The big story since yesterday’s roundup has to be Pitchfork‘s announcement that it’ll soon be launching a film site: “The Dissolve will feature reviews, commentary, interviews, and news about the films of the moment, while also exploring more than a century of film history.” Scott Tobias, former film editor at the AV Club, will be the editor, joined by a good handful of AV Club vets: Tasha Robinson and Genevieve Koski (as senior editors), and Nathan Rabin and Noel Murray (as staff writers). Matt Singer will be segueing from Criticwire to the Dissolve as news editor. Now that’s a dynamic lineup! Slate‘s David Haglund talks with Phipps about the project: “If we can become for movies what Pitchfork is for music—a smart site written with a lot of passion and knowledge for people who care about the subject—I’ll be thrilled.”
Reading. The Nation very rarely makes Stuart Klawans‘s film reviews available to non-subscribers, so it’s well worth mentioning that the magazine’s freed up this week’s column in which he takes on Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight.
“This was the best film I saw at Cannes.” And you won’t find it on our index. While he was there, Time Out New York‘s Keith Uhlich caught a market screening of Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain, and he’s posted an insightful review.
With “Vulgar Auteurism” in the air, Cinema Scope‘s posted extracts from Andrew Tracy‘s 2009 piece on Michael Mann.
In just over 440 words, Farran Nehme‘s turned a rattling personal experience into an evocative history of cinema.
Book. Curtis Harrington died six years ago, but Drag City will be releasing his memoir, Nice Guys Don’t Work In Hollywood, on June 18. At Dangerous Minds, Marc Campbell recommends this “fascinating read that anyone who has tried to maintain their integrity and sanity while working within a corporate-controlled art medium will find both amusing and painfully familiar.”
List. With Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me opening today (see Ignatiy Vishnevetsky‘s review at RogerEbert.com), Peter Martin revisits the “Most Magical Movie Heists of the Past 50 Years” at Movies.com. As for what else is opening this weekend, see the Critics Round Up entries on Darezhan Omirbaev’s Student, James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer, and M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth. We pointed to the entry on Margarethe von Trotta‘s Hannah Arendt yesterday, but let’s make note of Saul Austerlitz‘s objections to the film as well.
Los Angeles. “As its monumental Stanley Kubrick exhibition draws to a close June 30—catch it while you still can—the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will screen Kubrick films a final time, paired with movies by filmmakers Kubrick admired or with whom he shared affinities, curated by the museum’s Bernardo Rondeau.” In the Weekly, Doug Cummings considers a few of the unique pairings: Lolita (1962) and George Axelrod’s Lord Love a Duck (1966); Dr. Strangelove (1964) and William Klein’s Mr. Freedom (1969); A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Peter Watkins‘s Privilege (1967); and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Luis Buñuel‘s Belle de Jour (1967).
In the works. Nymphomaniac won’t begin rolling out into theaters until December, but Lars von Trier’s teasing campaign is already in full swing. Following that widely retweeted group portrait, eight chapter titles have been released as well as a new statement declaring that “Lars von Trier wants to introduce a new film genre: Digressionism.” Simon de Bruyn has more at Twitch.
All those pans for Only God Forgives aren’t going to keep down that other notorious Dane, Nicolas Winding Refn. A “sexual thriller, I Walk with the Dead, with Carey Mulligan is ‘looking very good,’ he’s ‘supposed to read a script’ for Button Man, he’s still developing a comedy with Ryan Gosling, and working on the TV series Barbarella,” reports the Playlist‘s Kevin Jagernauth, noting, too, that he’s also “working on an adaptation of Jodorowsky and Moebius’s comic series The Incal. The original six book series launched in 1981 and is set in a dystopian future, detailing the battle over the powerful Incal crystal. The comic series is notable in that it followed the collapse of Jodorowsky’s Dune, and utilizes some of the similar designs that Moebius had created while working on the movie.”
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