REFLECTIONS ON FILM CULTURE

DAILY | New Films, New Books, New Posters

La Semaine de la Critique, known to most as Critics’ Week, has announced that it’ll be closing this year’s edition on May 24 with two short films: Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker and João Pedro Rodrigues’s Manhã de Santo António. Walker premiered at the Hong Kong Film Festival in March as part of the omnibus film Beautiful 2012 and Screen‘s Mark Adams noted at the time that it “takes an unusual look at the bustling streets of Hong Kong as it features a series of stunningly shot scenes with at the center a red-robed monk who walks at a snail’s pace. With traffic and pedestrians speeding around him the man (head intensely bowed, bare feet and holding a bread roll in one hand and a plastic bag in the other) walks only a step every minute.”

Meantime, the Cannes Film Festival itself has announced that it’ll be hosting Haiti: Carnival in Cannes, a benefit event for Sean Penn’s J/P HRO, Paul Haggis’s Artists for Peace and Justice and Petra Nemcova’s Happy Heart’s Fund.

Every Night the Trees Disappear

Books. New reviews in the Austin Chronicle: Marc Savlov on Alan Greenberg‘s Every Night the Trees Disappear: Werner Herzog and the Making of Heart of Glass (related viewing: Herzog’s recent lecture at Amherst College), Kimberley Jones on David T Johnson‘s Richard Linklater and Margaret Moser on Sissy Spacek‘s My Extraordinary Ordinary Life.

Chicago. Adrian Martin will be delivering his lecture “Cinema Invents Ways of Dancing” this evening at the University of Chicago Film Studies Center. Tomorrow, he, Girish Shambu and Elena Gorfinkel will take part in a discussion of relations between film criticism and academic film studies at the Block Museum of Art. Illuminating the Shadows: Film Criticism in Focus, an evening moderated by Nick Davis, also features a screening of James Toback’s Exposed (1983).

New York. The Anthology Film Archives series Anything Could Happen Here: The Films of Jean-André Fieschi, running through the weekend, opens this evening with Pasolini L’Enragé (1966), a document of an hour-long conversation between Fieschi and the poet, painter, journalist and filmmaker. Steve Macfarlane for the L: “It’s intriguing to watch Pasolini—more earnest on-camera than Fassbinder, yet somehow also more cryptic than Bresson—push back against any easy categorizations while simultaneously juggling what appears to be about two dozen different thoughts at any given time.”

For Artforum, Ben Parker previews Focus Features: 10th Anniversary Salute, a ten-film program running at MoMA from today through May 20: “Some of these films, I suspect, only a college freshman would admit to liking in 2012. Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), however, no longer strikes me as gimmicky and twee, but as hugely depressing.” And Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) “is a different movie than people have wanted it to be, but possibly a more interesting one.” Also at MoMA, from today through Saturday: Literature and the Moving Image.

San Francisco. For the Bay Guardian, Dennis Harvey previews From a Whisper to a Scream: Discovering Andrzej Zulawski, a series opening today at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and running through May 13.

Los Angeles. “There exists a body of Hollywood films made in 1932-33—a narrow window just before and after Franklin Roosevelt’s election—that reflected the deep despair of the American people confronted with corruption at all political levels, and their temptation to take matters into their own hands. This type of populist vigilante film never happened again.” For the LA Weekly, Philippe Garnier previews tonight’s double bill at the Egyptian, Tay Garnett’s Okay, America! and Edward Cahn’s Afraid to Talk, both from 1932.

The eleven-film program Numbers, Patterns, and Shapes: Later Abstractions of the 1960s and 1970s happens tonight at Cinefamily.

Boston. Previewing the LGBT Film Festival of Boston, running today through May 13, the Phoenix‘s Peter Keough finds a few “gaudy, funny romps that also take on serious issues.”

Baltimore. The Maryland Film Festival runs from today through Sunday and you may well want to take a look at the trailer for Paul Duane’s Very Extremely Dangerous, a portrait of rockabilly artist Jerry McGill who quite evidently delivers on the promise of the title.

Amsterdam. The stop-motion animation series Stop & Go 3D begins its European tour with a week-long run at the Grafisch Atelier: “Stobing effects, afterimages, anaglyphic experiments, optical elements and three-dimensional spoofs are all part of the show.”

Paths of Glory

In the works. Nicole Holofcener will direct Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini in an as-yet-untitled film about “a masseuse [Louis-Dreyfus] who falls in love with the husband (Gandolfini) of a new friend,” reports Ioncinema‘s Eric Lavallee.

Not in the works. “HBO will not be going forward with the Noah Baumbach/Scott Rudin pilot The Corrections,” reports Nellie Andreeva for Deadline. “The drama project, based on Jonathan Franzen’s acclaimed book, boasted one of most star-studded casts ever assembled on television: Chris Cooper, Dianne Wiest, Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans and Greta Gerwig.”

Eye candy. “Preservation and restoration are the clarion calls of Martin Scorsese’s nonprofit The Film Foundation,” blogs the Austin Chronicle‘s Kimberley Jones, and “their cinematic saves are the focus of a new film series with Mondo and Alamo Drafthouse. Kicking off this Monday with Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, the eight-film series will pair restored 35mm prints with original poster art from Mondo.” She’s got the new posters for Tod Browning’s The Unholy Three (1925), Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider’s Film (1965) and James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932). At indieWIRE, Eric Kohn will show you the posters for Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), Merian C Cooper’s King Kong (1933) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

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