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With nearly 1,700 titles in their catalog, it’s hard to discern where exactly to start when exploring the Criterion Collection. To celebrate their 40th anniversary, the company has now made it a bit easier as they’ve unveiled CC40, a 40-film, 49-disc collection retailing for around $640 that is now the new go-to gift for that budding cinephile in your life.

“This monumental forty-film box set celebrates forty years of the Criterion Collection by gathering an electrifying mix of classic and contemporary films, and presenting them with all their special features and essays in a deluxe clothbound, slipcased edition,” they note. “CC40’s eclectic selection includes the releases most frequently chosen by the hundreds of filmmakers, actors, writers, and other movie-loving luminaries who have visited Criterion over the years, as documented in our popular Closet Picks video series. Neither a historical survey nor a top-forty compilation, this exciting, personal, unpredictable anthology...

Though Richard Linklater’s Hit Man is about to debut in theaters and on Netflix––just after his under-the-radar documentary God Save Texas: Hometown Prison came to Max––the ever-prolific American was recently in Paris for Nouvelle Vague, his chronicle of the making of Godard’s Breathless. (If not more: casting notices for Jean-Pierre Léaud around the time of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Martin Lassale around the time of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket popped up.) With filming recently wrapped, one might expect a fall premiere––expectations bolstered by today’s unveiling of our first real look, courtesy (who else!) Cahiers du cinéma.

Therein one can find Guillaume Marbeck as Jean-Luc Godard (previously unveiled in a cast-and-crew portrait) and filming of a scene on the Champs-Elysees. Meanwhile, Jean-Louis Fernandez shared a set photo suggesting the production design team should be paid handsomely.

Find them below:

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Mk2 Films, the Paris-based outfit behind Justine Triet’s Oscar-nominated “Anatomy of a Fall,” is set to restore Robert Bresson’s “Four Nights of a Dreamer,” a romantic drama which competed at the Berlinale in 1971 and disappeared from screens in 1985.

MK2 Films, the division of a major arthouse cinema chain in France, will digitize “Four Nights of a Dreamer” in 4K and will bring it to global theatres in 2024.

“Four Nights of a Dreamer” is the 10th film directed by Bresson and the only one which wasn’t restored. His other credits include “Mouchette,” “Au Hasard Balthazar” and “Pickpocket.”

Inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel “White Nights,” “Four Nights of a Dreamer” revolves around a meeting on the Pont Neuf between a dreamy young man and a distraught young woman who will confide in each other over four nights. It stars Guillaume des Forêts, Isabelle Weingarten, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer. The film...

Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, who “humanizes China’s modern history – and turns it into poetry,” according to one critic, will be the guest of honor at Visions du Réel. The documentary film festival’s 55th edition runs April 12-21 in Nyon, Switzerland.

Jia, a leading figure in independent Chinese cinema, will present a masterclass exploring his body of work, and a retrospective of his films will run throughout the edition. The tribute is made possible thanks to the collaboration with the Cinémathèque suisse and Ecal, the university of art and design in Lausanne.

“Since the outbreak of Covid-19, I haven’t left China for almost four years,” Jia said. “I feel like embracing the world again, as excited as a child about to go on a long trip for the first time. I am heading to Nyon for cinema that reveals the world as it really is.”

Jia belongs to...

The question of how to get the most authenticity possible out of actors has been riling up filmmakers for as long as the film medium has existed. William Wyler ("Ben-Hur") did 40 takes; Robert Bresson ("Pickpocket") insisted on simple movements and monotone line deliveries; Italian Neorealists cast people off the street; Robert Altman ("Nashville") let actors improvise; Andrei Tarkovsky ("Solaris") kept them in the dark about how the story would end.

When it comes to horror, the quest becomes even more daunting: How do you convince viewers that the people they're seeing on screen are genuinely disturbed and terrified, while also securing enough distance between actors and characters to keep the shoot sustainable? Some films have attempted to split the difference by instilling genuine scares, discomfort, and emotional distress on their actors. Others assembled their respective violent scenarios to within an inch of their lives, placing performers into circumstances that were...

When Martin Scorsese finally won the directing Oscar for 2006’s The Departed, he inspired a handful of film buffs to point out the supposed travesty implied by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences long ignoring the landmark titles on the filmmaker’s resume in favor of a remake. Few pointed out, or seemed to recall, that America’s most beloved living auteur, was not only no stranger to remakes, but took up the business of remaking, rebooting, and paying homage as a more than honorable foundation for a now-legendary body of work.

