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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.News Office Space.Some Hollywood insiders are blaming post-pandemic work-from-home policies—rather than rampant financialization and an overinvestment in stale intellectual-property tentpoles—for the industry’s recent decline.A coalition of human-rights groups have penned an open letter to Netflix demanding the renewal of its “Palestinian Stories” collection, which expired earlier this month after three years on the platform.Workers in RadicalMedia’s nonfiction division have launched a union drive, having collected an “overwhelming majority” of signature cards from the 65-person bargaining group. They plan to join the Writers Guild of America East.China will not have an Oscar entry this year, after the Academy deemed the documentary The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru (2023) ineligible for the Best Foreign Picture award,...

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

IFC Center

A Gaspar Noé retrospective is underway; the new restorations of Inland Empire and Mississippi Masala continue; Eraserhead, The Crow, Re-Animator, and Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane have late-night showings.

Roxy Cinema

Ugetsu and Altered States screen on 35mm this weekend.

Film Forum

A new Nights of Cabiria restoration has started, while the Sidney Poitier retrospective includes films by Ford, Kubrick, and Hitchcock.

Metrograph

A retrospective of nonfiction filmmaker Lionel Rogosin is underway, while novelist Gary Indiana has a selection running down.

Anthology Film Archives

Almost never screened, the films of Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller are given a series, while Laurel & Hardy plays alongside Sunrise in Essential Cinema.

The post NYC Weekend Watch: Gaspar Noé, Ugetsu, Sergeant Rutledge & More first appeared on The Film Stage.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)The Cannes Film Festival has announced that this year's edition will celebrate the 40-year career of Tom Cruise (whose Top Gun: Maverick is premiering at the festival) with a full career retrospective. Ahead of the reveal for this year's lineup on April 14, Cannes has also confirmed that one of the titles set to premiere will be George Miller's Three Thousand Years of Longing, his first film since 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. Described by Miller as being "anti-Mad Max," Three Thousand Years of Longing is a fantasy romance drama starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton. New York City's iconic video store, Kim's Video and Music, will be reopening this month inside the new Alamo Drafthouse location on Liberty Street. Recommended VIEWINGA24 has released a trailer for Alex Garland's Men,...

The Criterion Collection will be heralding in 2021 with a mix of new and old. First up, Bing Liu’s stellar documentary Minding the Gap will be joining the collection, as will another documentary, Martin Scorsese’s playful Rolling Thunder Revue. Also arriving is a three-film Luis Buñuel box set focusing on his late career, featuring The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire. Larisa Shepitko’s final, harrowing feature The Ascent will also be getting a release.

Check out the cover art and special features below, and see more on Criterion’s website.

New high-definition digital master, approved by director Bing Liu, with 5.1 surround DTS-hd Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-rayNew audio commentary featuring Liu and documentary subjects Keire Johnson and Zack MulliganNew follow-up conversation between Liu and documentary subject Nina BowgrenNew programs featuring interviews with professional skateboarder Tony Hawk and with Liu,...

Writers have a hard time controlling what they’re known for: It could be the wrong book, or no book at all but instead some provocation, feud, love affair, scandal, or autopsy. In his new memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, Gary Indiana laments that a young reporter profiling him seems mostly interested in “the art criticism I wrote for three years in the mid-1980s ... a bunch of yellowing newspaper columns I never republished and haven’t cared about for a second since writing them a quarter century ago.” A memoir, of course, is an opportunity to shift the emphasis. But it’s no surprise that a crucial player in the East Village art scene of the '80s — an era that’s attracted acute nostalgia as one of the last gasps of downtown authenticity, and a phase when there were still giants in the pages of...

Director Lee Daniels, who first made a name for himself with the 2009 drama Precious followed by the hit Oscar-nominated biopic The Butler, is set to take on his first horror movie with the true-life inspired Demon House.

Relativity is behind this story that still continues to this day, centering on demonic possession. Latoya Ammons and her family claim to be victims of the supernatural, succumbing to evil forces while living in their Gary Indiana home.

Relativity is financing the project, and will produce and distribute the thriller. Jackson Nguyen and Todd Crites of Turn Left Productions are producing alongside Bruce Cohen. Richard Potter will oversee the film on for Relativity.

Lee Daniels is currently serving as an executive producer on Fox's upcoming hip-hop inspired drama Empire. He also has the upcoming films Iced and The Brian Banks Story on his slate.

