News

We’re pleased to exclusively announce that Altered Innocence has acquired the restoration of the critically lauded queer film By Hook or by Crook ahead of its world premiere restoration screening at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on December 5, 2024. Altered Innocence has exclusively acquired all North American rights, with a planned theatrical release in Spring 2025.

By Hook or by Crook marks the feature film debut of three iconic queer filmmakers: film & TV director Silas Howard; author, visual artist and Guggenheim fellow Harry Dodge; and Emmy nominated producer Steak House.

The film’s new restoration will world premiere on Thursday, December 5th, 2024 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures as part of their upcoming series Present Past: A Celebration of Film Preservation. Pioneering musician and writer Kathleen Hannah will moderate a post-screening discussion with the filmmakers.

The film has been digitally restored by the Academy Film Archive and UCLA Film & Television Archive...

I always look forward to Severin's summer sale, since not only are they discounting previous releases, but they have announced Ten new titles that will be available, including the 4K Uhd release of Opera. The sale kicks off on Friday, July 12th and we have the details:

"Severin Films today announced full details of their 2024 Severin Summer Sale, the most ambitious and eclectic in company history. Leading the mid-year event is the Worldwide Uhd Premiere of Dario Argento’s masterwork Opera, newly restored by Severin and featuring 5 discs, 12 hours of Special Features and the CD soundtrack; the North American Disc Premiere of Dario Argento’S Deep Cuts, a 4-Disc Collection featuring 10 hours from his Rai TV shows; The Worldwide Uhd Premiere of Joe D’Amato’s Penne Post-Apocalypse epic 2020 Texas Gladiators, a 3-disc collection that includes a CD of the never-before-released soundtrack; and Bert I. Gordon’s politically incorrect crime...

Cinephiles will have plenty to celebrate this April with the next slate of additions to the Criterion Channel. The boutique distributor, which recently announced its June 2024 Blu-ray releases, has unveiled its new streaming lineup highlighted by an eclectic mix of classic films and modern arthouse hits.

Students of Hollywood history will be treated to the “Peak Noir: 1950” collection, which features 17 noir films from the landmark film year from directors including Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Huston.

New Hollywood maverick William Friedkin will also be celebrated when five of his most beloved movies, including “Sorcerer” and “The Exorcist,” come to the channel in April.

Criterion will offer the streaming premiere of Wim Wenders’ 3D art documentary “Anselm,” which will be accompanied by the “Wim Wenders’ Adventures in Moviegoing” collection, which sees the director curating a selection of films from around the world that have influenced his careers.

Contemporary cinema is also well represented,...

April’s an uncommonly strong auteurist month for the Criterion Channel, who will highlight a number of directors––many of whom aren’t often grouped together. Just after we screened House of Tolerance at the Roxy Cinema, Criterion are showing it and Nocturama for a two-film Bertrand Bonello retrospective, starting just four days before The Beast opens. Larger and rarer (but just as French) is the complete Jean Eustache series Janus toured last year. Meanwhile, five William Friedkin films and work from Makoto Shinkai, Lizzie Borden, and Rosine Mbakam are given a highlight.

One of my very favorite films, Comrades: Almost a Love Story plays in a series I’ve been trying to program for years: “Hong Kong in New York,” boasting the magnificent Full Moon in New York, Farewell China, and An Autumn’s Tale. Wim Wenders gets his “Adventures in Moviegoing”; After Hours, Personal Shopper, and Werckmeister Harmonies fill...

The Mother and the Whore.Jean Eustache orbited the world of criticism without ever fully falling into it. His intellectual biographer, Alain Philippon, describes him as a marginal figure at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1960s and yet actively involved in the debates unfolding in its offices.1 Though Eustache was close with future Cahiers editor-in-chief Jean-Louis Comolli and the magazine championed his films from the start, his critical output was minuscule. He started contributing to Cahiers only after completing his first short, Bad Company (1963). Even then, he wrote little, publishing a few brief pieces on some early films by Paul Vecchiali, Jean-Daniel Pollet, and Costa-Gavras. Luc Moullet would later admit that prior to Bad Company, he thought him the only person at Cahiers “that had absolutely nothing to do with the movies.”2 Indeed, Eustache was often at the offices to pick up his wife, who was employed as a secretary at the magazine.

First presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1970, Paul Vecchiali’s melancholic thriller The Strangler did not have a U.S. release until its screenings at Fantastic Fest and the New York Film Festival earlier this year. Its 2K restoration is currently making its way through selected cinemas across the States and finally getting the attention it deserves. The lonely women of Paris are being terrorized by a pleasant young man, Emile, with a face of a hero from a Jacques Demy musical. He is played by Jacques Perrin, who at the time had recently starred in The Young Girls of Rochefort. Emile is quiet and mild mannered, a dog lover to boot, and he chooses his prey based on the assumption that these women are desperate...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Despite being a celebrated selection of the Cannes Film Festival, Paul Vecchiali’s 1970 arthouse giallo The Strangler was never released stateside. Thanks to a new 2k restoration by Altered Innocence, the psychosexual thriller finally gets a proper release a half-century later. Not only does The Strangler offer a stylized character portrait centered around a killer, but the restoration finally carves out its earned space in Giallo‘s history.