New York, New York was essentially a ticker-tape parade for old Hollywood’s Technicolor musical legacy, while Taxi Driver was a tribute either to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket or John Ford’s The Searchers, depending on which auteur lens (Paul Schrader or Martin Scorsese) you look at it through. And 1973’s Mean Streets, the director’s third feature,...

Chinese cinema is a layered world waiting to be explored and discovered, particularly in its more “independent” sphere. The term “Chinese independent cinema” refers to a new wave movement in film that emerged in China during the late 1990s and early 2000s. During this time, an increasing number of independent filmmakers began creating films outside of the state-controlled film industry. Since then, directors have been venturing into themes and styles that deviate from mainstream narratives, with a primary focus on the experiences and struggles of ordinary people. Chinese independent cinema has made a significant impact both domestically and internationally by offering alternative perspectives and narratives that often delve into social, political, and cultural issues in contemporary China. This list aims to present five essential works of the Chinese independent film movement from the 1990s that you absolutely shouldn't miss.

5. Mama

Considered the very first Chinese independent work, this low-budget black...

While we’ve known the results of Jeanne Dielman Tops Sight and Sound‘s 2022 Greatest Films of All-Time List”>Sight & Sound’s once-in-a-decade greatest films of all-time poll for a few months now, the recent release of the individual ballots has given data-crunching cinephiles a new opportunity to dive deeper. We have Letterboxd lists detailing all 4,400+ films that received at least one vote and another expanding the directors poll, spreadsheets calculating every entry, and now a list ranking how many votes individual directors received for their films.

Tabulated by Genjuro, the list of 35 directors, with two pairs, puts Alfred Hitchcock back on top, while Chantal Akerman is at number two. Elsewhere in the top ten are David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Orson Welles, Yasujirō Ozu, and Stanley Kubrick, and tied for the tenth spot is Wong Kar Wai and Ingmar Bergman.

Check out the list below,...

by Simon Ramshaw

There is a moment in Jia Zhangke’s “Platform” where an argument between a cynic and an idealist creates an unexpected glimpse of a bright future. One of the film’s central characters Cui Mingliang (Wang Hongwei) declares “the four modernisations: Industry, Agriculture, Defense and Science” will be embraced by China in the year 2000, and it’s no mistake that this statement is a bitterly ironic one for his little town. Taking place between 1979 and 1989, Jia’s second feature film looks at the fallout of the death of Mao Zedong and the formation of the People’s Republic of China, which leaves the performers of provincial Communist theatre troupes without the purpose they once had in Mao’s lifetime. Their stage plays are state-sanctioned propaganda that young and old alike attend in their droves, yet there is the pervasive feeling that this nostalgia will take them nowhere.

As the film of the week I select Jia Zhangke’s feature directorial debut “Pickpocket”, out of the simple reason that it can be currently seen in its restored glory on Mubi. The film, originally shot on 16mm, stars Wang Hongwei as an outcast con-artist Xiao Wu who is equally estranged from the society and his partners in crime, and whose name serves as the film’s original title.

As it is going to be the case in Zhangke’s later body of work, the milieu the film is set up in in his hometown, it is spoken in the local Mandarine dialect, and the plot is heavily charged with symbolism. Little poisonous arrows are flying towards the direction of the alleged socialist society in which money talks, prostitution blooms, and in which the police turns a blind eye to corruption and middle-scale crime, noticing and punishing petty criminals only.

Venice film festival: Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton can’t save this stilted, eccentric crime story

Paul Schrader is back with another variation on his signature theme, although now it feels like a fifth-generation Xerox. Here again is the lonely, driven male – derived from the philosopher-hero of Bresson’s Pickpocket – broodingly writing his journal of an evening in conditions of monkish austerity, haunted by the existential revelations of crime and a violent past, trying to transform or subsume his trauma into some new vocational obsession.

Master Gardener has been described as the third film in a trilogy with First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), although the resemblances go further back into his cv than that and Schrader is probably unique in that he is not merely an auteur but a genre unto himself. This new iteration is eccentric – an oddity, certainly, with its stately, formal dialogue set-pieces which feel somewhat...

Action sequel drops just 8 on second weekend.

RankFilm (distributor) Three-day gross (June 3 - June 5)Total gross to date Week 1. Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount) £10.3m £30.6m 2 2. Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness (Disney) £1.15m £40.3m 5 3. Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (Paramount) £455,000 £26.2m 10 4. The Bad Guys (Universal) £401,112 £12.9m 10 5. Everything Everywhere All At Once (A24) £370,968 £3.85m 4

Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick has maintained an impressive altitude at the UK box office, slipping just 8 on its second weekend of release for a huge £10.3m haul between Friday and Sunday.

