Writer/Director Jane Schoenbrun’s feature debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, captured the isolating nature of online culture via creepypasta horror through non-narrative, visual storytelling. Schoenbrun continues that core theme of dysphoria in their sophomore effort, I Saw the TV Glow, now armed with a bigger budget that allows the filmmaker to get even more personal while evolving their voice and visual style to an intoxicating degree. I Saw the TV Glow offers a layered and authentic portrait of identity, wrapped in ’90s nostalgia and surreal imagery that embeds itself deep into your psyche.
I Saw the TV Glow charts the life of Owen (Justice Smith) over multiple decades, initially introduced as an early teen (Ian Foreman) in 1996. Owen is a dysphoric and friendless outcast until he bumps into a slightly older student and fellow outcast, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), at his high school. The pair quickly bond...
I Saw the TV Glow charts the life of Owen (Justice Smith) over multiple decades, initially introduced as an early teen (Ian Foreman) in 1996. Owen is a dysphoric and friendless outcast until he bumps into a slightly older student and fellow outcast, Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), at his high school. The pair quickly bond...
- 5/3/2024
- by Meagan Navarro
- bloody-disgusting.com
Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno and Other Shorts is now showing on Mubi in many countries.Green Porno: Mantis. Ask any film lover about Isabella Rossellini, and the first image that springs to their mind is most likely to be the star’s iconic performance as songstress Dorothy Vallens, the femme fatale of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), a glamorous yet tortured vision draped in sensual, shimmering black. Revealing a delightfully eccentric side to her screen image, Rossellini’s directorial career ventures into a very different realm of sexuality: that of the mating and maternal habits seen in the animal kingdom. Rossellini’s playful and educational micro-shorts—divided into three series cheekily titled Green Porno (2006–2008), Seduce Me (2010), and Mammas (2013)—are vaudevillian studies in animal behavior, awash in puppetry, construction-paper sets, and slapstick. In addition to her writing and directing duties, Rossellini also gamely performs these frisky rituals in inventive,...
- 4/30/2024
- MUBI
From fake news in 1902 to livestreaming a man asleep – and everything in between, the big picture gets a bit lost
Although being distributed in the UK with the title Fantastic Machine, this documentary about the camera through history originally had the much more prolix, pretentious and charming moniker And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine. The line is a quote attributed to Edward VII who is said to have reacted with awe when he saw a film of his own coronation – although the footage in question was not of his actual coronation but filmed by French director Georges Méliès with French actors in a Paris studio in advance, the first example of “fake news”.
That is fitting because here directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck explore the camera and the moving image’s ability to dazzle, deceive and delight through history. That said, their thematic intent seems to...
Although being distributed in the UK with the title Fantastic Machine, this documentary about the camera through history originally had the much more prolix, pretentious and charming moniker And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine. The line is a quote attributed to Edward VII who is said to have reacted with awe when he saw a film of his own coronation – although the footage in question was not of his actual coronation but filmed by French director Georges Méliès with French actors in a Paris studio in advance, the first example of “fake news”.
That is fitting because here directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck explore the camera and the moving image’s ability to dazzle, deceive and delight through history. That said, their thematic intent seems to...
- 4/16/2024
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Guardian - Film News
Our latest issue of Film Junior magazine is available now – the film magazine for young film fans (and they write lots of it too!)
Introducing issue 16 of Film Junior magazine that’s now available for purchase. This time around we’ve got a couple of amazing interviews – done by a trio of amazing your journalists – with none other than Jack Black and Awkwafina, the stars of Kung Fu Panda 4! They give us the lowdown on the latest instalment of the kicking animation series, tell us all about what it’s like to be an actor in an animated film, and what they think is in store for Po and Co. next!
If you’re new to the publication, it’s a 52-page print magazine aimed at younger film fans (around 7 to 14 years old), and it’s also mainly written by them too. The young writers come up with the majority of the ideas,...
Introducing issue 16 of Film Junior magazine that’s now available for purchase. This time around we’ve got a couple of amazing interviews – done by a trio of amazing your journalists – with none other than Jack Black and Awkwafina, the stars of Kung Fu Panda 4! They give us the lowdown on the latest instalment of the kicking animation series, tell us all about what it’s like to be an actor in an animated film, and what they think is in store for Po and Co. next!
If you’re new to the publication, it’s a 52-page print magazine aimed at younger film fans (around 7 to 14 years old), and it’s also mainly written by them too. The young writers come up with the majority of the ideas,...
- 3/28/2024
- by John Moore
- Film Stories
Those dismayed by the cancellation of the big-budget “Coyote vs. Acme” — a high-profile casualty of the recent Hollywood trend towards pulling the plug on near-completed projects — may find consolation and then some in “Hundreds of Beavers.” That is, if they become aware of it, of course. Chances are good that they will, eventually, as this DIY delight has begun self-distributing to North American theaters following a long tour on the regional festival circuit. It’s sure to develop a significant cult following with its unique mix of silent-era slapstick, animation elements, theme-park-style critter costumes, and general air of inspired absurdity.
Well, not entirely unique: Director Mike Cheslik and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews previously collaborated on 2018’s “Lake Michigan Monster,” a similarly nonsensical B&w comedy, albeit in a more Guy Maddin-esque pseudo-early-talkie vein, with a fantasy adventure gist in the vein of Jules Verne. But for all its enterprise,...
Well, not entirely unique: Director Mike Cheslik and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews previously collaborated on 2018’s “Lake Michigan Monster,” a similarly nonsensical B&w comedy, albeit in a more Guy Maddin-esque pseudo-early-talkie vein, with a fantasy adventure gist in the vein of Jules Verne. But for all its enterprise,...
- 2/17/2024
- by Dennis Harvey
- Variety Film + TV
Graphic: Images: Bleecker Street, David Apuzzo/Mainframe Pictures, Moris Puccio/Legendary Entertainment, Amazon MGM Studios
January is always a challenging month for moviegoing, and this January was particularly tough sledding, what with the impact of the actor’s and writer’s strikes taking a steep toll on an already-limited schedule of theatrical releases.
January is always a challenging month for moviegoing, and this January was particularly tough sledding, what with the impact of the actor’s and writer’s strikes taking a steep toll on an already-limited schedule of theatrical releases.
- 2/1/2024
- avclub.com
Image: Bleecker Street, Photo: David Apuzzo/Mainframe Pictures, The Criterion Collection, Vivien Killilea (Getty Images for TCM), Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures UK (Getty Images), Apple, Melinda Sue Gordon (Universal Pictures), Graphic: The A.V. ClubI.S.S. review: Ariana DeBose’s sci-fi outing fails...
- 1/20/2024
- avclub.com
Warning: The following contains major spoilers for The Babadook.