Emile seems like a nice guy. He’s handsome, loves his dog, and spends time at home crocheting scarves. Appearances are deceiving, of course; Emile uses said scarf to stalk and strangle lonely women whom he deems too depressed to go on living. As the death toll of mercy killings mounts, detective Simon Dangret (Julien Guiomar) finds himself resorting to unconventional, extreme measures to track the killer. That happens to include the assistance of the beautiful Anna (Eva Simonet), a woman who...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film Forum

Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil begins playing in a 4K restoration; “Hitchcock’s ’50s” runs through arguably the director’s greatest decade. the Farewell My Concubine restoration continues while Summer Stock plays on 35mm this Sunday.

Anthology Film Archives

Paul Vecchiali’s classic-in-waiting The Strangler is playing in a new restoration, while the films of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project are screening.

Roxy Cinema

The Josh Safdie-presented The Gods of Times Square begins a run, while The Untouchables and The Mission show on 35mm.

IFC Center

Distant Voices, Still Lives begins a run while The Exorcist, Battle Royale, Desperado, and a print of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 play on 35mm; Oldboy screens in a new restoration.

Museum of the Moving Image

Reverse Shot celebrates its 20th anniversary with a months-long programming run,...

A gorgeously discordant pairing of image and sound depicts the killer of women Émile (Jacques Perrin) as he stalks his prey in the late writer/director Paul Vecchiali’s distinctly autumnal “The Strangler” — or “L’Étrangleur.” He pursues them from a distance, a sinister but jazzy interlude sometimes underscoring his menacing shadow-like presence.

The 1970 French arthouse giallo didn’t receive a release in the United States upon its premiere a half-century ago, despite being celebrated at Cannes. Distributor Altered Innocence brings the winking, melodramatic psychosexual thriller — anchored in the intersection of four strangers’ warring amoral main character syndromes amid Émile’s gendered murder spree — to American audiences this fall. This comes after showing at Austin’s Fantastic Fest and the New York Film Festival in September. It is restored with the help of Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (Cnc).

Vecchiali died earlier this year at the age...

Paul Vecchiali’s moody, labyrinthine The Strangler suggests the visual style of Jacques Demy’s Model Shop coupled with the psychosexual fervor of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s a queer version of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï by way of the story machinations of Claude Chabrol’s The Champagne Murders. Either way, it’s clear that Vecchiali’s interests are cinephilic in nature, and that this 1970 psychological thriller was his self-conscious attempt during the waning years of the Nouvelle Vague to take the movement’s genre-defying sensibilities in a new direction.

Throughout, Vecchiali is concerned less with plot than with mood and setting, which he largely establishes by showing people moving around colorful apartments and through the bustling streets of Paris. Take Anna (Eva Simonet), who rushes to a television station fearing for her safety after Simon (Julien Guiomar...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSSubscribe to Notebook magazine before November 1 to receive Issue 4, which explores cinematic soundscapes in their diverse sonic forms and includes contributions from filmmakers like Pedro Costa, Garrett Bradley, and Dominga Sotomayor, pop musician Julia Holter, plus a wide range of artists, writers, and scholars. Subscribers will also receive with this issue a very special gift, a seven-inch record featuring a song by filmmaker Gus Van Sant and a field recording by sound designer Leslie Shatz.This week brought the sad, shocking news that the legendary Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien has retired from filmmaking due to illness. Hou's family confirmed in a statement that he is battling Alzheimer's, and the effects of long Covid have forced him to stop making films; they requested privacy during this time, adding that he is healthy overall, in the presence of family.

One of the standouts in a stellar lineup of Revivals at the 61st New York Film Festival earlier this month was Paul Vecchiali’s haunting, captivating portrait of alienation The Strangler. The new 2K restoration of the 1970 French arthouse giallo will now be getting a much-deserved wider release from Altered Innocence and for the occasion the new trailer and poster have arrived. With a series dedicated to the French filmmaker underway at Metrograph, a release of The Strangler will kick off at Anthology Film Archives starting November 15, then expand to Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and beyond.

Here’s the synopsis: “An unconventional French giallo released before the sub-genre’s popularity boom resulting from filmmakers like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, The Strangler centers on Émile, a handsome young man targeting women he believes are too depressed to go on living. As multiple women fall to Émile’s suffocating white scarf,...