Benefitting from strong word-of-mouth, the Top Gun sequel has now generated a box office total...

Restored versions of Chinese language cinema classics Wong Kar-wai’s “Days of Being Wild” (1990) and Jia Zhangke’s first full-length feature “Pickpocket” (“Xiao Wu”) 1998) will lead the inaugural program of Hong Kong’s M+ Cinema, which will be opened to the public on June 8.

The opening program also features the Hong Kong premiere of one of the films from Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s epic project series “Dau,” making the M+ Museum notable for not canceling Russian culture following the country’s invasion of Ukraine.

The cinema, comprising three theaters with seating capacity of 180, 60, and 40 seats, is a core facility of the Moving Image Centre at M+, the visual culture museum that opened in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District in November last year. Moving images, including artist-made audio-visual works, artist films, and traditional feature films, are considered among one of the three key disciplines of the mega institution...

‘Bergman Island’, ‘Dashcam’ and ‘Major’ are also set to debut.

After it soared to the top of the UK-Ireland box office last weekend, Top Gun: Maverick is highly likely to hold onto the number one spot after the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee bank holiday weekend, amid a quiet week for new openers.

The chief contender for breaking into the top five among this weekend’s debuts is Top Gun: Maverick’s fellow Cannes premiere Men, which opens at 570 sites for Entertainment Film Distributors – this weekend’s widest new release.

The Directors’ Fortnight title, which is directed by Ex Machina filmmaker Alex Garland,...

‘Bergman Island’, ‘Dascham’ and ‘Major’ are also set to debut.

After it soared to the top of the UK-Ireland box office last weekend, Top Gun: Maverick is highly likely to hold onto the number one spot after the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee bank holiday weekend, amid a quiet week for new openers.

The chief contender for breaking into the top five among this weekend’s debuts is Top Gun: Maverick’s fellow Cannes premiere Men, which opens at 570 sites for Entertainment Film Distributors – this weekend’s widest new release.

The Directors’ Fortnight title, which is directed by Ex Machina filmmaker Alex Garland,...

‘Bergman Island’, ‘Dascham’ and ‘Major’ are also out this weekend.

After it soared to the top of the UK-Ireland box office last weekend, Top Gun: Maverick is highly likely to hold onto the number one spot after the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee bank holiday weekend, amid a quiet week for new openers.

The chief contender for breaking into the top five among this weekend’s debuts is Top Gun: Maverick’s fellow Cannes premiere Men, which opens at 570 sites for Entertainment Film Distributors – this weekend’s widest new release.

The Directors’ Fortnight title, which is directed by Ex Machina filmmaker Alex Garland,...

Bresson’s 1959 film about a misfit who dreams of rising above conventional morals is a brilliant example of the cinema of ideas

Robert Bresson’s hypnotically intense and lucid movie-novella from 1959 is now revived as part of a director’s retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank, and whatever creakiness I thought I saw in this masterly film for its last UK re-release has vanished. The andante pace of Pickpocket is part of its brilliance, part of its seriousness and its status as a cinema of ideas: a movie with something of Dostoevsky or Camus, or even Victor Hugo.

The then non-professional actor Martin Lasalle was cast by Bresson as Michel, a gloomy young man who spends his days writing his journal in a seedy bedsit: a precursor for the prison cell for which he is destined. Michel is plagued with nameless guilt about his elderly, unwell mother whom he cannot bring himself to visit,...

Paul Schrader, who received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Zurich Film Festival on Friday, is planning to start shooting thriller “Master Gardener” in February, with Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver starring, and the third role to be played by a young woman of color. Zendaya was his first choice, but they couldn’t agree on the fee, he told an audience at the Swiss festival.

“Master Gardener” is about a horticulturist torn between two women, one old enough to be his mother and the other young enough to be his daughter.

“I was thinking about that guy, but then two women showed up. He is having romantic relations with both, but what I liked the most is that now, they can talk to each other. What would happen in ‘Taxi Driver’ if Cybill Shepherd and Jodie Foster went out to get coffee?”

At Zurich, Schrader presented his drama “The Card Counter,...

Every festival season has its standout star — the person who shows up in two or three or four movies in quick programming succession, suddenly seems ubiquitous on all those red carpets, becomes the unofficial face of the awards-circuit gauntlet. This year, we already have a few strong candidates. There’s Oscar Isaac, who hit Venice with the HBO miniseries redo of Scenes From a Marriage, Dune, and The Card Counter, Paul Schrader’s latest character study of existentially brooding, solitary men. (Find someone to love you the way Schrader loves Pickpocket.

