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Director Joe Wright signals his intent early on in M. Son of the Century, his eight-part series on the rise of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

“Follow me,” Luca Marinelli, playing Mussolini, whispers conspiratorily to the audience early in the first episode. “Follow me, you’ll love me too. I’ll make you a fascist.”

Over the course of eight hours, the show traces a decade in Mussolini’s career, his transition from journalist and political outsider to the head of a populist movement and new political ideology —fascism— that would force itself into the mainstream and seize power. Adapted from the first volume of Antonio Scurati’s bestselling “documentary novel” of the same name, M. Son of the Century shows how Mussolini, a former editor of the Italian Socialist Party’s official newspaper, fell out with the left and used any means necessary, up to and including murder, to advance his political career.

British director Joe Wright, who helmed Winston Churchill drama “Darkest Hour,” is at the Venice Film Festival with another historical piece, high-end TV drama “M. Son of the Century.” The series chronicles Benito Mussolini’s rise to power and is particularly timely as populist leaders are sprouting up all over the world.

Based on Italian author Antonio Scurati’s eponymous bestselling novel which traces the birth of Fascism in Italy, “M” reconstructs Mussolini’s ascent with an innovative approach. Luca Marinelli plays the despotic leader during the period between 1919, when he founded the fascist party in Italy, and 1925 when – having gained power with the 1922 March on Rome – Mussolini made an infamous speech in the Italian Chamber of Deputies declaring himself a dictator.

“M” is produced by Sky Studios and Lorenzo Mieli for Fremantle-owned The Apartment Pictures in collaboration with Pathé and Small Forward. The show, which was largely shot at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios,...

Sky and Fremantle have released the first teaser-trailer for “M – Son of the Century,” the hotly anticipated series about Benito Mussolini’s rise to power that will launch from the upcoming Venice Film Festival.

The kaleidoscopic eight-episode show is helmed by Joe Wright, the British director of Winston Churchill drama “Darkest Hour” – which earned Gary Oldman an Oscar for his portrayal as the British prime minister – and also of “Atonement,” among other titles.

The pulsating “M” soundtrack is composed by Tom Rowlands, also known for being part of pioneering British electronic music duo The Chemical Brothers.

“You can play with the aesthetics and the form of the piece. The score is going to be this kind of techno score,” Wright told Variety last year on set at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, where the show was shot entirely. “And the aesthetics are a kind of mashup between ’90s rave culture and...

“I can’t believe we’re here,” a friend said to me about halfway through this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, which takes over the center of Bologna for nine glorious days every summer, before correcting himself: “It actually makes a lot of sense that we’re here, but I still can’t believe it.”

My friend was in awe not that we––a pair of New York cinephiles, both fairly well-traveled––managed to make it to beautiful Bologna, but that we had entered some kind of an Olympic village for cinephiles, each day filled with some of the most memorable moviegoing events of our lives and each night filled with hours of discussion about the day’s pleasures. At the festival, everyone’s first question is “how many years have you been coming?” and newcomers are warmly welcomed into the fray. The favored departure is not a “ciao” or...

My Friend Ivan LapshinImage: International Film Exchange

When I was an undergrad in film school, one of the pillar courses was a two-semester film history class that would act as a broad survey to give us a foundation as aspiring filmmakers and workers. Naturally, this course was also about its...

The Oscar-winning film-maker discusses his documentary about the legendary puppeteer and his unwavering desire to experiment

Before he became the world’s most famous puppeteer – the man responsible for The Muppets and Big Bird; and turning David Bowie into the Goblin King in Labyrinth – Jim Henson was an experimental film-maker.

In his Oscar-nominated 1965 short, Time Piece, Henson stars as a man transcending time and space, the percussive beats of ticking clocks, heartbeats and other machinery creating the rhythms for the film’s montage. In a film that takes cues from Georges Méliès and Dziga Vertov, Henson goes from playing hospital patient to Tarzan to George Washington. He was a man who could seemingly be anyone, and do anything, much like Henson himself.

In the Moscow Times’ obituary for Eduard Limonov, who died four years ago aged 77, writer Mark Galeotti summed up the poet-turned-politician in two simple sentences: “Was Limonov a visionary or a poser, an artist or a politician, a leftist or a rightist? The answer to all of them is, of course, yes.” This is key to understanding Kirill Serebrennikov’s latest movie, a boundary-blasting biopic that simply drips with punk-rock energy, revealing everything and nothing about a slippery character whose modus operandi was reinvention from the get-go and for whom consistency really was the hobgoblin of small minds.