The underseen French giallo film “The Strangler,” from 1970, never saw a release in the United States. That’s until this year, when the psychosexual chiller — about a young man targeting women he believes are too depressed to go on living — played the New York Film Festival and Fantastic Fest in all its restored glory. French director Paul Vecchiali died this year before he could finally see a stateside release, but Altered Innocence will now open “The Strangler” this November. IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for the re-release this year.

Initially a selection of the 23rd Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section, “The Strangler” stars Jacques Perrin (“The Young Girls of Rochefort“) as serial killer Emile. As multiple women fall to Emile’s suffocating white scarf, inspector Simon Dangret, the detective assigned to track him down, resorts to seriously unorthodox and even unethical methods to get his man with the assistance of Anna,...

While it’s understandable that many’s most-anticipated films at a festival are also some of the biggest titles of the season––evidenced by the instant sell-outs of the latest from Hayao Miyazaki, Yorgos Lanthimos, Sofia Coppola, Andrew Haigh, Jonathan Glazer, and more at the 61st New York Film Festival––one of the true joys of the experience is seeing work one may never find again. For this year’s edition of Film at Lincoln Center’s annual celebration of world cinema, we’ve gathered eight recommendations that currently don’t have U.S. distribution. While we imagine news will be announced soon for some of these selections, a release might not occur until next year, so be sure to catch them if you can.

We should also make a special note for Revivals, NYFF’s lineup of restorations, which features Paul Vecchiali’s haunting, captivating portrait of alienation The Strangler...

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Paris Theater

The Paris reopens with a new Dolby Atmos screen and a 70mm series featuring Playtime, Lawrence of Arabia, 2001 and more.

Metrograph

One of France’s greatest directors and producers, Paul Vecchiali, is subject of a new retrospective that includes Jeanne Dielman and the terrific, too-little-seen Simone Barbès.

Bam

The Thin Red Line, Solaris, and more play in “Intimate Epics.”

Film at Lincoln Center

A retrospective of Korean cinema’s “golden decade” has begun.

Roxy Cinema

Passing the torch to Chapo Trap House‘s Movie Mindset, the 35mm print of Rio Bravo is now playing under their guardianship; Madonna fans can flock to Vision Quest, Who’s That Girl, Evita, and Spike Lee’s Girl 6 on 35mm.

Film Forum

Michael Roemer’s great The Plot Against Harry and the Tarantino-presented Winter Kills both screen on 35mm; Contempt continues

Museum of Modern Art...

Altered Innocence has acquired distribution rights for a new 2K restoration of the late French director Paul Vecchiali’s 1972 giallo “The Strangler” (“L’Étrangleur”).

The company will release the film in the United States for the first time this fall following screenings at the Austin genre event Fantastic Fest and the New York Film Festival. The restoration will then have a VOD and physical media release. The National Centre of Cinematography and Animated Pictures (Cnc) in France assisted in the restoration of “The Strangler.”

The film follows a murderer named Émile (Jacques Perrin) who targets women he believes are too depressed to keep living. Inspector Simon Dangret (Julien Guiomar) goes to great lengths, both unusual and unethical, to catch Emile. He is assisted by a woman named Anna (Eva Simonet) who is a potential target of the killer. The New York Film Festival describes the film as a “complex, melancholic...

Following Main Slate and Spotlight, the 61st New York Film Festival has unveiled its Revivals lineup, featuring new restorations of classic and overlooked films. Highlights include Manoel de Oliveira’s Abraham’s Valley, Jean Renoir‘s The Woman on the Beach, Bahram Beyzaie’s The Stranger and the Fog, Abel Gance’s La Roue, Paul Vecchiali’s The Strangler, Lee Grant’s Tell Me a Riddle, Nancy Savoca’s Household Saints, Horace Ové’s Pressure, and more.

“This year’s edition of Revivals is a thrilling showcase of cinema history, packed with groundbreaking discoveries and long unseen classics alike, all in outstanding restorations,” said Florence Almozini, Senior Director of Programming at Film at Lincoln Center and NYFF Revivals Programmer. “We never cease to be amazed at the lasting influence of these cinematic gems on our collective sense of cinema, with the way they have tackled cultural, societal, or political issues with such modernity and artistry.

Fantastic Fest is back for its eighteenth edition which is jam-packed with horror insanity including World Premieres of several prominent titles including the remake of Troma’s cult classic The Toxic Avenger, the Bloody Disgusting-produced Shudder Original V/H/S/85, Blumhouse and Amazon’s Totally Killer, and Paramount’s hotly anticipated Pet Sematary: Bloodlines.

The festival will once again possess Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin, TX from September 21st – 28th. Badges are available now at FantasticFest.com.

From the press release:

The opening night film for Fantastic Fest 2023 is the world premiere of Legendary Pictures’ The Toxic Avenger, a hilarious and action-packed reimagining of the classic Troma film from director Macon Blair that features an all-star cast including Peter Dinklage who will pick up the infamous mop to become the hideous vigilante that no one knew they needed (or wanted) as well as Jacob Tremblay and Taylour Paige with Elijah Wood and Kevin Bacon.