The first time I watched The Babadook, I nearly had a nervous breakdown. It was March of 2015. My husband, a Cpa, was deep in the throes of tax season, leaving me alone for long stretches of time with our one-year-old son and three-year-old daughter who was going through a screaming phase. Needless to say, the story of a mother pushed to the edge of sanity resonated with me deeply. One scene in particular, monstrous clothing reigning down as the frightened heroine crawls across the floor, was so affecting that I paused the movie and cried for a good ten minutes. Despite the extremity of my reaction, I would wager that I’m not alone. In the ten years since The Babadook premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, Jennifer Kent’s debut feature has become known for its ability to blend horror...
The first time I watched The Babadook, I nearly had a nervous breakdown. It was March of 2015. My husband, a Cpa, was deep in the throes of tax season, leaving me alone for long stretches of time with our one-year-old son and three-year-old daughter who was going through a screaming phase. Needless to say, the story of a mother pushed to the edge of sanity resonated with me deeply. One scene in particular, monstrous clothing reigning down as the frightened heroine crawls across the floor, was so affecting that I paused the movie and cried for a good ten minutes. Despite the extremity of my reaction, I would wager that I’m not alone. In the ten years since The Babadook premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, Jennifer Kent’s debut feature has become known for its ability to blend horror...
- 1/19/2024
- by Jenn Adams
- bloody-disgusting.com
Ariana DeBose in I.S.S.Image: Bleecker Street
Ever since Georges Méliès sent audiences out of orbit in 1902 with A Trip To The Moon, filmmakers have been busy crafting distinctly textured space-themed stories, ranging from tender to terrifying. It’s a setting that provides claustrophobic tension and awe-inducing wonder,...
Ever since Georges Méliès sent audiences out of orbit in 1902 with A Trip To The Moon, filmmakers have been busy crafting distinctly textured space-themed stories, ranging from tender to terrifying. It’s a setting that provides claustrophobic tension and awe-inducing wonder,...
- 1/17/2024
- by Courtney Howard
- avclub.com
Godfrey Reggio helped shape the syntax for contemporary commercial advertising, not to mention the music video, with his trilogy of experimental non-narrative films that began with 1983’s Koyaanisqatsi. Reggio’s autodidactic films require users to create their own meaning through the collision of hyperkinetically edited imagery with composer Philip Glass’s evocative music. At 83, Reggio isn’t resting on his laurels—or courting them at all.
After slowing down his rhythm to focus on extended shots trained on human faces in 2013’s Visitors, Reggio’s newest film, Once Within a Time, finds him once again working with more involved edits and compositions. Don’t call it a return to form, though, because he crafted something that looks and sounds quite different. The 52-minute short, co-directed with Jon Kane (who edited 2002’s Naqoyqatsi), conjures the look of Georges Méliès-era, hand-tinted frames while utilizing modern effects to overwhelm the dense frames with information.
After slowing down his rhythm to focus on extended shots trained on human faces in 2013’s Visitors, Reggio’s newest film, Once Within a Time, finds him once again working with more involved edits and compositions. Don’t call it a return to form, though, because he crafted something that looks and sounds quite different. The 52-minute short, co-directed with Jon Kane (who edited 2002’s Naqoyqatsi), conjures the look of Georges Méliès-era, hand-tinted frames while utilizing modern effects to overwhelm the dense frames with information.
- 10/13/2023
- by Marshall Shaffer
- Slant Magazine
Godfrey Reggio and Jon Kane’s Once Within a Time pulses with contradiction. Both technical feat and techno-pessimist fable, this strange brew brims with apocalyptic unease and naïve exuberance in equal measure, marking a departure from the strict documentary mode of Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy without sacrificing his unmistakable style.
Another wordless film for Reggio (though it contains many indecipherable words), and with a runtime of only 52 minutes, Once Within a Time is more of a gesture than a chain of events, though it arguably lands a little closer to the narrative pole than his previous work. As its starting point, it takes the biblical story of Genesis, with a visual pun connecting the “apple” to digital technology—maybe not knowledge per se, but the incessant barrage of visual information that, for Reggio, obliterates our innocence even as it infantilizes us.
Fenced in by screens, a group of children watch a bewildering array of images.
Another wordless film for Reggio (though it contains many indecipherable words), and with a runtime of only 52 minutes, Once Within a Time is more of a gesture than a chain of events, though it arguably lands a little closer to the narrative pole than his previous work. As its starting point, it takes the biblical story of Genesis, with a visual pun connecting the “apple” to digital technology—maybe not knowledge per se, but the incessant barrage of visual information that, for Reggio, obliterates our innocence even as it infantilizes us.
Fenced in by screens, a group of children watch a bewildering array of images.
- 10/8/2023
- by William Repass
- Slant Magazine
It’s no secret that artificial intelligence has become 2023’s cultural boogeyman — the vengeful ghost in the machine that now seems closer than ever to possibly “replacing” humanity. (Or, at the very least, replicating our worst instincts and darker desires in a way that’s too dangerous to laugh off.) Musicians, writers and other artists worry that AI’s ability to copy their voices, literally and otherwise, will either dilute the real thing or duplicate gajillions of fakes that make the original seem obsolete. Both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes...
- 9/29/2023
- by David Fear
- Rollingstone.com
“The clouds lifted” for cinema’s future recently. At least that was how Martin Scorsese felt after he saw “TÁR,” on which he lavished praise at the New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner in early January 2023.
That kind of praise means a lot. Scorsese is not just one of the greatest filmmakers of all time: he’s one of its greatest cinephiles. In recent years, he’s become known for the movies — or, as he might say of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “theme parks” — he doesn’t enjoy. But the Oscar-winning director’s favorite films are as wide-ranging in genre, year of release, and national origin as you might imagine, from Ti West’s “Pearl” to the horror flicks of Val Lewton and the works of Senegalese master Djibril Diop Mambety. He’s such an avid-moving watching buff that, in a recent interview with Time Magazine, he admitted he...
That kind of praise means a lot. Scorsese is not just one of the greatest filmmakers of all time: he’s one of its greatest cinephiles. In recent years, he’s become known for the movies — or, as he might say of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “theme parks” — he doesn’t enjoy. But the Oscar-winning director’s favorite films are as wide-ranging in genre, year of release, and national origin as you might imagine, from Ti West’s “Pearl” to the horror flicks of Val Lewton and the works of Senegalese master Djibril Diop Mambety. He’s such an avid-moving watching buff that, in a recent interview with Time Magazine, he admitted he...
- 9/13/2023
- by Alison Foreman and Wilson Chapman
- Indiewire
Science fiction on film has been around almost as long as cinema itself. Starting in 1895 when the first public showings of motion pictures commenced in France and the United States, and as filmmakers began to realize that they could string scenes together to tell a complete, coherent story, the genres of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy were part of the equation.