Demon House comes to theaters in 2016. The film is directed by Lee Daniels.

It’s all helixed into this: something fantastic, something disastrous. “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective” is upon us. One can’t think of the last 30 years in art without thinking of Koons, a lot. I’ve witnessed this career from very close range. I have seen him transform himself into the Koons hologram we know now; him polishing sculptures late at night in galleries before and during his shows; not selling his work; almost going broke; charging less for a sculpture than it cost to produce. In a Madrid club in 1986, I watched him confront a skeptical critic while smashing himself in the face, repeating, “You don’t get it, man. I’m a fucking genius.” The fit passed when another critic who was also watching this, the brilliant Gary Indiana, said, “You are, Jeff.” I agreed.No, Koons is not “our Warhol,” as so many claim. Warhol’s complex aura changed everything,...

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,...

Chicago – I adore David Cronenberg. He’s one of the most important filmmakers of his generation from “Videodrome” (also available in a great Criterion release) to “The Fly” to “Dead Ringers” to “The History of Violence.” He matters. And yet I’ve never been in love with “Naked Lunch,” recently released in Criterion Blu-ray and DVD. It’s one of those movies that I always admired but never loved. It’s about all that could be done with a Burroughs’ book, one that clearly could not be directly adapted into film, but I find it more interesting as a filmmaking exercise than an enjoyable piece of work on its own. Having said that, the Criterion treatment of it is expectedly stellar.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

Criterion HD transfers should be the model for all. “Naked Lunch” doesn’t look overly polished like too many movies from before 2000 often do. It just looks right.

This week: Bill Murray as President Franklin D. Roosevelt is the highlight of "Hyde Park on Hudson," which should in no way be considered a historically accurate account of Fdr's meeting with the King and Queen of England in 1939.

Also new this week are two Criterion Collection Blu-ray debuts: Laurence Olivier's "Richard III" ("My kingdom for a horse!") and David Cronenberg's "Naked Lunch" ("Exterminate all rational thought").

'Hyde Park on Hudson'

Box Office: $6.4 million

Rotten Tomatoes: 38% Rotten

Storyline: Based on the private journals and diaries of Margaret 'Daisy' Suckley (Laura Linney) that were found after her death, this biographical comedy drama takes a look at the events surrounding a pivotal historical meeting in upstate New York between President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Bill Murray) and the King and Queen of England on the eve of World War II. The British royals walk into an awkward domestic situation as Fdr's wife,...

Blu-ray Release Date: April 9, 2013

Price: Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Criterion

Something's bugging Peter Weller in Naked Lunch.

Peter Weller (Firstborn), Judy Davis (To Rome with Love) and Roy Scheider (Jaws) star in David Cronenberg’s (Cosmopolis) 1991 film adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s hallucinatory, once-thought unfilmable 1959 novel Naked Lunch.

Weller takes the lead in the biographical drama-comedy as a part-time exterminator and full-time drug addict named Bill Lee who plunges into the nightmarish Interzone, a netherworld of sinister cabals and giant talking bugs.

Alternately humorous and grotesque—and always surreal—the film mingles aspects of Burroughs’s novel with incidents from the writer’s own life, resulting in an paranoid fantasy and a self-reflexive investigation into the mysteries of the creative process.

The Blu-ray contains the same bonus features that were offered on the Criterion DVD that was issued back in 2003 (and that’s still available). Here’s what’s included:

• High-definition digital transfer,...

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Godard’S Nightmare Road Trip

By Raymond Benson

Jean-Luc Godard was the bad boy of the French New Wave. Whereas his contemporaries such as Francois Truffaut were “safe” and “accessible,” Godard liked to shock people. A lot of his work, especially in the sixties, was also political in nature—this was a man unafraid to scathingly portray French bourgeois society at its worst and trumpet his views on class discrepancy with the ferocity of a bull dog. In other words, he enjoyed pissing off audiences.

Released in 1967 with the opening titles caveat that “children under 18 should not see this film,” we are told at the beginning that Weekend (or Week End or Week-end, depending on what country you’re in) is a film “found on the trash heap.” It is one of the darkest and most vicious black comedies ever made,...