The Card Counter There’s something uniquely thrilling about watching an old master spin their formulas and leitmotivs to create something that feels novel, enrapturing, and heart-shaking. Such was the case with Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, one of the strongest entries in a remarkably solid official competition lineup. Written and directed by Schrader, his follow-up to his last Venice entry—the 2018 First Reformed—The Card Counter is an assaultive, unflinching piece of filmmaking in which a man’s path to atonement doubles as a reminder of a horrific stain in America’s history, and a vitriolic takedown of the military culture that enabled it.Oscar Isaacs plays William Tillich, a former special ops soldier who took part in the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the Guantanamo-like prison where US authorities tortured and killed Iraqi detainees in the early stages of the Iraq War. Once evidence of the human rights...

CinemaWith an impressive list of movies premiering directly on streaming platforms, here’s how actors and producers Suriya and Fahadh are using the Ott medium in these difficult times.Saradha UFacebook When the pandemic struck, the film industry came to a standstill. Shoots were halted and with theatres identified as high risk areas, the future seemed bleak and uncertain. But, some from the industry were quick to analyse the scenario and adapt to it. The first south Indian film to be made for a direct Over-the-Top release during the pandemic was C U Soon. Jimmy, who works in the UAE, matches with Anumol from Dubai, on Tinder. As they get to know each other better, they swiftly move from Tinder to Google Hangouts and so on. It is through these digital interactions that we are introduced to Jimmy’s world and its characters in Cu Soon. From romantic conversations and flirtatious looks,...

Ramin Bahrani, Oscar-nominated writer/director of The White Tiger, discusses a few of his favorite movies with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

The White Tiger (2021)

Man Push Cart (2005)

Chop Shop (2007)

99 Homes (2015)

The Boys From Fengkuei (1983)

The Time To Live And The Time To Die (1985)

The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (1976)

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

La Terra Trema (1948)

Umberto D (1952)

Where Is The Friend’s Home? (1987)

Nomadland (2020)

The Runner (1984)

Bashu, the Little Stranger (1989)

A Moment Of Innocence a.k.a. Bread And Flower Pot (1996)

The House Is Black (1963)

The Conversation (1974)

Mean Streets (1973)

Nashville (1975)

Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (1972)

The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Paris, Texas (1984)

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Vagabond (1985)

Luzzu (2021)

Bait (2019)

Sweet Sixteen (2002)

Abigail’s Party (1977)

Meantime (1983)

Fish Tank (2009)

Do The Right Thing (1989)

Malcolm X (1992)

Nothing But A Man (1964)

Goodbye Solo (2008)

The Spook Who Sat By The Door (1973)

Dekalog (1989)

The Double Life Of Veronique...

Quibi has slotted September 14 for the premiere of Steven Soderbergh’s survival thriller series Wireless, starring Tye Sheridan. We’re also getting a first look at a just-released image above.

In Wireless, on a sparsely traveled road deep in the Colorado mountains, college student Andy Braddock (Sheridan) drives to a New Years Eve party to try to rekindle a relationship with his ex-girlfriend. Distracted by his phone, Andy collides with a snowbank and hurtles into a ravine. Wounded and alone, Andy turns to his quickly dying cell for rescue, but help is far from a phone call away.

Cast also includes Lukas Gage, Francesca Reale, Mace Coronel, Sydney Park and Andie MacDowell,

Wireless is created and exec produced by newcomers Zach Wechter and Jack Seidman (Pocket). Soderbergh executive produces alongside Michael Sugar, Cathy Konrad and Danny Sherman, Wechter — who also directs the series, which is in production — and Seidman. Alpine...

Considering we are no longer getting a James Bond film this spring, those seeking slick espionage thrills will get a healthy dose (and much more of the unexpected) with The Whistlers, the latest work from Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, which is now in theaters. Clearly inspired by a number of noir films, today we’re taking a more general look at his favorite movies of all-time.

As voted on in the latest Sight & Sound poll, as well as a recent feature from our friends at Le Cinéma Club, his picks range include a healthy range of world cinema, from Apichatpong Weerasethakul to Michelangelo Antonioni to Éric Rohmer to Yasujirô Ozu. “All of them influenced my way of making movies and also my way of seeing world,” he said of the majority of the selections. Speaking about La Dolce Vita, he added, “I watched it by chance when I was 18 years old.