Celluloid offered ambitious storytellers the chance to put images on the screen—crude at the time, but still groundbreaking—that had only been glimpsed in the pages of novels, short stories, and later, comic books and pulp magazines. And as filmmaking techniques themselves progressed, and the motion picture industry began to take shape in the early 20th century, visionaries came along with audacious ideas that moved the art form, the technology, and the genres forward well into the new millennium.
Below are 16 such visionaries; men and women who either grew...
Celluloid offered ambitious storytellers the chance to put images on the screen—crude at the time, but still groundbreaking—that had only been glimpsed in the pages of novels, short stories, and later, comic books and pulp magazines. And as filmmaking techniques themselves progressed, and the motion picture industry began to take shape in the early 20th century, visionaries came along with audacious ideas that moved the art form, the technology, and the genres forward well into the new millennium.
Below are 16 such visionaries; men and women who either grew...
- 8/18/2023
- by Don Kaye
- Den of Geek
Nobody can be both the magnifying glass and the ant burning up under its glare. Nobody, that is, except shaggy Romanian shaman Radu Jude who, with his Locarno competition entry “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” follows up 2021’s Berlinale-winning “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” with a dizzying, dazzling feat of social critique, an all-fronts-at-once attack on the zeitgeist, and a mischievous, often hilarious work of art about the artifice of work. Funny and furious, crude and subtle, unkempt and thoroughly disciplined, this deranged movie is also maybe the sanest film of the year: a multifaceted manifesto exposing the absurd internalized fallacy that one must work in order to live, when it’s work — as in, the pitiless daily grind — that will be the death of us all.
Life is short but art is long, the saying goes. And at two hours 43 minutes, “Do Not Expect…...
Life is short but art is long, the saying goes. And at two hours 43 minutes, “Do Not Expect…...
- 8/7/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Somewhere in the middle of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, the eponymous young character (Asa Butterfield) dreams of a catastrophe in which a steam train runs over him, careens through the Gare Montparnasse railway terminal, and takes a nosedive into the street outside. While it isn’t made clear, or mentioned at all after he wakes up, the disaster he dreams about is based on a real crash at the same station that happened in 1895, mere months before the public exhibition of the Lumière brothers’ seminal actuality film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.
As the persistent but largely embellished filmic chestnut has it, audience members who first witnessed the Lumières’ cinematographic train fled the screening room in Paris in a panic, reacting as if they were in real danger of being run over. If you “print the legend” regarding these perhaps apocryphal, panicking spectators, it’s not too much...
As the persistent but largely embellished filmic chestnut has it, audience members who first witnessed the Lumières’ cinematographic train fled the screening room in Paris in a panic, reacting as if they were in real danger of being run over. If you “print the legend” regarding these perhaps apocryphal, panicking spectators, it’s not too much...
- 7/10/2023
- by Jaime N. Christley
- Slant Magazine
I honestly never expected Steven Spielberg in a Criterion Channel series––certainly not one that pairs him with Kogonada, anime, and Johnny Mnemonic––but so’s the power of artificial intelligence. Perhaps his greatest film (at this point I don’t need to tell you the title) plays with After Yang, Ghost in the Shell, and pre-Matrix Keanu in July’s aptly titled “AI” boasting also Spike Jonze’s Her, Carpenter’s Dark Star, and Computer Chess. Much more analog is a British Noir collection obviously carrying the likes of Odd Man Out, Night and the City, and The Small Back Room, further filled by Joseph Losey’s Time Without Pity and Basil Dearden’s It Always Rains on Sunday. (No two ways about it: these movies have great titles.) An Elvis retrospective brings six features, and the consensus best (Don Siegel’s Flaming Star) comes September 1.
While Isabella Rossellini...
While Isabella Rossellini...
- 6/22/2023
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Clockwise from top left: A Trip To The Moon (Flicker Alley), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Warner Bros.), King Kong (Warner Bros.), Avatar (Disney), The Matrix (Warner Bros.)Graphic: AVClub
Though they may seem a recent phenomenon, special-effects driven movies have been with us since the dawn of cinema. From the...
Though they may seem a recent phenomenon, special-effects driven movies have been with us since the dawn of cinema. From the...
- 6/8/2023
- by Luke Y. Thompson
- avclub.com
Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos are back in the first teaser trailer for the upcoming Searchlight Pictures film “Poor Things.” It marks Stone’s first film since 2021’s “Cruella” and Lanthimos’ first feature since his Oscar-winning 2018 film “The Favourite,” which also happened to star Stone.
In “Poor Things,” Stone plays a young woman named Bella Baxter who is brought back to life by the “brilliant and unorthodox scientist” Dr. Goodwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.
The teaser trailer has flourishes of Georges Méliès and Wes Anderson as the “Lobster” and “Killing of a Sacred Deer” filmmaker gets...
In “Poor Things,” Stone plays a young woman named Bella Baxter who is brought back to life by the “brilliant and unorthodox scientist” Dr. Goodwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.
The teaser trailer has flourishes of Georges Méliès and Wes Anderson as the “Lobster” and “Killing of a Sacred Deer” filmmaker gets...
- 5/11/2023
- by Adam Chitwood
- The Wrap
Unlike the Japan-centric first, the second season of "Star Wars: Visions" features animation studios from all over the world. One of these studios is El Guiri, co-founded in Madrid by creative director Rodrigo Blaas. Blaas has an impressive resume -- his contributions to "Ice Age," the first feature film produced by Blue Sky Studios, were impressive enough that he was scooped up by Pixar.
In the following years, he toiled behind the scenes of "Finding Nemo" and "The Incredibles." But then Blaas stepped away from Pixar to make "Alma," a 2009 horror short that earned "special mention" at Fantastic Fest that year. "Alma" caught the eye of Guillermo del Toro, who asked that Blaas come and direct a movie with him. That film became the Netflix TV series "Trollhunters" and its extended "Tales of Arcadia" universe. Now Blaas has returned to the short format with "Sith," produced by El Guiri co-founder...
In the following years, he toiled behind the scenes of "Finding Nemo" and "The Incredibles." But then Blaas stepped away from Pixar to make "Alma," a 2009 horror short that earned "special mention" at Fantastic Fest that year. "Alma" caught the eye of Guillermo del Toro, who asked that Blaas come and direct a movie with him. That film became the Netflix TV series "Trollhunters" and its extended "Tales of Arcadia" universe. Now Blaas has returned to the short format with "Sith," produced by El Guiri co-founder...
- 4/14/2023
- by Adam Wescott
- Slash Film
If there's one thing we can take away from modern blockbusters it's that, with rare exceptions, special effects just don't feel "special" anymore.