Limonov, the poet, fits into a long line of miscreant artists, such as writer Vladimir Mayakovsky, who co-wrote the manifesto of the Russian Futurist group (“A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”) in 1912, and Dziga Vertov, the avant-garde director whose Man with a Movie Camera (1929) changed the face of documentary altogether.

When Herbert Kline, Hans Burger, and Alexander Hammid’s Crisis: A Film of the Nazi Way premiered in New York City on March 11, 1939, agitprop was largely affiliated with European styles of theater, literature, and film that confronted viewers and readers with political messages. The Soviets in particular helped to define this mode of art in conjunction with the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. Crisis, though, introduced a new form of agitprop that combined the style of an expository documentary with the exigency of a newsreel.

The film documents the circumstances that led to the occupation of Czechoslovakia, beginning with images of maps and narration by American actor Leif Erickson before portraying daily life in Prague. Crisis abounds in luminous shots of Prague’s many cathedrals and castles, presenting the city as a thriving, peaceful place that will shortly be uprooted by Nazi infiltration.

Redolent of Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera,...

“In the Streets” is the first edition of the Notebook Insert, a seasonal supplement on moving-image culture.Illustration by Lale Westvind.On the night of November 17, 2011, thousands marched across the Brooklyn Bridge holding electric tea candles, a kind of vigil for dashed hopes. Two nights earlier, their protest encampment had been evicted from Zuccotti Park, a sparsely planted public-private open space two blocks from the New York Stock Exchange, from which they had fomented a popular movement demanding broad changes to the status quo of global capitalism. The march had been planned in advance to mark two months since the inception of the occupation, but in the aftermath of the police raid, it took on a somber, even funereal aspect. As marchers proceeded across the bridge overpass, a huge circle of light appeared on the long windowless wall of a nearby skyscraper, beneath the menacing checkmark logo of a telecommunications company.

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2023, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

In all honesty, the films of 2023 should take a backseat to the images we are seeing every day in Gaza, where journalists and average citizens have been recording and documenting a daily assault on their homes and livelihoods by the Idf. Whatever fakery we watched and enjoyed in the cinema this year should always be kept in perspective in importance with images that are real and actually happening right now. The Palestinians who have documented these important images have been targeted and killed with intent and purpose to silence what their photos and videos are showing and saying.

List of journalists who have been killed.

The below is of lesser note:

Best First Watches:

Angel’s Egg La belle noiseuse Centipede Horror Charley Varrick Coffy Crimson Gold...

War onscreen, whether fictive or documentary, is often a sort of highlight reel: the excitement and terror of battle, cities in flames, the devastated aftermath. It’s infrequent that a film dedicate itself to the disorientation of civilian survival in a long-term war zone, when everyday life goes on to an extent despite a surreal atmosphere of constant threat, and the uncertainty of any future at all.

That largely interior state is what director Olga Chernykh seeks to capture in “A Picture to Remember,” which opened the 2023 International Documentary Film Festival. Her family having already endured various erasures during the Russian Revolution, World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union, Chernykh catalogs the remaining evidence of their past as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine once again threatens to wipe the slate brutally “clean.”

This arresting short feature, which mixes elements of film diary, experimentalism, reportage and archival assembly,...

Sergei Loznitsa met with “immediate confrontation” following the premiere of “Babi Yar. Context,” he revealed at Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival.

The film focused on the massacre of nearly 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1941.

“I found myself in the center of the cyclone with this one. Ukraine was the only country where this film was heavily criticized. It’s a painful story and dangerous footage. I was editing it for a very long time, waiting for my emotions to go down,” he added, describing the film as his “hardest” one yet.

“I don’t know how it has transformed me, but maybe it’s just my destiny to touch on these kinds of topics.”

Addressing the audience remotely during the Conference on Ethics in Documentary Filmmaking, Loznitsa – who also presented his 2020 release “A Night in the Opera” – commented: “If we consider film as art, there is no ethics in art.

Knock Off.Tsui Hark’s Knock Off (1998) begins with an amniotic scene: baby dolls underwater, suggesting birth or possibly rebirth. Submerged off the coast of Hong Kong, which passed from British to Chinese governance in the historic 1997 Handover, the dolls gesture toward new beginnings. But these aren’t flesh-and-blood infants: they’re products, manufactured imitations of the real thing and copies of each other. Detached from any sense of originality, these toys can be reproduced and distributed wherever the market leads. The movement of the dolls through the water evokes the global flow of goods under late capitalism, as well as the postmodernist shift away from reality into simulacra. Moreover, their synthetic nature complicates the birth allegory—in what sense was the Handover a “real” rebirth?This is a fitting prologue for a film obsessed with the ersatz. Delivering on its title, Knock Off tracks two expat businessmen in Hong...

