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Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted the introduction to his 2004 book, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons as well as his list of 1,000 Favorites. Also in today's roundup of news and views: The new Film Quarterly features a dossier on Richard Linklater, Cahiers du Cinéma on Martin Scorsese in the 80s, Peter Cowie's memories of François Truffaut, Chris Cagle on Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death, Jake Cole on Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O, J. Hoberman on Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country and Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, Artforum and the New York Times on Shirley Yamaguchi and Setsuko Hara—and more. » - David Hudson...

Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted the introduction to his 2004 book, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons as well as his list of 1,000 Favorites. Also in today's roundup of news and views: The new Film Quarterly features a dossier on Richard Linklater, Cahiers du Cinéma on Martin Scorsese in the 80s, Peter Cowie's memories of François Truffaut, Chris Cagle on Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death, Jake Cole on Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O, J. Hoberman on Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country and Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, Artforum and the New York Times on Shirley Yamaguchi and Setsuko Hara—and more. » - David Hudson...

Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted the introduction to his 2004 book, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons as well as his list of 1,000 Favorites. Also in today's roundup of news and views: The new Film Quarterly features a dossier on Richard Linklater, Cahiers du Cinéma on Martin Scorsese in the 80s, Peter Cowie's memories of François Truffaut, Chris Cagle on Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death, Jake Cole on Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O, J. Hoberman on Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country and Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, Artforum and the New York Times on Shirley Yamaguchi and Setsuko Hara—and more. » - David Hudson...

Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted the introduction to his 2004 book, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons as well as his list of 1,000 Favorites. Also in today's roundup of news and views: The new Film Quarterly features a dossier on Richard Linklater, Cahiers du Cinéma on Martin Scorsese in the 80s, Peter Cowie's memories of François Truffaut, Chris Cagle on Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death, Jake Cole on Eric Rohmer's The Marquise of O, J. Hoberman on Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country and Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, Artforum and the New York Times on Shirley Yamaguchi and Setsuko Hara—and more. » - David Hudson...

Cinema's fascination with labor can be traced to the art form's very beginning: The Lumière brothers' first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), shows men and women, lunch pails in hand, streaming out of a warehouse. The imprint of this 45-second-long actualité is evident in myriad works, whether fact or fiction, that focus on the daily grind: from Charlie Chaplin's slapstick Modern Times (1936) to George Abbott and Stanley Donen's 1957 movie musical The Pajama Game (which Jean-Luc Godard, whose films from the 1960s often riffed on Marx's theories of alienated labor, hailed as "the first left-wing operetta") to Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death (2005), a globe-spanning documentary on some of the worst jobs...

João Bénard da Costa's essay on Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954) is now available in nine languages. Do we fully appreciate the impact of Cornell Woolrich on cinema? What does Ida Lupino's Outrage (1950) have to say about "what we now know to call rape culture"? Plus Boris Nelepo on Alain Resnais's Life of Riley, Kenji Fujishima and Carson Lund on Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death, Joseph Nechvatal on Henri Langlois and more. » - David Hudson...

Austrian director Michael Glawogger has tragically died at the age of 54 while shooting in Africa. For more on this brilliant director and his working method read Daniel Kasman's interview from Venice about Glawogger's last film, Whores' Glory (2011). Mubi Us is in the middle of a 30-day run of the director's Workingman's Death (2005).

Above: Omar Ahmed's brief video essay on Michael Mann's Thief. For Cinema Scope Online, Kiva Reardon writes on the Images Festival:

"Offering streaming links to almost their entire programme, the festival can be consumed from a couch, in sporadic order and with no regard for curatorial intent, which beggars the question: Is a collection of Vimeo links really a film festival? Should this sound like an ontological foray into digital existence, apologies, but the issue is not going away; Hot Docs likewise offers a multitude of link-based screeners to accredited journalists. It is a less than...

Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger, who worked under-the-radar and pushed himself to the brink as a documentary and feature filmmaker, has passed away at age 54 in Africa. He died from Malaria while working on his latest film. Glawogger's final finished feature was "Whores' Glory" in 2011, a stylish and gritty documentary triptych on prostitutes from Mexico, Thailand and Bangladesh. But he also worked on "Cathedrals of Culture," a 3D architecture doc, alongside Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. Throughout his prolific career, Glawogger sought to capture the rhythms of lives both ordinary and extreme in far away places, most notably in his 2005 masterpiece "Workingman's Death," about manual laborers in far-flung corners of the Earth, and 1998's cross-cultural portrait "Megacities." All of his documentaries look closely at globalization and its resonance, but they are also incredibly cinematic. Gorgeously lensed -- and typically on celluloid, which he preferred to digital -- his...