That's not to say that there aren't beautiful and convincing visual effects being produced in the world of cinema. "Top Gun: Maverick" seamlessly blends real aerial footage with CG recreations, to the extent that it's nearly impossible to tell what was really in front of the camera. "Avatar: The Way of Water," whatever its other flaws may be, is a sumptuous spectacle for the eyes, at once vibrant and colorful and creative.
But what so very many modern visual effects films have in common is that they take imagery that should be astounding for granted, treating the most incredible and impossible things the human mind could devise, and acting like it's just something everyone deals with every day. And the new superhero film "Shazam! Fury of the Gods...
That's not to say that there aren't beautiful and convincing visual effects being produced in the world of cinema. "Top Gun: Maverick" seamlessly blends real aerial footage with CG recreations, to the extent that it's nearly impossible to tell what was really in front of the camera. "Avatar: The Way of Water," whatever its other flaws may be, is a sumptuous spectacle for the eyes, at once vibrant and colorful and creative.
But what so very many modern visual effects films have in common is that they take imagery that should be astounding for granted, treating the most incredible and impossible things the human mind could devise, and acting like it's just something everyone deals with every day. And the new superhero film "Shazam! Fury of the Gods...
- 3/17/2023
- by William Bibbiani
- Slash Film
Since the creation of the camera and the dawn of cinema, film has been one long experiment. Experimental film has often been defined through its rejection of traditional storytelling and structure, its defiance of logic or reason while creating mesmerizing scenes through dreamlike abstraction and subjective narrative.
A key figure in the early history of experimental film was the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Méliès was one of the first filmmakers to use special effects and trick photography to create fantastical and surreal images on the screen. His films, such as A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage, were some of the first examples of what would later be called experimental film. Another important trailblazer during the silent era was female director Lois Weber who is credited in creating an estimated 200 to 400 films. She was credited with pioneering the use of the...
A key figure in the early history of experimental film was the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Méliès was one of the first filmmakers to use special effects and trick photography to create fantastical and surreal images on the screen. His films, such as A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage, were some of the first examples of what would later be called experimental film. Another important trailblazer during the silent era was female director Lois Weber who is credited in creating an estimated 200 to 400 films. She was credited with pioneering the use of the...
- 1/19/2023
- by Robert Lang
- Deadline Film + TV
Visual effects have been around since the early days of the silent era, when filmmakers like Georges Méliès used stage magic tricks and early photographic and editing experiments to make characters appear from out of nowhere, float on-screen, or travel to other planetoids and meet bizarre alien life forms. And while in many respects nothing has changed — we're still making movies packed with visual effects to trick audiences into thinking they're watching something real — the technology we use to create these illusions has evolved so rapidly that even Monsieur Méliès would probably have no idea how a film like "Avatar: The Way of Water" pulled off its incredible images.
Even the visual effects artists who worked on "Avatar: The Way of Water" were faced with highly unusual challenges. This wasn't the usual sci-fi spectacular, where villains shoot skybeams into the air while costumed do-gooders and do-badders hold their hands out...
Even the visual effects artists who worked on "Avatar: The Way of Water" were faced with highly unusual challenges. This wasn't the usual sci-fi spectacular, where villains shoot skybeams into the air while costumed do-gooders and do-badders hold their hands out...
- 12/21/2022
- by William Bibbiani
- Slash Film
The term "movie magic" makes the art of filmmaking sound like intricate shots are as easy as the flick of a wand. But even in the age of CGI, some scenes can take an inordinate amount of planning. And can you imagine how much more difficult it was to pull off things like realistic dinosaurs, exploding spaceships, or twisters before advanced cinematic technology existed?
This isn't about to turn into a "back in my day" diatribe about how "kids have it so easy these days." Instead, it's more worthwhile to look back on movies that were released prior to the rise of computer-generated effects and truly appreciate the amount of work that went into creating them. For example, just how did Harold Ramis manage to "clone" Michael Keaton for "Multiplicity"?
The 1996 comedy about a man duplicating himself in order to create a better work-life balance for himself was hardly the...
This isn't about to turn into a "back in my day" diatribe about how "kids have it so easy these days." Instead, it's more worthwhile to look back on movies that were released prior to the rise of computer-generated effects and truly appreciate the amount of work that went into creating them. For example, just how did Harold Ramis manage to "clone" Michael Keaton for "Multiplicity"?
The 1996 comedy about a man duplicating himself in order to create a better work-life balance for himself was hardly the...
- 12/17/2022
- by Ben F. Silverio
- Slash Film
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSGush.The lineup for the 2023 Sundance Film Festival has been announced. Before the festival begins in Park City on January 19, peruse the selection on Notebook—including new films from Ira Sachs, Deborah Stratman (The Illinois Parables), Mary Helena Clark (Figure Minus Fact), and Fox Maxy (F1ght1ng Looks Different 2 Me Now).Victor Erice has just wrapped production on a new film, Cerrar los Ojos, in Granada, Spain, ahead of a 2023 release. This will be his fourth feature, arriving 31 years after 1992’s Dream of Light.The legendary composer Angelo Badalamenti—one of David Lynch’s most important collaborators, and the architect of all of his atmospheres—has died at age 85. In addition to his music with Lynch, Badalamenti worked with artists like Nina Simone,...
- 12/14/2022
- MUBI
As the leaves crunch underfoot and the wintry chill intensifies, you may realize: it’s time to think of a good gift for that friend of yours who’s already packed their shelves to the gills with Blu-rays and back issues of Cahiers du Cinéma. Have no fear. Covering books, home video, music, posters, and apparel, here are some gift ideas for the dearest cinephiles in your life.Books And MAGAZINESFireflies Press recently published Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper: a beautiful set of two complementary volumes to honor the filmmaker’s centenary. The smaller book includes a revised translation of his poem “Poet of the Ashes,” while the larger volume includes tributes from 20 contemporary artists and critics, including Catherine Breillat, Jia Zhangke, Luc Moullet, Angela Schanelec, and Mike Leigh.Written by Karen Han, Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema is a mid-career monograph covering the Korean auteur’s features,...
- 11/29/2022
- MUBI
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a film that, much like its protagonist, crosses oceans of time. Director Francis Ford Coppola, one of the filmmakers at the leading edge of the “film school” generation of the seventies, tapped into the talents of the young up-and-coming stars, both in front of and behind the camera, to tell a familiar story using very old techniques. Opting to avoid the rising tide of digital effects, expensive location shooting, and elaborate artifices in favor of “naïve” in-camera effects, stage-bound shooting, and lavish costumes as “sets,” Coppola and his collaborators created a thoroughly unique retelling of Dracula. The look of the film is simultaneously timeless and on the cutting-edge of innovation. Though it celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year, it still feels as modern and transgressive as the day it was released.
Though Coppola is cited as one of cinema’s great auteurs, he is first...
Though Coppola is cited as one of cinema’s great auteurs, he is first...