Made in Russian at Odesa Film Studio in the aftermath of de-Stalinization, Kira Muratova’s Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell nonetheless faced censorship for ignoring the precepts of socialist realism. They make for fruitful viewing as a diptych, sharing in certain themes, motifs, and, above all, a rulebook-shredding attitude to cinematic form. Neither overtly criticize Soviet life, yet they smuggle in a discontent that’s detectable less by what they condemn than by what they frame instead: the domestic, the psychological, the interpersonal. What’s surprising isn’t that they got banned, but that Muratova managed to get them made at all. Now especially, watching these two films feels like something of a miracle.

Brief Encounters, from 1967, tells the story of Nadya (Nina Ruslanova), a young woman who leaves her village to work as a housekeeper for Valya (Muratova), committee member to a provincial Odesa district, and her husband,...

Tales from Planet Kolkata.The essay film has always been a shapeshifting entity. It is an offshoot of the documentary mode that fully employs the potential of montage, with various texts and personal reflections interfacing and proposing new ideas, much like written counterparts. It’s a genre that defies immediate and digestible definition in most cases, with Dziga Vertov, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Agnès Varda, Thom Andersen, and Orson Welles employing different strategies in their respective canonical examples. In the United Kingdom, the yearly Essay Film Festival champions and explores the form, often incorporating study days and seminars. This year, the festival presented three densely structured and unique films by Ruchir Joshi, an Indian cultural writer and novelist. In the early 1990s, Joshi produced two short essay films focused on the Indian cities of Ahmedabad and his hometown of Calcutta, and an expansive feature concerning the nomadic Baul musicians in West Bengal.

British director Joe Wright, who helmed Winston Churchill drama “Darkest Hour” – which earned Gary Oldman an Oscar for his portrayal as the British prime minister – has now changed historical sides.

Wright is at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios shooting high-end TV drama “M. Son of the Century” which chronicles Benito Mussolini’s rise to power. A timely tale because, as he puts it: “Populist leaders are sprouting up all over the world.”

Aesthetically, the show will be “quite outlandish” with deeply saturated colors, punctuated by a “kind of techno score,” the director said during a recent set visit. Though “It’s not told in a vérité style,” Wright pointed out that “All the facts of what happened, they’re all there.”

Luca Marinelli plays Mussolini during the period between 1919, when he founded the fascist party in Italy, and 1925 when – having gained power with the 1922 March on Rome – Mussolini made an infamous...

Emergency NYC is a documentary series created by Adi Barash and Ruthie Shatz about emergency services in New York City.

New York, a city with almost nine million inhabitants and nine million possible emergencies every day. Emergencies: New York takes us into the daily life of its health workers, from doctors to nurses, ambulance drivers, and even helicopter pilots to beat the infernal traffic of Manhattan.

A documentary that, despite its fast-paced subject matter, manages to take itself calmly, explaining how the system works from within and how these men and women manage to help every day in the most urgent cases.

A documentary that seeks its essence of divulgation: putting Dziga Vertov’s “cinema eye” in New York City a century later and looking more for the story and getting closer to the men and women who achieve these miracles every day. It wants to more than just highlight...

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,...

This year, all the Oscar-contending directors are nominated for original screenplay: the Daniels, Todd Field, Martin McDonagh, Ruben Östlund and Steven Spielberg (writing with Tony Kushner).

This is the first time it’s happened in AMPAS history.

The only year that came close was 2017, when all five helmers had written or co-written their scripts, though they didn’t all get writing noms.

So here’s Film History 101.

In Hollywood lore, Preston Sturges is often credited as the first scribe to become a hyphenate, as writer-director of the 1940 “The Great McGinty.” But as with all Hollywood “facts,” there is only an element of truth here.

In the next few years, he was joined by some heavyweights: Orson Welles (“Citizen Kane”) and John Huston (“The Maltese Falcon”) in 1941; Leo McCarey (co-writer of “Going My Way”); Billy Wilder (writing with Raymond Chandler) for “Double Indemnity” in 1944; and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (“Dragonwyck”), 1946.

However, a writer-director wasn’t an innovation.

