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If my shortlist for this piece is any indication, Hollywood adjusted to Covid just fine. I’ve put aside an average of 60-70 posters every year since I’ve been doing Posterized until barely hitting 40 in 2020. It wasn’t a dearth of quality work, but the fact that there were so many fewer releases to choose from. And since I base these columns on current-year US runs rather than when one-sheets start making their rounds, my pool of candidates was greatly reduced.

So either 2021 work was off-the-charts or the hybrid theatrical-streaming schedule found itself whole once again, because I was back to around 65. It helps too when you get new players on the scene, alt-posters too good to dismiss, and social-media controversy courtesy the collision of nudity and art that put more international designs into our American consciousness.

There are a couple below where the domestic marketing team decided to...

Following the announcement of their new curated theatrical venture Mubi Go, next month’s U.S. streaming lineup at Mubi has now been unveiled. Highlights include Terrence Malick’s heartbreakingly raw romantic drama To the Wonder and its Javier Bardem-focused counterpart, Eugene Richards’ Thy Kingdom Come.

Also in the lineup is Julian Faraut’s terrifically entertaining documentary Witches of the Orient, the Werner Herzog double bill of Grizzly Man and Lo and Behold, John Carpenter’s Escape From New York, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Blue, Sandra Wollner’s controversial feature The Trouble With Being Born, Alexandre Rockwell’s latest film Sweet Thing, and much more.

See the full lineup below and get 30 days of Mubi free here.

November 1 | The First Lap New | Kim Dae-hwan | South Korean Cinema

November 2 | L’innocente | Luchino Visconti

November 3 | 80,000 Years Old | Christelle Lheureux

November 4 | Liebelei | Max Ophüls

November 5 | Maelström | Denis Villeneuve | A Cosmic Trajectory: Early Films by...

Keep track of when films are coming out in the territory.

Cinemas in the UK and Ireland are set to reopen this spring, following months of closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Screen is listing the release dates for films in the territory in the calendar below. For distributors who wish to add/amend a date on the calendar, please get in touch with Screen here.

Indoor cinemas in England and Scotland will be allowed to reopen from May 17; with dates yet to be confirmed for Wales, Northern Ireland and Ireland.

Screen is also tracking reopening dates of cinemas in...

Takings for the top five titles down 25 percent despite three new openers.

Rank Film (Distributor) Three-day gross (July 16-18) Total gross to date Week 1 Black Widow (Disney) £1.8m £11.2m 2 2 Space Jam: A New Legacy (Warner Bros) £1.4m £1.4m 1 3 The Forever Purge (Universal) £702,000 £720,000 1 4 The Croods 2: A New Age (Universal) £696,000 £696,000 1 5 Fast & Furious 9 (Universal) £446,000 £14.2m 4

Gbp to Usd conversion rate: 1.37

Marvel’s latest superhero blockbuster Black Widow held top spot at the UK-Ireland box office for a second successive session, on a weekend when hot weather across much of the territory limited box office takings.

Black Widow fell 61% on its opening session for distributor Disney,...

As this documentary opens, a group of Japanese women in their 70s sit around a table, eating and reminiscing. They are the surviving members of a volleyball team, founded at a textile factory, that between the late 1950s and the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, became the best in the world. Dubbed ‘The Witches of the Orient’ by the press during their early 60s world tour, in which they defeated all comers, including their biggest rivals, the Ussr.

Julien Faraut’s film mixes archive footage of the team, of anime inspired by them and of Japan at and before the time of their dominance, with contemporary footage of interviews with the surviving members, as well as bits of their current daily routine. As far as it goes, it’s not an uninteresting subject, but in terms of focus it passes by much of the most provocative material. In (finally) contextualising its anime clips,...

As Sheffield Doc Fest wrapped its first online edition, we spoke with one of the most promising filmmakers to emerge from that discipline in recent years. With just two titles released, Parisian director Julien Faraut has become quietly synonymous with finding new and surprising territory in one of documentary cinema’s most hackneyed genres: the sports documentary.

In The Realm of Perfection came like a breath of fresh air in 2018; his latest continues the trend. Again working with footage from the National Institute of Sport, where he continues to work as an archivist, The Witches of the Orient tells the story of the 1964 Japanese Women’s Olympic volleyball team and the television anime they would later inspire–two distinct threads Faraut weaves into something hypnotic. As the film arrives in the U.S. read our conversation below.

The Film Stage: I read a nice line recently from Marc Nemcik. He said,...