Do Not Expect Too Much Of The End Of The World (Radu Jude).The lineup for the 76th edition of the festival has been announced, including new films by Eduardo Williams, Leonor Teles, Lav Diaz, Radu Jude, and others.Concorso INTERNAZIONALEAnimal (Sofia Exarchou)Critical Zone (Ali Ahmadzadeh)Essential Truths of the Lake (Lav Diaz)Home (Leonor Teles)The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams)The Invisible Fight (Rainer Sarnet)Do Not Expect Too Much Of The End Of The World (Radu Jude)Lousy Carter (Bob Byington)Manga D’Terra (Basil Da Cunha)Nuit Obscure – Au Revoir Ici, N’Importe Où (Sylvain George)Patagonia (Simone Bozzelli)The Permanent Picture (Laura Ferrés)Rossosperanza (Annarita Zambrano)Stepne (Maryna Vroda)Sweet Dreams (Ena Sendijarević)The Vanishing Soldier (Dani Rosenberg)Yannick (Quentin Dupieux)Excursion (Una Gunjak).Concorso Cineasti Del PRESENTECamping du Lac (Eléonore Saintagnan)Ein Schöner Ort (Katharina Huber)Excursion (Una Gunjak)Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr)Dreaming...

German director Angela Schanelec to head international competition jury.

The Marseille International Film Festival (FIDMarseille) has selected 45 films for its competition sections, of which 34 are world premieres.

World premieres in the international competition include An Evening Song (For Three Voices) by US director Graham Swon, who previously directed 2018 feature The World Is Full Of Secrets.

Germany’s Khaled Abdulwahed also world premieres Background, having formerly co-directed 2020 refugee documentary Purple Sea.

FIDMarseille, which takes place July 4-9, bills itself as a pioneering festival, championing new styles and ways of production, and puts its First Film Competition and films by young filmmakers...

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.Extra! Extra!A new Notebook publication has been released into the world! Our limited-edition, print-only Notebook Cannes Special is exclusively available at the Cannes Film Festival. It includes interviews with Souleymane Cissé and Alice Rohrwacher, an insider’s guide to the festival, a crossword, a comic, and much more. The publication is pictured above, but the bright red Pantone color must be seen on the page to be truly appreciated! (As an online preview: Yasmina Price's interview with Souleymane Cissé is available online.)NEWSIn production news, writer Durga Chew-Bose will make her directorial debut with an adaptation of Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse, starring Chloë Sevigny and Claes Bang (The Square). Filming began last week in the south of France.Noémie Merlant (of...

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.NEWSNewly-minted Oscar nominee Andrea Riseborough in To Leslie.The 95th Academy Awards unveiled their full list of nominees yesterday. Browse the categories and relevant coverage on Notebook to prepare for the ceremony, airing March 12. (Andrea Riseborough made the cut.)On Monday, the Berlinale announced their main competition lineup, including new films by Angela Schanelec, Christian Petzold, Margarethe Von Trotta, and Philippe Garrel. Meanwhile, their Encounters section features new films from Hong Sang-soo, Dustin Guy Defa, Tatiana Huezo, and more. Notebook has the full lineup here.Last Wednesday, January 18, filmmaker, critic, and producer Paul Vecchiali died at the age of 92. Patrick Preziosi summed up a bit of his impact in his Notebook Primer on Vecchiali’s film company, Diagonale, “a solar system of the utopian possibilities of cinematic community.

Du côté d’Orouët (1971).The water is too cold for swimming and there’s the subtle threat of a gale in Jacques Rozier’s 1971 film Du côté d’Orouët. Ostensibly a summer movie, this lackadaisical, two-and-a-half hour dispatch from three girls’ eponymous beachfront holiday nevertheless has trouble fulfilling the hallmarks of a successful vacation. In addition to the especially crummy weather, the beachhouse grows messier and the local patisserie, one of the only eateries, shutters for the impending fall and winter seasons. Such is the liminality of September, where the worst elements of August and October mingle without ever fully committing to one or the other, and these three weeks are the chosen off-time chosen by Caroline (Caroline Cartier), Kareen (Francoise Guégan) and Joëlle (Danièle Croisy). These 21 days equally swirl with torpor and fleetingness, Rozier evincing an impossible relationship between the two to convey both the longueurs and excitability of vacation.

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Femmes femmes“Post New Wave” has mutated into a catch-all term that not only accounts for French directors whose output began to crest in the 1970s and beyond, but also for those who may have operated adjacently, or even on the fringes of the five-pronged Nouvelle Vague. Belabored attempts to identify a newly-minted movement in French cinema and subsequently foist it upon a sect of filmmakers typically buckle under closer scrutiny. The more one burrows and subdivides this unwieldy categorization, the more the examples only grow more far-flung, resisting the very grouping that collected them side by side in the first place.Although not a direct predecessor of André Bazin and his acolytes, Diagonale et Co., the production company founded by one-time Cahiers du cinéma critic and director Paul Vecchiali, exists...