Presenting single-paragraph biographies of each member, the Cannes Film Festival's announced the Jury of the Competition for its 65th anniversary edition, running May 16 through 27: Nanni Moretti (President), Hiam Abbass, Andrea Arnold, Emmanuelle Devos, Diane Kruger, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Ewan McGregor, Alexander Payne and Raoul Peck.

"Ebertfest, the annual film festival founded by the venerable Chicago Sun-Times critic in 1989 and running April 25-29, 2012, has always had the core mission of spotlighting underappreciated films." A preview from Michael Fox at Keyframe.

With its tenth anniversary edition, the Independent Film Festival Boston "continues the tradition of mixing renowned filmmakers and unknown artists, celebrity speakers and thoughtful in-depth panels," notes Not Coming to a Theater Near You, introducing a special section where it'll be collecting reviews throughout the festival's run from today through May 2. The Globe's Ty Burr and Wesley Morris present a batch of capsule previews.

"The Seattle International Film Festival (Siff), announced...

The most vibrant and colorful film in Venice last year was, troublingly, Michael Glawogger's three part documentary on prostitution, Whores' Glory, which is getting its Us premiere this week at the Museum of the Moving Image's retrospective on the director. The film is beautiful—diverse geographic, national, cultural and social spaces filmed with attention to costuming and colors more befitting a fictional production (cf. Bonello's opulent House of Tolerance, Hou's Flowers of Shanghai). Yet its beauty is one based solely on the liveliness required of its subject trade, the need for appearances and the bustle implicit in selling sex.

Each section takes a different location, a difference space, a different kind of prostitution, a different religion of the prostitutes. After a stunning laser-show prelude, where women in a glass booth floating above a street tag in green ray beams potential clients down below, the first segment begins, taking place a similar glass booth,...

The Terracotta Far East Film Festival is on in London through the weekend, presenting, as Electric Sheep notes in the introduction to its newish issue, "the UK premiere of Sion Sono's Himizu [review: John Bleasdale], using a comic to tackle the fallout from Fukushima." Es takes "a look at manga adaptations with Takashi Miike's stylized, violent high school movie Crows Zero [comic strip review: Joe Morgan] and Toshiya Fujita's 70s revenge tale Lady Snowblood: Blizzard from the Netherworld [review: Virginie Sélavy]."

Hiroyuki Okiura's A Letter to Momo, seven years in the making, opens in Japan next week after a run through the festival circuit and, in the Japan Times, Mark Schilling gives it four out of five stars: "Hayao Miyazaki is the obvious point of comparison, but unlike many of Miyazaki's more fanciful landscapes, Okiura's port is vividly, recognizably real — so much so that you can almost smell the salt in the water and feel the warmth of the stones.

"Michael Glawogger, Austria's most enigmatic filmmaker, continues his pendulum movement between fascinatingly diverse fictions — as evidenced by 2009's one-two yin-yang-punch of Contact High and Kill Daddy Goodnight — and globe-spanning documentaries like the 1998 Megacities or the 2005 Workingman's Death." Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope: "Following in the latter's footsteps, Glawogger's docu-essay Whores' Glory caps, as the press book biography dryly states, 'his trilogy about working environments.' … Thriving on contradiction and observational curiosity as usual, Glawogger still resolutely rejects social cause-pandering, but scratches for something deeper by contrasting the rituals of love (for sale) in three different cultures, religions and economies: a look not just at prostitution, but the relationships between men and women in contemporary society that yields telling and ambivalent insights. Another major work, and the only Austrian feature-length film of importance in the upper echelons of the festival circuit this year."

And Huber and Olaf Möller talk with Glawogger...

LONDON -- Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death won the inaugural Times BFI London Film Festival Grierson Award, organizers said Thursday. New to the festival this year, the award is given to the director of the best feature-length documentary shown at the festival. Glawogger is scheduled to be presented with the award Nov. 1 at a special screening of the documentary. The award is presented in conjunction with The Grierson Trust, which commemorates Scottish documentary-maker John Grierson, who died in 1972.