The first time I saw Angela Schanelec speak, there was nothing for her to smile about: at a cartoonishly hostile Q&a for 2016’s The Dreamed Path, she fielded questions like “Was this supposed to take place in an alternate universe where emotions don’t exist?” and admirably didn’t yield an inch. Returning to Tiff, Schanelec was onhand not just for Q&As for her latest, I Was at Home, But… but to introduce a 35mm rep screening of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket—one of the foundational works from a director whose influence on, and importance for, Schanelec’s work is immediately apparent. Both when I interviewed her […]...

The first time I saw Angela Schanelec speak, there was nothing for her to smile about: at a cartoonishly hostile Q&a for 2016’s The Dreamed Path, she fielded questions like “Was this supposed to take place in an alternate universe where emotions don’t exist?” and admirably didn’t yield an inch. Returning to Tiff, Schanelec was onhand not just for Q&As for her latest, I Was at Home, But… but to introduce a 35mm rep screening of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket—one of the foundational works from a director whose influence on, and importance for, Schanelec’s work is immediately apparent. Both when I interviewed her […]...

New works from celebrated documentary filmmakers Alex Gibney, Barbara Kopple, Lauren Greenfield, Alan Berliner, Feras Fayyad, Patricio Guzman, Fisher Stevens and Mark Cousins will be showcased in the Tiff Docs section of the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, Tiff organizers announced on Thursday.

In addition to the 25 documentaries, the festival also revealed more than 50 additional films in the Midnight Madness, Tiff Discovery and Tiff Cinematheque sections.

The documentary section will open with “The Cave” from Feras Fayyad, director of the Oscar-nominated “Last Men in Aleppo.” The film is set in an underground hospital led by a female doctor in Syria. Other former Oscar nominees and winners showing films at Tiff include Gibney with “Citizen K,” his portrait of Russian oligarch-turned-Putin-critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky; Kopple, with “Desert One,” about an Iranian hostage rescue mission; and Stevens, co-director with Malcolm Venville of “And We Go Green,” a Leonardo DiCaprio-produced film about the Formula...

Canadian zombie film Blood Quantum, Ugandan gonzo action film Crazy World bookend Midnight Madness.

Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff) brass on Thursday (8) unveiled selections in the Midnight Madness, Discovery, Tiff Docs, and Cinematheque programmes set to screen next month.

The 10-strong Midnight Madness programme includes world premieres of Rose Glass’s psychological thriller Saint Maud, Joko Anwar’s Indonesian superhero adaptation Gundala, and Richard Stanley’s H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out Of Space starring Nicolas Cage. Jeff Barnaby’s previously announced zombie outbreak thriller Blood Quantum from Canada and Isaac Nabwana’s Ugandan gonzo action film Crazy World bookend the section.

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Paul Schrader's Light Sleeper (1992) is showing June 9-July 9, 2018 in the United States.In the opening sequence of Light Sleeper a man played by a pale-faced yet sleekly handsome Willem Dafoe is being chauffeured through the New York night. Beyond the windows of the car the lights of the city and traffic pass by reflecting on his impassive face, oversized piles of garbage litter the sidewalks and puddles of rainwater line the streets. He sees it all without touching it. On the soundtrack plays an achingly moody song with the line: ‘I trust my life in providence, I give my soul to grace.’ We don’t need the credits to tell us that we are in pure Paul Schrader territory: a man apart sheltered in a car at night, separated and shielded from the world.The man’s name...

The Tenth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series continues this weekend. — The Classic French Film Festival celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the mid-1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

There are two more events for the Tenth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival happening this weekend:

Friday, March 16th at 7:30pm – Alphaville

A cockeyed fusion of science fiction, pulp characters, and surrealist poetry, Jean-Luc Godard’s irreverent journey to the mysterious Alphaville remains one of the least conventional films of all time. Eddie Constantine stars as intergalactic hero Lemmy Caution, on a mission to eliminate Professor Von Braun, the creator of the malevolent Alpha 60, a computer that rules the city of Alphaville. Befriended by the scientist’s beautiful daughter Natasha (Godard...

Writer/director was talking ahead of Rotterdam Film Festival masterclass.

Source: Wiki Commons

Paul Schrader

Writer-director Paul Schrader, who will attend the International Film Festival Rotterdam on Monday (29 Jan) to give a Masterclass, has predicted that he will finish his career working in cinema - and he has warned that TV drama is not the haven for filmmakers that it recently seemed.

“I think I’ll finish out working for the cinema particularly now that television has lost some of its allure,” Schrader said. “You know, there are 500 scripted TV series now being made. Do you really want to get into that world?”