“It would be better if I were dead,” the old lady laments to her even older husband in Gaspar Noé’s startling new film Vortex, and he makes no effort to disagree. Even though its title might have worked just fine for one of the perennially youth-obsessed director’s previous films, here it serves as an indicator of life swirling down the drain. This close-up look at a married couple on the brink of the inevitable introduces a surprising and demanding new chapter to the throbbingly flamboyant director’s career, which is normally preoccupied with sex, drugs and music.

Stylistically, the nearly 2½-hour film, which was shown as a “Cannes premiere” and not in competition, is notable in that the two main characters, a long-married couple knocking around in their cluttered Paris apartment, were shot with separate cameras and presented simultaneously next to one another on the screen; all the way through,...

As the New York Film Festival readies to roll out its 58th edition tomorrow (and running through October 11), IndieWire is pleased to share an exclusive look at the many festival-sponsored Talks which will roll out during this year’s event. HBO serves as the presenting sponsor of Talks, which supplement NYFF’s screenings with a series of free and live panel discussions and in-depth conversations with a wide range of guests.

As announced by festival brass earlier this summer, this year’s NYFF is going to operate differently than it has in previous incarnations. The event will combine a brand-new virtual presence with carefully designed outdoor screenings, including two drive-ins. The Talks are taking a new shape, too, and while they are not available as in-person events, as they have been in years past, the festival is hoping to turn them into “an essential live, online meeting place for audiences,...

While it seems like more has been discussed about the sequel to Call Me by Your Name than most independent films that have actually been made the last few years, in a time when little else brings joy, it’s worth providing the updates that do come in. Since the 2017 release of his romantic drama, Luca Guadagnino has been vocal about wanting to continue this story in a Before trilogy-esque way and it looks like things are still moving forward despite a pandemic-related hiccup.

“I was going to America to meet a writer I love very much, whose name I don’t want to mention, to talk about the second part. Unfortunately, everything is canceled,” he recently told the Italian Gay.it (via The Playlist). “Of course, it’s a great pleasure to work with Timothée Chalamet, Armie Hammer, Michael Stulhbarg, Esther Garrel, and the other actors. They will all...

Photo by Elena LazicA few tranquil days spent at IndieLisboa back in May were for this writer a powerful reminder of cinema’s ability to be truly unsettling, and of the value in encountering a film that places you completely outside of your comfort zone. That watching strange movies alone in a foreign country where I did not speak the language wound up being the opposite of a traumatizing experience is in large part due to the hospitality, lovely weather and great beauty of Lisbon, which the festival seemed to take into real consideration in the structure of its program.As morning screenings at the festival were all but exclusively dedicated to short films for kids, I started almost every day exploring the city, basking in the sun and admiring the vistas. Most likely a rather common experience for those who regularly attend smaller festivals such as this, the experience was entirely new for me.

The Festival de Cannes has announced the lineup for the official selection, including the Competition and Un Certain Regard sections, as well as special screenings, for the 69th edition of the festival:COMPETITIONOpening Night: Café Society (Woody Allen) [Out of Competition]Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade)Julieta (Pedro Almodóvar)American Honey (Andrea Arnold)Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas)La Fille Inconnue (Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne)Juste La Fin du Monde (Xavier Dolan)Ma Loute (Bruno Dumont)Paterson (Jim Jarmusch)Rester Vertical (Alain Guiraudie)Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho)Mal de Pierres (Nicole Garcia)I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach)Ma' Rosa (Brillante Mendoza)Bacalaureat (Cristian Mungiu)Loving (Jeff Nichols)Agassi (Park Chan-Wook)The Last Face (Sean Penn)Sieranevada (Cristi Puiu)Elle (Paul Verhoeven)The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding-Refn)The Salesman (Asgha Farhadi)Un Certain REGARDOpening Film: Clash (Mohamed Diab)Varoonegi (Behnam Behzadi)Apprentice (Boo Junfeng)Voir du Pays (Delphine Coulin & Muriel Coulin)La Danseuse (Stéphanie Di Giusto)La...

As one of the highest profile events on the film festival calendar, the announcement of the film selection for the Cannes Film Festival is always greatly anticipated. A broad range of cinema is always guaranteed, and this year is no exception. With Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller already known to be President of the 2016 Cannes competition Jury, we can now take a look at the feature films that will be included in the festival – which runs from May 11th to May 22nd, 2016.

Familiar names – such as Paul Verhoeven, Park Chan-Wook, Ken Loach, Sean Penn, Pedro Almodovar, Nicolas Winding Refn and Jim Jarmusch – will be among those competing for prestigious acknowledgement from the Jury, while several directorial debuts feature as entries in Un Certain Regard – from filmmakers such as Stephanie Di Giusto, Maha Haj and Michael O’Shea.