Tár writer/director Todd Field discusses a few of his favorite movies with Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

You Only Live Twice (1967) – Dana Gould’s trailer commentary

Tár (2022)

Man With A Movie Camera (1929)

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Koyaanisqatsi (1982)

The Big Parade (1925)

Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)

The Crowd (1928)

Star Wars (1977)

The Servant (1963)

Parasite (2019) – Glenn Erickson’s Blu-ray review, Dennis Cozzalio’s review

The Three Musketeers (1973) – Josh Olson’s trailer commentary

Figures In A Landscape (1970)

M (1931)

M (1951)

I Am Cuba (1964)

The Cranes Are Flying (1957) – Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Letter Never Sent (1960)

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965)

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)

The Towering Inferno (1974) – George Hickenlooper’s trailer commentary

The Great Waldo Pepper (1975)

The Sting (1973)

The World of Henry Orient (1964) – Larry Karaszewski’s trailer commentary

Thelma And Louise (1991)

Murmur Of The Heart (1971)

The Silent World (1956)

Opening Night (1977)

The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (1976) – Larry Karaszewski’s...

Italy in 2022 made several landmark strides in the international entertainment arena: an Italian play, Stefano Massini’s “The Lehman Trilogy,” garnered five Tony Awards, a prize the country had never conquered; Roman rock band Måneskin scored a Grammy nomination; and even as domestic box office plunged this year, Italian film exports mushroomed.

Massini’s five-hour play, which follows the three Lehman brothers from their arrival from Germany in New York in 1844 up to the 2008 bankruptcy of their global financial services company, prompted Sam Mendes to stage an English-language adaptation, which ultimately triumphed at the Tonys. Now a high-end TV series based on his play is being developed by producers Domenico Procacci and Lorenzo Mieli with Florian Zeller attached to direct. Procacci, speaking to Variety, praised Massini for managing “to tell so effectively a story that doesn’t have any Italian elements, since most of it takes place in the U.

The results of Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade Greatest Film of All Time poll are in.

Every 10 years, the British Film Institute-published magazine asks experts, including critics, academics, distributors, writers, curators, archivists and programmers, to send their personal top 10 favourite films.

In 2012, the winner was Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which has been bumped into second place.

The 2022 poll, which recorded responses from just under double the amount that voted a decade ago, was topped by Chantal Akerman’s minimalistic Belgian drama Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).

Akerman has become the first female director to have a film top the poll in its 70-year history. In the 2012 list, the film finished in 36th place.

The three-hour, 21-minute-long film, which was directed by Akerman when she was 25, charts the daily routine of a widow (Delphine Seyrig) over the course of three days.

Rounding out the top five is Orson Welles’s...

Chantal Akerman’s ’Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’ previously sat at number 36 on the poll

Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has topped Sight & Sound magazine’s Greatest Film of All Time Critics’ poll 2022, becoming the first woman director to do so.

Akerman’s 1975 French-language film was previously 36th place when the poll was last conducted in 2012.

The number one spot at the time, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, has now fallen to second place with Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane - which was previously number one for 50 years - at number three.

Sight & Sound’s ’Greatest Film...

Click here to read the full article.

Almost 50 years after its release, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — Chantal Akerman’s groundbreaking 1975 drama following the meticulous daily routine of a middle-aged widow over the course of three days — has become the first film by a female director to top Sight & Sound magazine’s once-a-decade “Best Films of All Time” poll in 70 years.

More than 1,600 film critics, academics, distributors, writers, curators, archivists and programmers voted in the poll, which the BFI-backed publication has been running since 1952, with the results, announced Thursday, seeing Akerman’s feature — which was heralded by Le Monde in January 1976 as “the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema” — leapfrog from 36th position in 2022 to No. 1.

The 2012 winner, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, now sits in second place, with Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (which held the No. 1 spot for 50 years) placed third and Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story fourth.

An entire generation of cinephiles knew Vertigo as the greatest film ever made. Maybe they didn’t hold it in such high esteem; there’s odds they didn’t even like it that much. But the Sight and Sound list released summer 2012 left an imprint on film culture far beyond anything else striving to define consensus, and for a decade it’s been hard not to consider Hitchcock’s (if you ask me) pretty good film without quickly drifting to assessments of canon. Like the list before it (when Citizen Kane loomed larger than all) and the one before that.

From today to at least 2032 Jeanne Dielman will, with a certain shorthand, be known as the greatest film ever made. Sight and Sound have unveiled their once-per-decade poll, now topped by Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece—a good choice, and we all know it could be so much worse. Mulholland Dr....

Filmed in 1931, this experimental film about Ukraine’s industrial might captures the revolutionary upheaval of its era with bold cuts and uproarious sound cues

The jittery, crazed, experimental brilliance of Dziga Vertov’s 1931 film, subtitled The Symphony of the Donbas, still pulses after almost a century, although it should be said right away that the “enthusiasm” of the title is mainly for two things: first, Soviet Russia’s control of Ukraine and, second, coal. Neither of these commands quite the same excitement in 2022.