- 11/14/2022
- by Brian Keiper
- bloody-disgusting.com
Movie magic is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot. These days, it's become synonymous with latex prosthetics and green screens, but long before computer graphics entered the game, master filmmakers were tricking our senses with editing magic. Early pioneers, like Georges Méliès, merely enjoyed all the new sleight of hand they could pull off by cutting and splicing film, while later greats like Hitchcock used editing to elevate horror and avoid censorship.
In the late '50s, Hollywood filmmakers were still under the thumb of censors, who followed the Hays Code, which was a set of rules that covered everything from costumes to content within a movie. Nudity, sexuality, and violence were big no-nos, which caused Hitchcock to get creative, and a bit rebellious while filming "Psycho." To meet the standards of The Motion Picture Production Code, Hitchcock pulled off some editing tricks that confused censors and frightened audiences.
In the late '50s, Hollywood filmmakers were still under the thumb of censors, who followed the Hays Code, which was a set of rules that covered everything from costumes to content within a movie. Nudity, sexuality, and violence were big no-nos, which caused Hitchcock to get creative, and a bit rebellious while filming "Psycho." To meet the standards of The Motion Picture Production Code, Hitchcock pulled off some editing tricks that confused censors and frightened audiences.
- 10/23/2022
- by Christian Gainey
- Slash Film
Animation fans are truly being treated in 2022. Pixar released one of their best ever films, "Turning Red," while DreamWorks dropped an underrated caper in the form of "The Bad Guys." Richard Linklater turned to rotoscope for "Apollo 10 ½" and "Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero" became an unexpected box office hit in North America. To top it off, we're getting not one but two stop-motion animated features: Guillermo del Toro's take on the classic story of "Pinocchio," and Henry Selick's return to the medium with the horror-comedy "Wendell and Wild."
Selick has long been one of the stalwarts of stop-motion in American animation thanks to iconic spooky season films like "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "Coraline," while del Toro turned to the medium for his decade-long passion project and has received some of the best reviews of his starry career for his troubles. It's hard not to be...
Selick has long been one of the stalwarts of stop-motion in American animation thanks to iconic spooky season films like "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "Coraline," while del Toro turned to the medium for his decade-long passion project and has received some of the best reviews of his starry career for his troubles. It's hard not to be...
- 10/20/2022
- by Kayleigh Donaldson
- Slash Film
Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 "Dracula" was promoted as a faithful adaptation of the 1897 novel, down to its full title "Bram Stoker's Dracula." Don't think for a moment this means the movie is a stuffy stage reading, concerned only with literally adapting the text. No, Coppola's rendition of Stoker is one of the most visually audacious films of its decade.
Mini-documentary "In Camera: The Naïve Visual Effects of Dracula" explores how Coppola and his team used entirely in-camera special effects, resulting in a film as tactile as it is lavish. Coppola explains this choice was motivated by period accuracy:
"Given that the book 'Dracula' was written around 1900, being the same date as the birth of the cinema... coming out of magicians and illusions and basically magic tricks, I thought would not only make the film entirely in a false place, in a studio, but I would only use effects...
Mini-documentary "In Camera: The Naïve Visual Effects of Dracula" explores how Coppola and his team used entirely in-camera special effects, resulting in a film as tactile as it is lavish. Coppola explains this choice was motivated by period accuracy:
"Given that the book 'Dracula' was written around 1900, being the same date as the birth of the cinema... coming out of magicians and illusions and basically magic tricks, I thought would not only make the film entirely in a false place, in a studio, but I would only use effects...
- 10/4/2022
- by Devin Meenan
- Slash Film
“Moonage Daydream” was reviewed by TheWrap out of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
The David Bowie documentary “Moonage Daydream” begins with a quote in which Bowie talks about Friedrich Nietzsche’s late 19th-century proclamation that God is dead and that humans must become gods themselves. It’s an appropriate enough opening, considering that Bowie’s most famous character, Ziggy Stardust, flirted with Nietzsche-style notions of man and Superman.
But a more telling quote comes later in Brett Morgen’s film, when Bowie talks about his fascination with “an artistic language that deals with fragments and chaos.” Because if there was ever a documentary that embraces the idea of fragments and chaos as organizing principles, it’s “Moonage Daydream,” which abandons all thought of straightforward narrative in favor of an immersive and purposefully mysterious and chaotic Bowie experience.
Or is “purposefully chaotic” a contradiction in terms? Regardless, “Moonage Daydream” is a bracing,...
The David Bowie documentary “Moonage Daydream” begins with a quote in which Bowie talks about Friedrich Nietzsche’s late 19th-century proclamation that God is dead and that humans must become gods themselves. It’s an appropriate enough opening, considering that Bowie’s most famous character, Ziggy Stardust, flirted with Nietzsche-style notions of man and Superman.
But a more telling quote comes later in Brett Morgen’s film, when Bowie talks about his fascination with “an artistic language that deals with fragments and chaos.” Because if there was ever a documentary that embraces the idea of fragments and chaos as organizing principles, it’s “Moonage Daydream,” which abandons all thought of straightforward narrative in favor of an immersive and purposefully mysterious and chaotic Bowie experience.
Or is “purposefully chaotic” a contradiction in terms? Regardless, “Moonage Daydream” is a bracing,...
- 9/15/2022
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
Click here to read the full article.
The French director, film critic and voracious cinephile Francois Truffaut once suggested a thought experiment. Imagine, he said, that there was only one copy of a book, and that copy was held in a single library, and you could only read it while inside that library. This was how film lovers were obliged to check out the objects of their desire before repertory theaters, videotape and streaming platforms brought the elusive history of cinema, so long beyond reach, into the palm of our hands.
A reminder of how inaccessible the motion picture legacy might be — and how dependent it is on the whims of a corporate mogul — arrived on Aug. 2 when two related news items hit the entertainment trade sites with the force of mallet between the eyes: Batgirl, the latest entry in the DC Universe pipeline, a film that was basically in...
The French director, film critic and voracious cinephile Francois Truffaut once suggested a thought experiment. Imagine, he said, that there was only one copy of a book, and that copy was held in a single library, and you could only read it while inside that library. This was how film lovers were obliged to check out the objects of their desire before repertory theaters, videotape and streaming platforms brought the elusive history of cinema, so long beyond reach, into the palm of our hands.
A reminder of how inaccessible the motion picture legacy might be — and how dependent it is on the whims of a corporate mogul — arrived on Aug. 2 when two related news items hit the entertainment trade sites with the force of mallet between the eyes: Batgirl, the latest entry in the DC Universe pipeline, a film that was basically in...