The veteran filmmaker added that the “so called freedom of TV is not as free as you might think”. He said that his latest feature, First Reformed (which premiered in Venice and which is screening at Iffr), could not have been made for television, which is why he plans to stick to making movies. “I think...

The 10th Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-presented by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series — celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the 1990s, offering a revealing overview of French cinema.

This year’s fest kicks off with a screening of Bertrand Tavernier’s acclaimed documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema,” the director’s personal reflections on key films and filmmakers. Several of the works he highlights — such as Jacques Becker’s “Casque d’or” and Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samouraï” — are screened at this year’s fest.

The fest annually includes significant restorations, and this year features New Wave master Jacques Rivette’s visually sumptuous “La belle noiseuse.” The fest also provides one of the few opportunities available in St. Louis to see films projected the old-school, time-honored way, with Jean Renoir...

Daniel Talbot, a distributor and exhibitor of enormous influence over specialized exhibition and distribution as well as the international film world, died Friday in Manhattan. He was 91. A memorial was held Sunday, December 31 at the Riverside Memorial Chapel with a capacity audience including many leading New York specialized players. Talbot’s wife and business partner, Toby Talbot, as well as daughters Nina, Emily and Sara attended the memorial, where the family spoke fondly about Talbot’s love for the comedian W.C. Fields.

Another more public post-holiday event marking the closing of the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas is scheduled on January 28 in New York. The last few weeks have seen Talbot’s legacy celebrated with reaction to the unexpected announcement that the six-screen Upper West Side theater would close at the end of January, at the expiration of its lease. Milstein Properties, who have been the Talbots’ co-partners in the theater since...

Richard Linklater’s new film Last Flag Flying may not be in theaters until November, but it opened this year’s New York Film Festival and the director sat down with festival director Kent Jones for extensive at the Walter Reade Theater on Saturday, September 30.

On Cinema is an annual event at the festival where world-renowned filmmakers invite festival goers to learn their cinematic inspiration and influences. Linklater built the conversation around his favorite moments in film, including The Long Goodbye, Pickpocket and Taxi Driver, among others. From the beginning of his talk, it was clear Linklater held reverence for everyone he was to discuss, but none received praise like Robert Bresson and Robert Altman.

Linklater fixates on the passing moments in film, which he calls the stuff we remember from cinema. He’s gifted American cinema with a philosophy unique to the last twenty years of filmmaking and was...

Paul Schrader has been open about the original intentions for his most famous work, the screenplay to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Writing it in the vein of Robert Bresson films like Diary of a Country Priest or Pickpocket, it was his full intention for the film to be directed in a similarly austere fashion. This writer perhaps doesn’t need to further recount what actually happened in the end result of one of the most famous American films of all-time, but nonetheless the multiple authors involved put it in a different direction.

It seems that some of Schrader’s own directorial efforts, be it American Gigolo or Light Sleeper, were certainly an attempt to complete the “Transcendental” experience to one degree or another. Yet four decades later, First Reformed — which, should be mentioned, also seems to be taking from Bergman’s Winter Light and Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice in the...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSOver the weekend we lost two greats: Filmmaker George A. Romero, best known for inventing the modern version of all things zombie, and actor Martin Landau. Patton Oswalt has pointed out that a 19-year-old Romero worked as a pageboy on North by Northwest, Landau's second movie.The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has again added more names to its membership, and this latest batch includes even more unexpected additions from the world of international art cinema, including directors Pedro Costa, Lav Diaz, Ann Hui, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Kira Muratova, Johnnie To and Athina Rachel Tsangari.Did you see that the lineup of the Locarno Film Festival has been announced? With a huge retrospective devoted to Cat People director Jacques Tourneur and a competition including new films by Wang Bing, F.J. Ossang, Ben Russell,...

Welcome to the final film of the aesthetically precise, rigorously austere Robert Bresson, an adaptation of a fateful tale by Leo Tolstoy visualized in Bresson’s frequently maddening personal style. An extreme artist makes a fascinatingly unyielding show: as with the classic paintings that Bresson admires, appreciation requires special knowledge.

L’argent

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 886

1983 / Color / 1:85 anamorphic 16:9 / 85 min. / Money / Street Date July 11, 2017 / 39.95

Starring: Christian Patey, Vincent Risterucci, Caroline Lang, Sylvie Van den Elsen, Báatrice Tabourin, Didier Baussy.

Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis, Emmanuel Machuel

Production Designer: Pierre Guffroy

Film Editor: Jean-Francois Naudon

Written by Robert Bresson from a short story by Leo Tolstoy

Produced by Antoine Gannagé, Jean-Marc Henchoz, Daniel Toscan du Plantier

Written and Directed by Robert Bresson

Some movies need disclaimers, and many of the pictures of Robert Bresson could use a caption reading, ‘not for beginners.’ Bresson’s filmography includes the spiritually mysterious Diary of a Country Priest...