This was Vertov’s first sound film, celebrating the role played by the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and its mineral and agricultural riches in Joseph Stalin’s five-year plan, and nothing could have been less conventionally “symphonic”: a piercing, clanging, screeching sound-collage, mixing crowds, shouts, boots and industrial machinery as well as ordinary music and speech. Religion is swept away by Communist party orthodoxy. The pious,...

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

Roxy Cinema

Three by Abel Ferrara—Mary, Go Go Tales, and The Funeral—are on 35mm while the director presents his cut of Welcome to New York; this Friday a 16mm print of Deep Throat and 35mm of The Warriors are both available.

Museum of Modern Art

One of the year’s great retrospectives looks at deep cuts of Shochiku Studios.

Japan Society

A print of Kurosawa’s Kagemusha shows Friday.

Film Forum

35mms print of Brooke Adams-starrer Vengeance Is Mine and Diva screen, while Montgomery Clift is given a retro featuring the greatest of Old Hollywood; Creature from the Black Lagoon plays in 3D this Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

Miami Vice and The Insider show on 35mm for “Mann to Mann: The Manly Melodramas of Michael Mann,” while the great Dp James Wong Howe is given his dues in a new retrospective.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSDesigned by Hartland Villa, the official poster for the 75th edition of the Cannes Film Festival features a still from Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol’s The Truman Show. The festival has also unveiled the lineup for its official selection, which features a hefty list of competitors for the Palme d'Or. Check out the full lineup here.Accompanying the official selection are the Directors' Fortnight and Critics' Week lineups, which are not to be overlooked. Pietro Marcello's French-language debut Scarlet will be opening the Directors' Fortnight, while Yann Gonzalez and July Jung will be premiering new films at Critics' Week. Kelly Reichardt will be receiving an honorary Golden Leopard from this year's Locarno International Film Festival in celebration of her distinguished career, throughout which she's "[redesigned] the profile of genres, from western to thriller,...

The embattled nation’s cinema is rich and distinctive, from 1929’s milestone Man With a Movie Camera to Sergei Loznitsa’s pitch-black comedy Donbass

Ukraine’s national cinema is a storied and distinctive one, though not one that has traditionally received the exposure it deserves. That’s been shifting of late, with Ukrainian film-makers such as Sergei Loznitsa and Valentyn Vasyanovych finding a following on the international film festival circuit. On the streaming side of things, availability is pretty patchy even when it comes to some major titles – though a couple of useful online initiatives are seeking to put that right.

We’ll begin with probably the most famous vision of Ukraine on screen: Dziga Vertov’s landmark 1929 documentary Man With a Movie Camera (BFI Player), which landed in the top 10 of Sight and Sound magazine’s all-time greatest films poll a decade ago. Nearly a century after it was made,...

David Abelevich Kaufman, also known as Dziga (a Ukrainian phrase meaning whirling top) Vertov was born in 1896 into a Jewish book-dealer’s family in Białystok, Russian Empire, now modern-day Poland. Despite being known for his widely celebrated and pioneering 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera—a visually dynamic snapshot of urban life in various Ukrainian cities—until recently it’s been impossible to fully measure Vertov’s achievements, as his ambitious 1918 debut, Anniversary of the Revolution, a compilation film that stands as the first feature-length documentary ever made, was believed to be lost. Released in several Russian cities on November 7, 1918, the 119-minute compilation of 3000 meters of newsreels for the first anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution depicts the period from the bourgeois February Revolution in 1917 to the beginning of the Civil War in 1918. The film’s 30 positive prints circulated the Russian Soviet Republic on so-called October Revolution agitational trains...

It’s not every day a silent film is discovered, restored, and screened for audiences 100 years since it was last seen by any audience but attendees at this year’s Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam are in for just such a treat. It’s been revealed that Soviet director Dziga Vertov’s “The History of the Civil War,” filmed in 1921, will screen at the festival for just the second time in its existence. The film will be shown with live musical accompaniment from the Anvil Orchestra, using a newly composed soundtrack written by Roger Miller and Terry Donahue, former members of the Alloy Orchestra.

The film was initially presumed to be lost, last screening for members of the Comintern in 1921. It was presumed that only a 12-minute snippet was all that existed. This print was part of a two-year restoration effort by film historian Nikolai Izvolov, who had previously brought Vertov’s 1918 feature,...

than the crowdsourced YouTube doc “Life in a Day 2020.” The internet video behemoth foretold a new era of DIY filmmaking when it launched in 2005, and just five years later it tried give an artistic patina to the amateur works that defined the site with “Life in a Day,” an assortment of uploaded clips given some coherence by veteran documentarian Kevin Macdonald. The result was meant to be profound, a glimpse at the beauty of the ordinary. But it was just ordinary.