Opening Film

Cafe Society (Woody Allen)

Official Competition

Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade...

The competition line-up for our most-anticipated cinema-related event of the year has arrived. With a jury headed up by George Miller, early this morning, the 2016 Cannes Film Festival announced their slate. The competition line-up includes some of our most-anticipated films of the year, including the Dardennes‘ The Unknown Girl, Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper, Andrea Arnold‘s American Honey, Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson, Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle, Park Chan-wook‘s The Handmaiden, and many more.

Playing out of competition is the previously announced Cafe Society from Woody Allen, as well as Steven Spielberg‘s The Bfg, Jodie Foster‘s Money Monster, Shane Black‘s The Nice Guys, and Na Hong-jin‘s mystery thriller Goksung. Some notable titles in the Un Certain Regard section include the Studio Ghibli-backed Red Turtle and Hirokazu Kore-eda‘s After the Storm.

Check out the full line-up below, along with new stills at the end of the post.

The line-up of the 69th Cannes Film Festival in full.

At a press conference this morning, Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux and president Pierre Lescure revealed 49 films selected for inclusion in this year’s festival, set to run May 11-22.

The annoncement was delayed by a peaceful protest at the Ugc Normandie movie theatre on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. A tweet from the festival said: “Due to an intervention of Entertaintement workers, the announcement of the Selection is slightly delayed. Stay with us!”

As previously announced, Woody Allen’s Café Society will open the festival on May 11.

Also previously announced, the competition jury will be presided over by Australian director George Miller, whose Oscar-winning Mad Max: Fury Road received its world premiere at Cannes last year.

Competition

Jury chair: George Miller

Toni Erdmann, Maren Ade (Germany)Julieta, Pedro Almodóvar (Spain)American Honey, Andrea Arnold (UK)Personal Shopper, Olivier Assayas (France)The Unknown Girl (La Fille Inconnue), Jean-Pierre Dardenne & [link...

Les belles manièresJean-Claude Guiguet’s Les belles manières (1978) is a beautiful film, but, more to the point, it is one that has taken beauty as its subject. Not content with merely exemplifying, or with setting itself the all-too-easy task of finding beauty in the world, it is a film about feeling beauty, about the effects and significance of an adored object, the whys and hows of it. The setting for this investigation is neither here nor there: a grande-bourgeois apartment enveloped in curtains, dark wood, and the comforting presence of family heirlooms, the precious as well as the worthless. It is a space resignedly past decadence, one which has dried out, but that has preserved some of the aroma of its past. A woman and her son live there. The son, overcome with apathy, has become an anchorite; in hopes of luring him out, and to lend an occasional hand with the housework,...

It’s become a great breaking in the new year traditional here at Ioncinema.com. We begin our countdown to the our most anticipated foreign films (anything outside the U.S.) with our own Nicholas Bell curating the best bets for 2016. Here are the titles and filmmakers that didn’t make our final Top 100 cut, but are nonetheless “radar” worthy.

101. El Rey del Once – Daniel Burman

102. The Dancer – Stephanie Di Giusto

103. Le Cancre – Paul Vecchiali

104. While the Women are Sleeping – Wayne Wang

105. Tomorrow – Martha Pinson

106. Spring Again – Gael Morel

107. Crowhurst – Simon Rumley

108. Le Garcon – Philippe Lioret *

109. Marie and the Misfits – Sebastien Betbeder

110. Le Caravage – Alain Chevalier

111. Night Song – Raphael Nadjari

112. Réparer les vivants – Katell Quillevere *

113. Project Lazarus – Mateo Gil

114. Afterimages – Andrzej Wajda

115. Don’t Knock Twice – Caradog James

116. Detour – Christopher Smith

117. The Bride of Rip Van Winkle – Shunji Iwai

118. Three on the Road – Johnnie To

119. Le Vin et le Vent...

A roundup of news from the inaugural St Petersburg International Media Forum includes a busy French delegation and a local controversy brewing over Leviathan.

The King Of Madagascar, a kind of Russian answer to the pirate adventure films à la Pirates of the Caribbean, is being set up as a $ 16m international co-production by producer-director Oleg Ryaskov’s Moscow-based Bft Movie.

Speaking at the opening of St Petersburg International Media Forum’s (Spimf) co-production market this morning, producer Ryaskov revealed that the project - which is based on real historical events abouta Russian expedition by Peter The Great to the island of Madagascar in danger of being thwarted by Great Britain’s King George - has Spain’s Smartline Spain and the Us casting company Scott Carlson Entertainment on board as partners and is currently in talks with French and German production companies to join.

Ryaskov added that he intends to have American, European and Russian...