- 8/11/2022
- by Thomas Doherty
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
“Moonage Daydream” feels, first and foremost, like a montage of media criticism encompassing the entire 20th century, all of it laser-focused through a single pinhole: the dynamic David Bowie. , the documentary by Brett Morgen (“Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck”) is about feeling your way through a chaotic world with Ziggy Stardust as your anchor. It’s a fitting encapsulation of the many “he taught me it was Ok to be weird” sentiments in the wake of Bowie’s death. But despite the quasi-religiousness of such refrains, the film by no means avoids painting the late pop icon as distinctly human, whether through his insecurities, or the way his perspective on love would eventually evolve.
The doc features a treasure trove of archival footage and zero contemporary talking heads. It is immediately positioned as an exploration of Bowie’s rise to global fame in the early ’70s, told from the perspective of that same era,...
The doc features a treasure trove of archival footage and zero contemporary talking heads. It is immediately positioned as an exploration of Bowie’s rise to global fame in the early ’70s, told from the perspective of that same era,...
- 5/24/2022
- by Siddhant Adlakha
- Indiewire
Normal 0 false false false En-gb X-none X-none
Bloomsbury/ BFI
Paperback
217 pages
70 colour illustrations
Isbn: 9781839021466
Rrp: £19.99
Of the millions of film books out there, it’s highly likely that horror covers by far the largest percentage in terms of genre. Just what is it about the genre that proves to be so endlessly fascinating to readers and audiences, considering its disreputable reputation? This is something that Barry Keith Grant addresses in his introduction to this excellent collection of essays on 100 classic (and occasionally forgotten) American horror films. As he points out, horror has been with us throughout history, with its roots in Medieval woodcuts, Grand Guignol theatre and the Gothic novel, with the first horror film being produced by Georges Méliès in 1896. We are endlessly fascinated and enthralled by the feelings of terror, fear, suspense, and revulsion that horror inflicts on its willing audience.
The book covers American horror from over 100 years,...
Bloomsbury/ BFI
Paperback
217 pages
70 colour illustrations
Isbn: 9781839021466
Rrp: £19.99
Of the millions of film books out there, it’s highly likely that horror covers by far the largest percentage in terms of genre. Just what is it about the genre that proves to be so endlessly fascinating to readers and audiences, considering its disreputable reputation? This is something that Barry Keith Grant addresses in his introduction to this excellent collection of essays on 100 classic (and occasionally forgotten) American horror films. As he points out, horror has been with us throughout history, with its roots in Medieval woodcuts, Grand Guignol theatre and the Gothic novel, with the first horror film being produced by Georges Méliès in 1896. We are endlessly fascinated and enthralled by the feelings of terror, fear, suspense, and revulsion that horror inflicts on its willing audience.
The book covers American horror from over 100 years,...
- 5/11/2022
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
Science fiction films can inspire us with optimistic visions of the future. It's powerful to see a film that predicts humanity will better itself, as it gives us something to strive for. The optimistic cooperation of the "Star Trek" franchise showed how much better the universe would be if different cultures learned to peacefully coexist. Some sci-fi predictions even came true: In 1902, the Georges Méliès film "A Trip to the Moon" showed what a potential lunar voyage would look like over six decades before the "Apollo 11" mission. However, science fiction films aren't always this optimistic. There are many who believe that the future looks bleak. A...
The post The 15 Best Cyberpunk Movies Ranked appeared first on /Film.
The post The 15 Best Cyberpunk Movies Ranked appeared first on /Film.
- 2/17/2022
- by Liam Gaughan
- Slash Film
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is informing film and television works around the world and Malayalam-language film “Hawk’s Muffin” (“Prappeda”) – selected in this week’s International Film Festival Rotterdam – uses it as a starting point, and adds elements of war to tell a surreal tale set in a dystopian future.
After his plane drops an atomic bomb, a pilot is ordered into hiding by his commanders. The location is an isolated estate where his life intertwines with his daughter, granddaughter, a bodyguard, a priest and a policeman. Things get complicated when the granddaughter befriends a stranger.
“Hawk’s Muffin” is the feature debut of Krishnendu Kalesh, known for his 2017 short satirical noir thriller “Black Beast” (“Karinchathan”), a response to the Charlie Hebdo attack.
“The pandemic is used only as an opportunity to start off a story of century-long conspiracy in the film. I conceived the pandemic period as an occasion...
After his plane drops an atomic bomb, a pilot is ordered into hiding by his commanders. The location is an isolated estate where his life intertwines with his daughter, granddaughter, a bodyguard, a priest and a policeman. Things get complicated when the granddaughter befriends a stranger.
“Hawk’s Muffin” is the feature debut of Krishnendu Kalesh, known for his 2017 short satirical noir thriller “Black Beast” (“Karinchathan”), a response to the Charlie Hebdo attack.
“The pandemic is used only as an opportunity to start off a story of century-long conspiracy in the film. I conceived the pandemic period as an occasion...
- 1/25/2022
- by Naman Ramachandran
- Variety Film + TV
Over recent years France has established itself as a key hub for VFX work, driven by the talent and creativity of local players and extensive public support schemes.
In 2020, the VFX sector was given a further boost by the change to France’s Tax Rebate for International Production (Trip) scheme, which now offers a 40% rebate on all eligible production expenses for international projects whose VFX expenses in France surpass €2 million ($2.27 million).
Pids Enghien – the Paris Images Digital Summit in Enghien-les-Bains – runs from Jan. 26-29, including a series of presentations, round-tables and case studies, and presentation of the Genie Awards.
Yann Marchet, founder and managing director of Pids Enghien, provides an overview of the key trends that will be discussed during the event.
What are the key recent achievements of the French VFX industry?
The two last years have been very important for the French VFX industry. In 2020, for the first time,...
In 2020, the VFX sector was given a further boost by the change to France’s Tax Rebate for International Production (Trip) scheme, which now offers a 40% rebate on all eligible production expenses for international projects whose VFX expenses in France surpass €2 million ($2.27 million).
Pids Enghien – the Paris Images Digital Summit in Enghien-les-Bains – runs from Jan. 26-29, including a series of presentations, round-tables and case studies, and presentation of the Genie Awards.
Yann Marchet, founder and managing director of Pids Enghien, provides an overview of the key trends that will be discussed during the event.
What are the key recent achievements of the French VFX industry?
The two last years have been very important for the French VFX industry. In 2020, for the first time,...
- 1/23/2022
- by Martin Dale
- Variety Film + TV
Photo: Steven Spielberg and George Lucas After graduating from a school that has many majors focused on Cinema and filmmaking, there was a common thread that no matter what classes were taken or which professor taught that semester the same films were thrown onto the projector. This list of films will guarantee you to be a professor’s favorite and help understand the history of Cinema. As each film is discussed as to why it is important to view, other films will be mentioned that have directly been affected by these prior films and accomplish similar actions. Related article: ‘In the Heights’ – Behind the Scenes and Full Commentary/Reactions from Cast & Crew Related article: A Tribute to Cannes Film Festival: A Celebration of Cinema, Glamour, and Humanity | Statement From The Hollywood Insider’s CEO Pritan Ambroase Film School Advice: Must-Watch Movies 'A Trip to the Moon' (1902) This twelve-minute classic put...