A decade later, YouTube and Macdonald have doubled down with “Life in a Day 2020,” which leans into the gravitas — and what better year to get “deep” than 2020? Over 320,000 amateur videographers from 192 countries uploaded videos shot on July 25, 2020, and the footage could be anything. Some are performance works: a Black guy sings the Schubert Lied “The Elf King” in crisp, precise German; one teenage Italian girl poses coquettishly...

With regard to the concept of movies as a way to approach and better understand a subject, we, as the audience, certainly see the world through a different lens (pun intended) after having followed the story or having been through the same journey as the characters. However, in many ways, the same principle should also be applied to the creator(s) of the feature, because while the idea for the story, the characters and the aesthetics may have laid the theoretical foundation for it, the filming process often brings new experiences and knowledge to the surface, at times to an extent which changes the feature as a whole. In his feature debut “The Boy With Moving Image” Indonesian director Roufy Nasution puts this idea at the center of the story revolving around a young director whose encounter with a woman changes his perspective on his craft and on life itself.

Attraction Photo: Art Pictures If you ask people to name a Russian film, there's a good chance it'll be a classic of Soviet cinema, from the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin) or, perhaps, Dziga Vertov's early documenary Man With A Movie Camera. Russian cinema continues to be a force to be reckoned with, however, not just in terms of its arthouse input - the films that most generally hit the festival circuit - but also more mainstream films aimed chiefly at cineplexes at home.

Later this month, American viewers will be able to stream the pick of the country's most recent films, courtesy of Russian Film Week - the UK edition of which is scheduled to return in November. We've taken that as our inspiration this week, to offer a Streaming Spotlight selection of films from the country from the past decade that you...

From "Modern Lusts," Berghahn 2020, 340PPErnest Borneman not only wrote the greatest detective novel set in the movie-business, with one of the best titles, The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor (1937), but was also a screenwriter, editor, producer, distributor and director who worked closely with two cinema colossi, John Grierson and Orson Welles. He was also a painter, musician, revered jazz critic and historian of African-American life, a radical agitator and sexologist whose stated aim was to destroy the patriarchy. Modern Lusts, the first biography of this protean polymath, reveals a man who did everything, knew everyone, and remained in the forefront of avant-garde art and politics, Black liberation and sexual freedom, like some ultra-woke Zelig. Never in the field of human culture was so much done, so many met, now known to so few.Born in Berlin in 1915, Borneman attended Karl Marx school and by 15 had met Brecht, with whom he collaborated over the decades,...

For her feature-directing debut “Cameraperson” (2016), top non-fiction cinematographer Kirsten Johnson explored the moral dilemma of filming people under duress. The film was intuitive and nonlinear, as Johnson and editor Nels Bangerter searched for twisty ways to connect things. The movie landed on the Academy Awards shortlist, and for her next film Johnson decided to let her creative instincts fly.

“‘Cameraperson’ freed me and allowed me to see myself in ways I hadn’t seen myself,” she told filmmaker Mike Mills during an AFI Q&a. “When we did that, we broke things and broke where the edge was. You are seeing the people, not the screen, and understanding more. It offered more of who I was.”

For this one, she chose a subject she could not keep at arms’ length: her declining father. Four years later, “Dick Johnson is Dead” debuted at Sundance 2020 to more praise. The elder Johnson has dementia,...

For her feature-directing debut “Cameraperson” (2016), top non-fiction cinematographer Kirsten Johnson explored the moral dilemma of filming people under duress. The film was intuitive and nonlinear, as Johnson and editor Nels Bangerter searched for twisty ways to connect things. The movie landed on the Academy Awards shortlist, and for her next film Johnson decided to let her creative instincts fly.

“‘Cameraperson’ freed me and allowed me to see myself in ways I hadn’t seen myself,” she told filmmaker Mike Mills during an AFI Q&a. “When we did that, we broke things and broke where the edge was. You are seeing the people, not the screen, and understanding more. It offered more of who I was.”

For this one, she chose a subject she could not keep at arms’ length: her declining father. Four years later, “Dick Johnson is Dead” debuted at Sundance 2020 to more praise. The elder Johnson has dementia,...