Weekend capped Jean-Luc Godard’s insanely productive year of 1967, and can rightly be considered the director’s Götterdämmerung. Both projects make their respective points with sledgehammer subtlety, and along with Godard’s previous features that year, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and La Chinoise, Weekend consummates an anti-consumerist thematic cycle.

As one of its frequent title cards proclaims, Godard approached Weekend as “a film found in a dump.” It is a Dadaist, no holds barred decimation of modern French society filled with shocking violence, Marxist theory and some really, really awful driving. Told through a series of set pieces –often with elaborate and impressive production techniques– Weekend leaves no aspect of class struggle unexplored or unscathed. As the world lurches by in fits and starts, Godard’s ever evolving absurdist tableau amuses, stuns and mystifies, casting a cinematic butterfly net over a society at war with itself.

The film...

“Weekend” can be retroactively seen as a turning point in Jean-Luc Godard’s still-growing body of work. This is partly because the film’s nightmarish, picaresque plot makes some of Godard’s more recent movies look high-concept. In a new essay commissioned by the Criterion Collection for their recent DVD and Blu-ray release, Gary Indiana describes the film as: “...the last ‘real’ movie Godard made for several years, until ‘Tout va bien’ (1972)—‘real’ in the sense that it relies on cinematic illusion, however thing, to move from point A to point B, relates a story one can summarize coherently, and could, conceivably be viewed with pleasure even by an audience indifferent to its sociological and political didacticism.” Godard’s fifteenth feature is, as Indiana suggests, meandering but relatively cogent. It follows a bourgeois couple, played by popular contemporary actors Mireille Darc...

The second annual Gary Indiana International Black Film Festival is set to kick off on Friday October 5 and will continue through October 7. One of major events for this years festival will be an appearence by filmmaker Robert Townsend (Five Heartbeats, The Meteor Man, Hollywood Shuffle, The Parent Hood, etc) who will screen and discuss his latest film project In The Hive ststarring the late Michael Clarke Duncan (in one of his last screen appearences), Loretta Devine, Vivica A. Fox and Roger Guenveur Smith Among the other films that will be screened are Byron Hurt's Soul Food Junkies, Steve James' The Interrupters and Rashad Ernesto Green's Gun Hill Road. ...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Nov. 13, 2012

Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Criterion

Weekend, the scathing 1967 comedy-satire film by France’s legendary Jean-Luc Godard (Histoires du Cinema), remains one of modern cinema’s great anarchic works.

Western civilization crashes and burns in Godard's Weekend.

Determined to collect an inheritance from a dying relative, a bourgeois couple (Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc) travel across the French countryside while civilization crashes and burns around them. After their own car is destroyed, the pair wanders through a series of vignettes involving class struggle and figures from literature and history, revealing a world that is at once humorous and beautiful, and senseless and frightening

Featuring a justly famous centerpiece sequence in which the camera tracks along a seemingly endless traffic jam (the single shot runs for some eight minutes), Weekend is a surreal, funny and disturbing call for revolution, a depiction of society retreating to savagery, and...

Robert Bresson: The Over-Plenty of Life is a series we've been running in conjunction with the complete retrospective of Bresson's work that'll be touring North America through May. I thought I'd supplement Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's essays, Daniel Kasman's observations and Adrian Curry's collection of posters with a roundup of pointers to pieces on Bresson that have appeared over the past month or two. One of the occasions of the series, as I mentioned in the entry on the initial announcement (with its basic schedule of cities and dates) is the publication of an expanded and illustrated edition of series curator James Quandt's collection, Robert Bresson (Revised), so let's open this go round with notes on another book, Tony Pipolo's Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film. Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted his review for the Summer 2010 issue of Cineaste, in which he calls it…

one of the most careful and...

Your Weekly Source for the Newest Releases to Blu-Ray Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

‘Twas The Night Before Christmas: 2-Disc Deluxe Edition (1974)

Synopsis: For some unexplained reason, letters to Santa Claus are being returned to the children of Junctionville. It seems some resident has angered St. Nick by calling him “a fraudulent myth!” Skeptical Albert Mouse has to be brought to his senses “and let up a little on the wonder why.” How Albert is persuaded to change his tune paves the way for Santa’s jolly return to town – and the joyous finale of the animated fable inspired by Clement Moore’s poem and produced by the merrymaking conjures of Rankin/bass studios. The voice talents of Joel grey, Tammy Grimes, John McGiver and George Gobel make this festive fable even more fun. (highdefdigest.com)

Special Features:

Tba

The 12 Dogs Of Christmas (2005)

Synopsis: A girl who uses dogs to...