A roundup of news from the inaugural St Petersburg International Media Forum includes a busy French delegation and a local controversy brewing over Leviathan.

The King Of Madagascar, a kind of Russian answer to the pirate adventure films à la Pirates of the Caribbean, is being set up as a $ 16m international co-production by producer-director Oleg Ryaskov’s Moscow-based Bft Movie.

Speaking at the opening of St Petersburg International Media Forum’s (Spimf) co-production market this morning, producer Ryaskov revealed that the project - which is based on real historical events abouta Russian expedition by Peter The Great to the island of Madagascar in danger of being thwarted by Great Britain’s King George - has Spain’s Smartline Spain and the Us casting company Scott Carlson Entertainment on board as partners and is currently in talks with French and German production companies to join.

Ryaskov added that he intends to have American, European and Russian...

Below you will find an index of all our coverage of the 67th Locarno Film Festival by Adam Cook, Marie-Pierre Duhamel, and Celluloid Liberation Front.

Web Exclusive: The World of Titanus by Carlo Chatrian

Films

From What is Before by Lav Diaz

The Princess of France by Matías Piñeiro

Buzzard by Joel Potrykus (x two)

Listen Up Philip by Alex Ross Perry

Horse Money by Pedro Costa

Sosialismi by Peter von Bagh

Single Stream by Ernst Karel, Toby Lee, & Pawel Wojtasik

White Nights on the Pier by Paul Vecchiali

La Sapienza by Eugène Green

Une jeune poète by Damien Manivel

Interviews

Soon-Mi Yoo (director of Songs From the North)...

Described by the filmmaker as a "gallery," Sosialismi assembles footage from 40-something films, while also mixing in quotes, songs, and more. The theme that unites the cited material is, as the title might suggest, socialism. Peter von Bagh appropriates the footage to reconstruct a unified, idealist, and even dreamlike vision of socialist / left-wing ideas...or maybe not ideas so much as faith. This reconstruction knows no borders, and transcends place and temporality. Rather than delving into the details of the history/reality of socialism in the 20th century, the film creates a tapestry of socialist belief as found in disparate works from around the world. It is a take on what cinema thinks of / imagines as socialism. Ranging from Dziga Vertov to John Ford to Chaplin to Pasolini, dozens of films and filmmakers take part, if only implicitly, in testifying to a certain way of thinking/believing/living.

Von Bagh...

Above: Pedro Costa's Horse Money

The Locarno Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 67th edition, taking place this August between the 6th and 16th. It speaks for itself, but, um, wow...

"Every film festival, be it small or large, claims to offer, if not an account of the state of things, then an updated map of the art form and the world it seeks to represent. This cartography should show both the major routes and the byways, along with essential places to visit and those that are more unusual. The Festival del film Locarno is no exception to the rule, and I think that looking through the program you will be able to distinguish the route map for this edition." — Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director

Above: Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France

Concorso Internazionale (Official Competition)

A Blast (Syllas Tzoumerkas, Greece/Germany/Netherlands)

Alive (Jungbum Park, South Korea)

Horse Money (Pedro Costa,...

13 of the 17 films competing for the Golden Leopard are world premieres; Juliette Binoche to receive Excellence Award.

Full details of the line-up for the 67th Locarno Film Festival, which runs August 6-16, were unveiled at a press conference in the Swiss capital Berne today.

13 of the 17 films competing for the Golden Leopard in the festival’s International Competition section are world premiers including Syllas Tzoumerkas’s A Blast [pictured], Jungbum Park’s Alive (South Korea), Paul Vecchiali’s White Nights On The Pier (France) and Yury Bykov’s The Fool (Russia). International premieres include Alex Ross Perry’s hotly antipated Us comedy Listen Up Philip starring Jason Schwartzman who is expected to attend.

The Piazza Grande line-up includes the international premieres of Eran Riklis’ Dancing Arabs, Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens’ critically acclaimed Iceland set Land Ho! Which world premiered at Sundance, and Olivier Assayas’ Clouds Of Sils Maria, which played in competition in Cannes. World premieres...

Rome -- The Locarno Film Festival on Wednesday announced a cosmopolitan competition slate dominated by world premieres and featuring the latest from Portugal's Pedro Costa, U.S. indie darling Alex Ross Perry, and veteran French filmmaker Paul Vecchiali. The fest also said it would present career honors to acclaimed thespians Mia Farrow, Juliette Binoche, and Armin Mueller-Stahl. Photos 25 Summer Movies for Grown-Ups The festival's famed Piazza Grande venue, which has Europe's largest silver screen, again features an eclectic mix of pop productions, cerebral fare, and classics, including Luc Besson's thriller Lucy -- which stars Scarlett Johansson -- Lasse Hallström's comedy The Hundred Foot

read more...