The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, born January 23, 1898, in Latvia, was, for better and worse, a distinct product of his time. At the turn of the century, the Russian Empire was a vast, volatile region of intense sociopolitical upheaval, technological innovation, and artistic inspiration, cultural facets that would define and dramatically impact Eisenstein’s subsequently tremulous life and career. Intending to follow in the footsteps of his father, Eisenstein was admitted to the Petrograd Institute of Civil Engineering in 1915. But with the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, he enlisted in the Red Army and became a designer for its theatrical unit. Enamored by the heady influence of the Bolshevik uprising, Eisenstein was also inspired by assorted manner of creative expression, including Kabuki theater, opera, and comic strips. After joining the Proletkult Theatre in Moscow,...

Over the course of more than two decades Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa has quietly established himself amongst the great political filmmakers of the 21st century. More recently his work has provided an increasingly vital perspective on the Soviet Union and its eventual demise, as well as contemporary Russia and its annexation of Crimea–a situation the director does not hesitate to call a war.

Across a rapidly expanding oeuvre (18 features and counting), Loznitsa has shown an adeptness in both fiction and documentary filmmaking but he is perhaps best known for operating in the grey area between–often re-editing and adding new audio to found material. With his latest, State Funeral, the director was given free reign on a vast archive of largely unseen footage that had originally been shot to make Sergei Gerasimov’s The Great Farewell, a propaganda documentary on the funeral of Joseph Stalin that never saw the light of day.

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and an archive of past round-ups here.

Asako I & II (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi)

Full-fledged, complicated, rapturous romance is relatively rare in cinema nowadays, and one of the very best examples is Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II, which uses its doubled lovers as a way to reflect back upon its main character, in all of her doubts and uncertainties. Deeply rooted in its present moment, yet prone to flights of fancy as transportive and unreal as any in contemporary filmmaking, the film delights as much as it aches, staying in close step with the turns caused by the whims of the self and the other, moving back and forth in rapture. – Ryan S.

One of the innovations of Orwa Nyrabia, artistic director at Idfa, a leading documentary festival, has been to present a wide range of live productions to enhance the film experience, blurring the boundaries between documentary, music, and performing arts.

Curated by Jasper Hokken, the section called Idfa On Stage… is incredibly diverse, ranging from more traditional projects, such as the Belgian theater piece “True Copy,” to concert films (“The Long River Slides”) and a near-unclassifiable new media mash-up called A Machine for Viewing, which features cinema, Vr and performance.

It is a measure of the fast-moving and ever-evolving nature of Hokken’s project that he already has half an eye on next year’s selection. “We’re open for submissions,” he says, “and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s coming in. In the meantime I’ll continue having conversations with filmmakers and creators whenever I can, introducing them to this new,...

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Museum of Modern Art

MoMA has reopened, and it is–I do not say this lightly–almost too much in one weekend. See for yourself.

Film Forum

“Shitamachi: Tales of Downtown Tokyo” begins with both canon and lesser-known Japanese cinema.

Films by Tim Burton and Joseph Losey play this weekend.

Metrograph

Films by Hitchcock and Blake Edwards play this weekend.

With a new restoration of Béla Tarr’s 1994 opus Sátántangó now playing in theaters, today we’re taking a look back at the Hungarian maestro’s favorite films. It may not be quite as immersive as attending his recent film school in Sarajevo, but watching these ten films may give one greater insight into his vision of the world.

As voted on in the latest Sight & Sound poll, selections include Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (a film that’s about double the length of Sátántangó), fellow Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó’s break-out drama The Round-Up, and more.

We recently spoke with Tarr at Berlinale, where he gave some lively advice about filmmaking and the state of the industry, “Go and shoot something with your phone and find your own way and that’s all. Who cares? Fuck off this shitty film industry.

After spending $450 million on four months of renovation and some 47,000 square feet of new gallery space, MoMA reopens October 21 with a radical refashioning of its artwork and curation. The goal is to provide a more diverse and expansive understanding of modernism — and that includes film.

While Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” still greets visitors in the museum’s first gallery, they only have to look to the right for the first cinematic experience, a recording of the New York City subway from 1905. The piece sits at the center of an entire room dedicated to early photography and moving images, including a selection from the Bert Williams 1914 silent work “Lime Kiln Club Field Day,” a Biograph production considered the earliest surviving film with African American actors.

It keeps going. Wandering the galleries two weeks before the opening, much remained unlabeled and unfinished — but movies were almost everywhere, sharing space with the...