The woods hold an unmistakable allure, familiar yet unknown, idyllic, yet fraught with peril. They are the heart of Happy Times Will Come, shot in natural light, which often means that viewers are abandoned in darkness to develop our senses. Indeed, the film thrusts us into the stark indigo night where a pair of fugitives scurrying up a steep hill are long heard before they are seen. Once the sun peeks out, dappling everything in its midst to beguiling effect, it’s not difficult to acclimate to the sights–the crooked crags aside a crisp brook or a verdant curtain of trees. Meanwhile, the young men, peculiarly unplaceable in time, forage for mushrooms or tussle in the high grass. Combining personal history and fabricated folklore, Italian director Alessandro Comodin imbues the alpine setting, already easy on the eyes, with a spectral glow and timelessness. The effect extends to a brief interlude of talking head interviews,...

Pang Ho-cheung’s romantic comedy will have its world premiere at the event.

Pang Ho-cheung’s Love Off The Cuff, the third installment in the Hong Kong filmmaker’s romantic comedy series, will receive its world premiere as the opening film of this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival (Hkiff).

Miriam Yeung and Shawn Yue are resuming their roles as star-crossed lovers Cherie and Jimmy in the film, which follows Love In A Puff (2010) and Love In The Buff (2012). In this third episode, set in Hong Kong and Taipei, the couple’s relationship is tested when Jimmy’s childhood friend asks him to donate sperm for her artificial insemination.

Hkiff also recently announced that it will screen all seven of late Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang’s films in a section entitled ‘Edward Yang, 10-year Commemoration’.

The festival will also present digitally restored versions of four classics directed by French auteur Robert Bresson and three from Filipino...

We’re less than half-a-year away from Christopher Nolan‘s Dunkirk, one of our most-anticipated summer studio films (alongside Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, of course), and one of our biggest questions is how (or if) his approach to a period epic will feel different than his recent features. Inspired by Operation Dynamo, a miracle of a mission in 1940 where nearly 340,000 Allied troops were rescued after being trapped by the Nazis in this northern area of France, more details have now arrived.

“I spent a lot of time reviewing the silent films for crowd scenes –the way extras move, evolve, how the space is staged and how the cameras capture it, the views used,” Nolan tells Premiere Magazine. The director revealed that he brushed up on silent films such as Intolerance, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, and Greed, as well as the films of Robert Bresson (notably Pickpocket and A Man Escaped,...

For a film with an animal protagonist, Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar” says a lot about humanity. Writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour (“A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night”) argues that the film’s central idea lends a timeless honesty, one that resonates half a century later.

Read More: Watch: ‘Jackie’ Director Pablo Larraín Discusses ‘Movies That Inspire Me’ in New IndieWire Video Series Presented by FilmStruck

Following the respective journeys of young Marie and her donkey Balthazar, the film shows how the two face hardships of different kinds as they grow older. In true Bressonian fashion, those various abuses are tempered with quiet, graceful moments of beauty. The result is a portrait of lost innocence that’s also a work of great empathy.

As part of our ongoing series of filmmaker conversations, presented in partnership with Filmstruck, Amirpour spoke with us about seeing “Au Hasard Balthazar” during a...

Le Monde reports that Pierre Étaix, the Oscar-winning French comedian and filmmaker, has died at the age of 88. He’s best known for his acclaimed short- and feature-length films in the 1960’s, all of which were tied up in rights disputes for over 20 years until their eventual restoration and revival in 2012, courtesy of Janus Films. These films include “Le Grand Amour,” “As Long as You’ve Got Your Health,” “Land of Milk and Honey,” “Rupture,” “The Suitor,” and “Yoyo.”

Read More: A Comic Master Gets His Due

Étaix began his career as a designer before meeting director Jacques Tati in 1954 when he worked as a gagman and assistant director on his film “Mon Oncle.” His apprenticeship with Tati eventually led to his collaboration with Jean-Claude Carrière, whom he wrote his short film “Happy Anniversary,” which won the Oscar for Best Short Subject in 1963. Étaix and Carrière would collaborate on the...

Robert Bresson was an abstemious filmmaker. He paid the utmost attention to detail and divulged his entire self into each of his 13 feature films. Compared by Jean-Luc Godard himself to the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Bresson’s enigmatic, minimalist films leave viewers with a lingering sense of solidarity, as if you’ve just been a part of something […]

The post Watch: 4-Minute Video Essay Puts A Hand Into Robert Bresson’s ‘Pickpocket’ appeared first on The Playlist.