- 7/27/2021
- by Jack Colin
- Hollywood Insider - Substance & Meaningful Entertainment
Sylvain Chomet, the BAFTA-winning, four-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker of “The Triplets of Belleville” and “The Illusionist,” has partnered up with Mediawan’s On Kids & Family on his next directorial outing, “The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol.”
The ambitious film is being co-developed and produced by What The Prod, the outfit created and headed by Ashargin Poiré and Valérie Puech, with veteran animation producer Aton Soumache at On Kids & Family. The project is being presented at Annecy Film Festival with a well-polished, English-speaking teaser.
A modern fable, the animated biopic will chart the epic life of Pagnol, a celebrated French novelist, playwright and filmmaker who grew up in a middle-class household in Marseille and became one of the world’s most inventive and prolific artists from the 1930’s to the 1950’s. Throughout his long career, Pagnol’s books were translated into more than 50 languages and sold more than 150 million units. Pagnol also...
The ambitious film is being co-developed and produced by What The Prod, the outfit created and headed by Ashargin Poiré and Valérie Puech, with veteran animation producer Aton Soumache at On Kids & Family. The project is being presented at Annecy Film Festival with a well-polished, English-speaking teaser.
A modern fable, the animated biopic will chart the epic life of Pagnol, a celebrated French novelist, playwright and filmmaker who grew up in a middle-class household in Marseille and became one of the world’s most inventive and prolific artists from the 1930’s to the 1950’s. Throughout his long career, Pagnol’s books were translated into more than 50 languages and sold more than 150 million units. Pagnol also...
- 6/15/2021
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
By Glenn Dunks
Do you ever think about what career path you may have chosen in retrospect? You know, the one you would have selected had you been able to make such a life-changing decision after having actually experienced life? Maybe you already have your dream job, but even then—there’s often a niggling part of us that imagines something else. If I could turn back time, I think I would love to have gotten into film restoration and archiving. They are each fascinating professions that play to my niche interests including preservation and exhibition of celluloid, not to mention pretty, curated shelves. (I was the guy who would visit the video store and ensure the cases were in alphabetical order.) What's this go to do with anything though?
I bring this up because playing at this month’s TCM Classic Film Festival (May 6–9) is a new documentary called...
Do you ever think about what career path you may have chosen in retrospect? You know, the one you would have selected had you been able to make such a life-changing decision after having actually experienced life? Maybe you already have your dream job, but even then—there’s often a niggling part of us that imagines something else. If I could turn back time, I think I would love to have gotten into film restoration and archiving. They are each fascinating professions that play to my niche interests including preservation and exhibition of celluloid, not to mention pretty, curated shelves. (I was the guy who would visit the video store and ensure the cases were in alphabetical order.) What's this go to do with anything though?
I bring this up because playing at this month’s TCM Classic Film Festival (May 6–9) is a new documentary called...
- 5/5/2021
- by Glenn Dunks
- FilmExperience
Cinema is a wonderful tool for showing us other lives. Stories that we enjoy on the big screen connect intimately to our understanding of our own lives and to the lives of others. The best films can be wish-fulfilment, they can throw us into unimaginable terror, or they can show us what we might do given the circumstances the film presents us with.
Many of these films feature a protagonist whose life at the beginning of the film is not too dissimilar to our own. How many of Hitchcock‘s great films use the premise of extraordinary things happening to ordinary people? And because of the way film works on us as an entertainment medium, there is a very real connection between our visceral reaction and what we see on screen.
Certain films shake us to our core, or delight us in ways we couldn’t possibly have imagined. The...
Many of these films feature a protagonist whose life at the beginning of the film is not too dissimilar to our own. How many of Hitchcock‘s great films use the premise of extraordinary things happening to ordinary people? And because of the way film works on us as an entertainment medium, there is a very real connection between our visceral reaction and what we see on screen.
Certain films shake us to our core, or delight us in ways we couldn’t possibly have imagined. The...
- 4/21/2021
- by Michael Walsh
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Hosting moving images that are brief, breezy, and infinitely consumable, Tik Tok—the social media juggernaut built on an expanding user base of short form video-makers—is poised to become the nickelodeon of our still-young century. For the low, low price of one’s attention and personal data, users can journey through an infinite scroll of synchronized dances, tearful video diaries, and wacky pet antics. Savvy users employ text on screen, popular music, and a rogue’s gallery of emojis to augment one-minute video loops, shot and edited entirely on a mobile device.While some creators have introduced a higher concept of “production value” to their work, this is hardly the norm. For the majority of Tik Tok creators, their output has more in common with a home movie than, say, a polished Instagram post. Even without an account on the platform, it is hard not to encounter viral posts vis-a-vis Twitter and Instagram feeds,...
- 2/28/2021
- MUBI
The Criterion Channel has unveiled their March 2021 lineup, which includes no shortage of remarkable programming. Highlights from the slate include eight gems from Preston Sturges, Elaine May’s brilliant A New Leaf, a series featuring Black Westerns, Ann Hui’s Boat People, the new restoration of Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi.
They will also add films from their Essential Fellini boxset, series on Dirk Bogarde and Nelly Kaplan, and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned and Death in Venice, and more. In terms of recent releases, there’s also Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century and Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In.
Check out the lineup below, along with the teaser for the Black Westerns series. For weekly streaming updates across all services, bookmark this page.
The Adventurer, Charles Chaplin, 1917
Bandini, Bimal Roy, 1963
Behind the Screen, Charles Chaplin, 1916
Black Jack, Ken Loach, 1979
Black Rodeo, Jeff Kanew, 1972
Blood Simple, Joel and Ethan Coen,...
They will also add films from their Essential Fellini boxset, series on Dirk Bogarde and Nelly Kaplan, and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned and Death in Venice, and more. In terms of recent releases, there’s also Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century and Claire Denis’ Let the Sunshine In.
Check out the lineup below, along with the teaser for the Black Westerns series. For weekly streaming updates across all services, bookmark this page.
The Adventurer, Charles Chaplin, 1917
Bandini, Bimal Roy, 1963
Behind the Screen, Charles Chaplin, 1916
Black Jack, Ken Loach, 1979
Black Rodeo, Jeff Kanew, 1972
Blood Simple, Joel and Ethan Coen,...
- 2/26/2021
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
In a guest column for Variety, on the eve of the 125th anniversary of the first commercial movie screening, Thierry Fremaux, director of the Lumiere Institute and the Cannes Film Festival, celebrates the legacy and resilience of cinema through history. The film was made by Louis and Auguste Lumiere, the iconic French brothers who developed a camera-projector called the cinematographe. With movie theaters shuttered around the world due to the pandemic, Fremaux argues that we can’t give up on the collective experience of moviegoing.
