversation among seven directors: Darren Aronofsky (mother!), Sean Baker (The Florida Project), Kathryn Bigelow (Detroit), Guillermo del Toro (The...

Oct 26, 2017 — “The last we heard of Hayao Miyazaki’s new movie, pre-production was beginning as Studio Ghibli reopened its doors in August,” writes Zack Sharf at IndieWire. We don’t yet know much about the feature slated for a 2020 release other than...

Oct 26, 2017 — Senses of Cinema has launched a podcast and topics discussed in the first episode (62’45”) include Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, Jacques Tourneur, and the Mexican narco wars onscreen. And speaking of Blade Runner, Cinematologists Dario Llinares and Neil Fox...

Oct 23, 2017 — David Bordwell’s new book, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling, is out, and we’ll be hearing more about it soon. For now, though, New Yorkers will want to know that Bordwell’s coming to town, specifically to the Museum...

Oct 19, 2017 — Danielle Darrieux, who turned 100 on May 1 and appeared in over 110 films, perhaps most famously in three directed by Max Ophuls, has passed away, reports the AP.“Unlike most branded stars whose appeal can be captured in one well-chosen...

Oct 12, 2017 — “In my undergraduate years, I watched three films almost every day,” Wang Bing, director most recently of the Golden Leopard-winning Mrs. Fang, tells Zoe Meng Jiang. “I’m from the same generation as the Sixth Generation filmmakers like Wang Xiaoshuai and...

Oct 8, 2017 — The New York Film Festival presents BPM (Beats Per Minute) tonight and tomorrow, and we begin with Jordan Cronk, writing for Cinema Scope: “A sprawling yet affectingly personal portrait of a group of Parisian activists and ACT UP members in...

Oct 5, 2017 — For kicks, I’m opening this one with something I wrote myself back in February, just hours after seeing the film at the Berlinale: “Aki Kaurismäki’s uneven but irresistibly amusing The Other Side of Hope, dedicated to the late film historian...

Oct 1, 2017 — Last week, Deadline’s Amanda N’Duka reported that Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) “has signed on to direct an upcoming biopic on Rosa Parks, which will center on the decade before her seminal moment on a Montgomery bus, when Parks,...

Sep 29, 2017 — New York. The big event in town is, of course, the New York Film Festival, which gets going in earnest today following last night’s premiere of Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying. At the top of the NYFF 2017 Index, I’ve linked to an interview with festival director Kent...