AndreischAfter the staggering success of Shadows of The Forgotten Ancestors (1965), which won awards in London, New York, Mar Del Plata and Montreal, Sergei Parajanov was thrust onto the world stage as one of the most original filmmakers in the business. Depicting the conventions of the Hutsul people of the Carpathian mountains, it was a brave new step in Soviet filmmaking due to its restless camerawork, intense subjectivity, and ambiguous tone. The positive reception would inform his later work, a triumph of the local, celebrating ancient customs and dress in a visually dazzling fashion. To celebrate his legacy, Arsenal Kino in Berlin, supported by the Embassy of the Republic of Armenia, presented all eight of Parajanov’s feature films this fall, allowing audiences to see how the acclaimed filmmaker changed from studio-tied hack to inimitable auteur. When talking about Parajanov’s filmmaking and style, critics will invariably focus on his last four films—Forgotten Ancestors,...

F.J. Ossang's Doctor Chance (1997) is showing on Mubi in December and January, 2018 as part of the series F.J. Ossang: Cinema Is Punk.“Out into the halls again, past dark Coke machines, and there he is lying horizontally across a metal folding chair like he’s practicing a levitation trick, both ragged cowboy boots propped up on a metal desk. He’s blue. That’s the first thing that strikes me. He’s all blue from the eyes clear down through his clothes. First thing he says to me, ‘We don’t have to make any connections.’ At first I’m not sure if he’s talking about us personally or the movie. ‘None of this has to connect, in fact it is better if it doesn’t connect.’“ —Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook“The world has a new form of beauty: speed. Art is dead.” —Angstel Presley von...

When it opens its doors late next year, the $388 million Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will feature exhibits designed to capture the interest of movie fans and historians alike, making it “the first institution of its scope and scale devoted to the past, present, and future of cinema,” the Museum said today in announcing its plans for the opening.

“The Museum’s exhibitions are as expansive and imaginative as the movies we love,” said Academy CEO Dawn Hudson in a release distributed during a luncheon today at the Petersen Automotive Museum across Wilshire Boulevard from the construction stie. “With its piazza and open spaces, the Museum will be a gathering place for film lovers and will invite people from all over the world to re-experience and deepen our collective love of this art form, accessible to all.”

A long-term exhibit, tentatively titled “Where Dreams Are Made: A Journey Inside the Movies,...

By depicting issues of racism and bigotry in pre-apartheid South Africa, “Sew Winter to My Skin” writer and director Jahmil X.T. Qubeka said he wants to portray everything that “make(s) us the same in humanity, rather than the things that set us apart.”

Following a screening of the 2018 film, South Africa’s Oscar foreign race entry, Qubeka participated in a Q&A moderated by TheWrap CEO and founder Sharon Waxman. Based on true events, “Sew Winter to My Skin” is a Western-style film that follows the violent and emotional last days leading up to South African outlaw John Kepe’s execution in June 1952. Kepe (Ezra Mabengeza), the self-proclaimed “Samson of Boschberg,” was hung for a string of crimes including theft and the murder of a farmworker.

“If you ask me what the film’s about, it’s a love letter to our history. The pain that we live through...

David Abelevich Kaufman – a.k.a. Dziga Vertov, a Ukrainian phrase meaning “spinning top” – is best known for his pioneering 1929 film “Man With a Movie Camera,” a snapshot of daily life in various Russian cities. Unusually for a documentary, the film wasn’t so much celebrated for its subject-matter as its style – even today, the film is a startlingly adventurous exploration of the possibilities of cinema, using slow motion, shot reversals, freeze-frames, optical illusions and more to create a hallucinogenic meditation on the everyday.

It was deemed to be the high watermark of the director’s career, even though he worked until his death in 1954, aged 58. But until now it’s been impossible to truly measure Vertov’s achievements, since his ambitious debut, 1918’s “The Anniversary of the Revolution,” has been unavailable to view. Last year, however, Russian film scholars made a breakthrough, finding a shot list that enabled them...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSThe 30 films comprising the main slate of this year's New York Film Festival have been announced, including Alfonso Cuarón's autobiographical, Mexico-set film Roma, Mariano Llinás's fourteen-hour "adventure in scale and duration" La Flor, and Alex Ross Perry's '90s rockstar melodrama Her Smell. "The unifying thread is their bravery," says Festival Director Kent Jones. "The bravery needed to fight past the urge to commercialized smoothness and mediocrity that is always assuming new forms." Festival president Marco Solari and Vice President Carla Speziali of the Locarno Film Festival—which is currently ongoing until August 11—have agreed to sign a pledge "ensuring gender equality and inclusion in programming". The initiative was organized by members of the Swiss Women’s Audiovisual Network (Swan), including filmmaker Ursula Meier, and joins a number of pledges to...