In the summer of 1894, in Paris, Antoine Lumière discovered Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, an object that allowed for a tiny image to animate itself for individual viewing by inserting a coin. “We must take out the strip of film from this box…and project it on a big screen, before an audience,” said Lumière. “My sons will find a way.” Indeed, his sons Louis and Auguste succeeded,...
In the summer of 1894, in Paris, Antoine Lumière discovered Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, an object that allowed for a tiny image to animate itself for individual viewing by inserting a coin. “We must take out the strip of film from this box…and project it on a big screen, before an audience,” said Lumière. “My sons will find a way.” Indeed, his sons Louis and Auguste succeeded,...
- 12/27/2020
- by Thierry Frémaux
- Variety Film + TV
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe cover for the new issue of Cahiers du Cinema is a patchwork tribute to the erratic year of 2020. Frederick Wiseman's City Hall also tops the Cahiers list of this year's top ten films. Actress and screenwriter Daria Nicolodi, best known for co-writing Dario Argento's Suspiria and appearing in a number of Argento's Giallo classics like Deep Red and Inferno, has died. Recommended VIEWINGAnthology Film Archives is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a showcase of video tributes from a wide range of artists, filmmakers, and scholars, including Bette Gordon, Abel Ferrara, Nathaniel Dorsky, and Michael Snow. They've also made available a free recreation of their inaugural program from November 30, 1970, featuring films by Georges Méliès, Joseph Cornell, Jerome Hill and Harry Smith. The curators of the Museum of Modern Art and the Berlinale...
- 12/3/2020
- MUBI
Some of the earliest experiments in film 120 years ago were reproduced as flipbooks for wider audiences. Now a painstaking restoration project has brought long-lost gems back to life
Some lost films are more lost than others. There are very early works that no one now alive has seen, and we have little hope of recovering. While later silent feature films were duplicated and distributed widely, there are hundreds of short experiments by the first film-makers, movies no more than a few seconds long, that no longer exist even as a memory.
It seemed too good to be true, then, that lost films by Georges Méliès could really have been found by chance in a German bookshop in 2013. Yet a dogged research project by an independent scholar from France, Thierry Lecointe, has helped uncover miraculous images from lost films, not just by Méliès, but also by Alice Guy-Blaché.
Some lost films are more lost than others. There are very early works that no one now alive has seen, and we have little hope of recovering. While later silent feature films were duplicated and distributed widely, there are hundreds of short experiments by the first film-makers, movies no more than a few seconds long, that no longer exist even as a memory.
It seemed too good to be true, then, that lost films by Georges Méliès could really have been found by chance in a German bookshop in 2013. Yet a dogged research project by an independent scholar from France, Thierry Lecointe, has helped uncover miraculous images from lost films, not just by Méliès, but also by Alice Guy-Blaché.
- 10/22/2020
- by Pamela Hutchinson
- The Guardian - Film News
The great French director Eric Rohmer died 10 years ago, but his spirit lives on in other filmmakers. There are artists at work in the Rohmer tradition who, at moments, have evoked his sublime conversational ardor — and if you want to know what I mean, just watch Eugène Green’s “La Sapienza.” Few in the U.S. saw this 2014 release, but it’s a beguiling and rapturous movie. Green brought together four characters in Italy and had them ruminate about love, marriage, sickness, healing, ghosts, light, the mystic wonders of Roman Baroque architecture, and death, all set against landscapes pristine enough to suggest that the earth is still an Eden if only we’d wake up to it. At the end, two characters, each staring directly into the camera, arrived at a moment of truth, and it was as if they were talking to each other, to us, and to God.
- 10/11/2020
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
To mark the release of George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, out now, we’ve been given George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon Blu-ray & Autobiography to give away to 1 winner.
Georges Méliès was not just a pioneer of early cinema, he was central to what we know as film today. An illustrator, magician, filmmaker, and inventor he paved the way for animation and multi-media filmmaking.
Of all of Méliès films, his boldest and most well known is certainly A Trip to the Moon [Le Voyage dans la Lune], loosely based on the writings of Jules Verne. A Trip to the Moon follows a group of travellers who jet off to the moon from earth on an exploration mission only to end up in peril and captured by the local inhabitants, the Selenites. Featuring a who’s who of theatrical cast from the era, with Méliès himself taking a lead role, this is one...
Georges Méliès was not just a pioneer of early cinema, he was central to what we know as film today. An illustrator, magician, filmmaker, and inventor he paved the way for animation and multi-media filmmaking.
Of all of Méliès films, his boldest and most well known is certainly A Trip to the Moon [Le Voyage dans la Lune], loosely based on the writings of Jules Verne. A Trip to the Moon follows a group of travellers who jet off to the moon from earth on an exploration mission only to end up in peril and captured by the local inhabitants, the Selenites. Featuring a who’s who of theatrical cast from the era, with Méliès himself taking a lead role, this is one...
- 9/21/2020
- by Competitions
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
In 1895, the Lumiére Brothers used their invention, the Cinématographe, to capture some of the first motion pictures. Auguste and Louis Lemière’s short films were the start of the commercial development of film and cinema. Georges Méliès, another pioneer in filmmaking, built on the Lumiére Brothers' foundation with films like A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage. These early short films set the groundwork for the future of the movie industry. The Lumiére Brothers and Méliès are credited with some of the earliest innovations in film and are still revered by filmmakers today. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo was a five times Oscar winner that paid homage to these earlier innovators of film.
- 8/18/2020
- by Drew Ross
- Hollywood Insider - Substance & Meaningful Entertainment
As the new documentary “Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies” points out, 2020 is a risky time to make movies that feature female nudity, particularly if it’s of the gratuitous kind. But, as “Skin” doesn’t say but does demonstrate, it’s also a risky time to make movies about onscreen nudity, even if you try to emphasize that it’s a work of scholarship not titillation.
To be sure, the film from writer-director Danny Wolf and writer Paul Fishbein (the “Time Warp” series of docs about cult films) takes a historical approach to the subject of on-screen flesh. It’s a chronological account that makes copious use of authors, critics, academics and even an art historian to talk about the place of the nude in art.
But it also illustrates the points they make with plenty of breasts, bums and penises. And its attempts to deal with...
To be sure, the film from writer-director Danny Wolf and writer Paul Fishbein (the “Time Warp” series of docs about cult films) takes a historical approach to the subject of on-screen flesh. It’s a chronological account that makes copious use of authors, critics, academics and even an art historian to talk about the place of the nude in art.
But it also illustrates the points they make with plenty of breasts, bums and penises. And its attempts to deal with...
- 8/18/2020
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
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