Consider only his reputation as the ultimate minimalist filmmaker, and it becomes awfully easy to forget about the meat of Robert Bresson’s oeuvre — not just how very strange their mechanics are, but how these oddities burrow into the most elemental pieces of cinematic construction. Recently seeing The Devil, Probably on a big screen was as transportive for its sound and sense of movement as the rigid and, yes, “minimalist” compositions, sometimes to the point that a closing door or opened book could practically create a taste in the viewer’s mouth.

For all the mystery that can come with watching, Bresson’s philosophies and strategies are never clearer than when reading his staple text Notes on Cinematography, in some ways a written guide to what’s been put onscreen. Wisely, the people at Film Scalpel have created a video essay that overlays excerpts onto what is perhaps the most Bressonian film,...

In today's roundup of special events, we note that Richard Linklater will introduce and then discuss Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959) in Austin on Tuesday. The other goings on are in New York: screenings of Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground with Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino, Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall, Jonas Mekas's Scenes from the Life of Raimund Abraham, Simone Rapisarda Casanova's The Creation of Meaning, Dreams Rewired, narrated by Tilda Swinton, and the ongoing series pairing films by David Lynch and Jacques Rivette. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup of special events, we note that Richard Linklater will introduce and then discuss Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959) in Austin on Tuesday. The other goings on are in New York: screenings of Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground with Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino, Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall, Jonas Mekas's Scenes from the Life of Raimund Abraham, Simone Rapisarda Casanova's The Creation of Meaning, Dreams Rewired, narrated by Tilda Swinton, and the ongoing series pairing films by David Lynch and Jacques Rivette. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup: Interviews with Werner Herzog, Gaspar Noé, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Telaroli and Kurt Walker. Richard Linklater on Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin-Féminin, Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados, Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, Ulrike Ottinger's Ticket of No Return, Martin Scorsese's New York, New York and Nagisa Oshima's The Ceremony. Vanity Fair's Bill Murray profile. Remembering actor and scriptwriter Colin Welland (Chariots of Fire). Simon Callow on Orson Welles. News of forthcoming films by Shane Carruth, Xavier Dolan, Duncan Jones and Edgar Wright—and more. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup: Interviews with Werner Herzog, Gaspar Noé, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Telaroli and Kurt Walker. Richard Linklater on Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin-Féminin, Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados, Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, Ulrike Ottinger's Ticket of No Return, Martin Scorsese's New York, New York and Nagisa Oshima's The Ceremony. Vanity Fair's Bill Murray profile. Remembering actor and scriptwriter Colin Welland (Chariots of Fire). Simon Callow on Orson Welles. News of forthcoming films by Shane Carruth, Xavier Dolan, Duncan Jones and Edgar Wright—and more. » - David Hudson...

Each week, the fine folks at Fandor add a number of films to their Criterion Picks area, which will then be available to subscribers for the following twelve days. This week, the Criterion Picks focus on the brilliant French comedian: Pierre Étaix.

Now re-discovered and restored after decades suppressed by distribution red-tape, enjoy “greatest hits” from this clever, warm-hearted clown’s directorial oeuvre and highlights from his acting career.

If you’ve never seen any of his films, this is a perfect opportunity watch some of his finest work. Don’t have a Fandor subscription? They offer a free trial membership.

Order the Pierre Etaix Blu-ray collection from Amazon, currently only $31.99 (47% off)

As Long as You’ve Got Your Health

In this endlessly diverting compendium of four short films, Pierre Etaix regards the 1960s from his askew but astute perspective. Each part is as technically impressive as it is riotous:...

One of our favorite directors, Olivier Assayas ("Summer Hours," "Clouds of Sils Maria") has a predictably eclectic Top Ten List, detailed at Criterion, which is actually a much longer list than ten. He offers American entries from Steven Soderbergh, Richard Linklater, Michael Mann, Robert Altman, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach! Have you seen them all? I've never seen the director's cut of Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate," the TV cut of Ingmar Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander," Sacha Guitry's "Désiré" or "Judex" by Georges Franju. I will have to remedy that.  1. "The Leopard" (Luchino Visconti) 2. "Pickpocket" (Robert Bresson) (tie) "Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky) (tie) "White Material" (Claire Denis) (tie) "A Christmas Tale" (Arnaud Desplechin) (tie) "Chungking Express" (Wong Kar-wai) (tie)  "Dazed and Confused"...