Issue 6 of The Cine-Files, on "Film Acting", is now online and features a dialogue between Jonathan Rosenbaum and James Naremore. In the latest Hello Cinema podcast, the first of a two-parter, Tina Hassannia and Amir Soltani talk to film critic Godfrey Cheshire about Abbas Kiarostami's early cinema.

Above: the trailer for Paul Clipson's Hypnosis Display, currently touring in the UK with musical artist Grouper. Check out Dummy's interview with Clipson and Grouper. For Film Comment, Fernando F. Croce writes on Agnès Varda: From Here to There:

"Varda’s curiosity about human beings is bottomless and unpredictable. (I can personally attest: I briefly met her at a screening of The Beaches of Agnès, and a question about my accent somehow led to a conversation about my grandmother’s days in Czechoslovakia and my brother’s passion for tubas.) From Here to There is an unabashed self-portrait in...

On the occasion of its 700th issue, legendary French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma has partnered with the French Institute Alliance Française (Fiaf), New York's premiere French cultural center, to present a special two-part CinéSalon film series. The series features a selection of rarely shown treasures from French film history and continues in June with a showcase of top picks that have been championed in the pages of the magazine. Indiewire pleased to be partnering with Fiaf and Cahiers du Cinéma to present reviews of films in the series originally published in the magazine and available here in English for the first time with translations by Nicholas Elliott, the magazine's New York correspondent. On Tuesday, May 13, Fiaf screens Raymond Bernard's "Les misérables" (part 1) (4 Pm) and Agnès Varda's "Le bonheur" (7:30 Pm), the latter with an introduction by sex therapist Esther Perel. Legendary French director Paul Vecchiali ("Femmes femmes") wrote the following essay,...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: July 15, 2014

Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.95, DVD $24.99

Studio: Criterion

Martin Lasalle and Marika Green in Pickpocket.

The 1959 crime drama Pickpocket is an incomparable story of crime and redemption from French master Robert Bresson (The Devil, Probably).

The film follows Michel (Martin Lasalle), a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. As his compulsive pursuit of the thrill of stealing grows, however, so does his fear that his luck is about to run out.

A cornerstone in the career of Bresson, one of the most economical and profoundly spiritual of filmmakers, Pickpocket is an elegantly crafted, tautly choreographed study of humanity in all its mischief and grace. It is indeed the work of a director at the height of his powers.

Presented in French with English subtitles, Criterion’s Blu-ray/DVD combo and single-disc editions of Pickpocket contains the following features:

• New,...

Criterion has announced their July 2014 titles and among them is one fans have been waiting a long time to see introduced, David Cronenberg's head-exploding sci-fi Scanners, set for a July 15 release. The set will include a newly restored 2K digital film transfer, supervised by Cronenberg, "The Scanners Way" visual effects documentary, a new interview with Michael Ironside, a 2012 interview with actor and artist Stephen Lack, an excerpt from a 1981 interview with Cronenberg on the CBC's "The Bob McLean Show" and Cronenberg's first feature film, Stereo (1969). Also on July 15 comes Robert Bresson's 1959 classic Pickpocket, telling the story of Michel (Martin Lasalle), a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. Features include: New, 2K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray Audio commentary by film scholar James Quandt Introduction by writer-director Paul Schrader The Models of "Pickpocket," a...

News.

Above: Cinetract 2: Revolution Is in the Eye of the Beholder, a video essay by David Phelps. The video is part of a new issue of one of our very favorite—and one of the best—film magazines in the world, La Furia Umana, which is now out. Each issue is focused on dossiers on particular directors, and this issue includes essential articles on Leo McCarey, Paul Vecchiali, Jean-Claude Rousseau and José Luis Guerín. In the McCarey dossier are pieces by our very own Daniel Kasman—on the Cary Grant & Ginger Rogers vs. the Nazis film, Once Upon a Honeymoon—and Ted Fendt on McCarey's Charley Chase comedy shorts. But don't ignore the depth and variety of articles outside this center, which include searing video pieces by Notebook regulars David Phelps—on Lang, Vertov and protest—and Gina Telaroli on Joan Bennett, Max Ophüls, The Reckless Moment and the reflections of American presidents.

April 13-18

Fifty years after Jean-Luc Godard, Serge Bozon and the .young turks. of Cahiers du cinéma resolved that the best way to criticize movies was to make their own films. The result was the creation of another exciting .new wave. of critic-filmmakers, hailing from the iconoclastic film magazine La lettre du cinéma(1997-2005), boldly storming the gates of the French film establishment.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center brings writer, director, actor and DJ, Serge Bozon to New York to present this first major North American survey of films by the Lettre du cinéma circle as well as to curate and present a series of screenings of rarities (along with Anthology Film Archives) that have influenced his work. Also introducing and discussing their films will be his fellow filmmakers, Jean-Charles Fitoussi and Aurélia Georges. And if that weren.t enough, Bozon will also put his DJ skills on display,...