This is not the kind of film I expect from Jean-Pierre Melville based on the films of his I've seen. Taking place in Nazi-occupied France, who would've ever thought Melville would present a "life during wartime" drama and seemingly focus so little on the war? Instead, he focuses on a woman (Emmanuelle Riva) and her relationship with a local priest played by Jean-Paul Belmondo (Breathless). The film serves as a lesson in tension, building as Melville explores the growing sexual attraction this woman has for a man she cannot have. Embedded in the narrative the audience is also left to question the priest's motivations. Is he just messing with her? Does he know the effect he has on her and her friends? Religion obviously plays a role and the war isn't as forgotten as you may initially believe, but to look at the film on a surface level you'd hardly...

Release Date: Oct. 4, 2011

Price: Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Criterion

The extremes of Fascism are disurbingly explored in Pasolini's 1975 Salò.

The notorious final movie from Italy’s controversial filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (La Rabbia), 1975’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, has been described by critics as nauseating, shocking, depraved and pornographic, but many also consider it to be a masterpiece.

Pasolini’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s 18th century opus of torture and degradation to Fascist Italy remains one of the poet/novelist/filmmaker’s most passionately debated works.

Presented in Italian with English subtitles, the drama-thriller focuses on four wealthy and corrupt fascist libertines who kidnap a group of teenage boys and girls and subject them to four months of extreme violence, sadism and sexual and mental torture following the fall of Mussolini’s Italy in 1944.

Criterion’s Blu-ray of the movie offers a high definition digital restoration with...

Your Weekly Source for the Newest Releases to Blu-Ray Tuesday, July 26th, 2011

The Blues Brothers (1980)

Synopsis: Jake and Elwood Blues endeavor to raise $5,000 for their childhood parrish by putting their old band back together uand taking their show on the road. While touring, they manage to wreak havoc on the entire city of Chicago and much of the midwest.

Special Features: Stories Behind the Making of The Blues Brothers: Go behind the scenes with Director John Landis, Dan Aykroyd and the Blues Brothers band; Transposing the Music: Highlights of the many spin-offs, tributes and merchandising developments, as well as stage shows, impersonators and pop culture inspired by the film; Remembering John: Friends, family and co-stars share their personal stories about the late great comedian; Theatrical trailer.

Dante’S Peak (1997)

Synopsis: Four years after the death of his fiancée in a volcanic eruption, vulcanologist Harry Dalton is sent to...

Criterion is releasing one of cinema’s most controversial films in director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Sodom, or The 120 Days of Sodom. The 1975 film is an adaptation of a Marquis de Sade story. The film is set in the Republic of Salò, the Fascist-occupied portion of Italy in 1944, with four segments loosely parallel to Dante’s Inferno: the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit, and the Circle of Blood.

Four men of power, the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President, agree to marry each other’s daughters as the first step in a debauched ritual. With the aid of several collaborator young men, they kidnap eighteen young men and women (nine of each sex), and take them to a palace near Marzabotto. Accompanying them are four middle-aged prostitutes, also collaborators, whose function in the debauchery will be to recount erotically arousing stories for the men of power,...

The Criterion Collection will issue the 1961 French drama film Léon Morin, Priest directed by the great Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samourai) on Blu-ray and DVD on July 26.

Emmanuelle Riva has feels for Jean-Paul Belmondo in Leon Murin, Priest.

Jean-Paul Belmondo (Breathless) dons clerical robes and delivers a uncharacteristically subtle but sensual performance in the movie’s titular role. The French superstar plays a devoted man of the cloth who is the crush object of all the women of a small village in Nazi-occupied France. He finds himself most drawn to a sexually frustrated widow (Emmanuelle Riva, Hiroshima mon amour), a borderline heretic whose relationship with her confessor is a confrontation with both God and her own repressed desire. A triumph of mood, setting, and innuendo, Léon Morin, Priest is an irreverent pleasure from one of France’s great filmmakers.

The Blu-ray and DVD will carry the list prices of $39.95 and $29.95, respectively.

Note: I’ll be updating this page as Criterion makes the release dates and final art available. – Ryan 4/15/2011

Well here we are, another mid-month Criterion new release announcement. This time last year, we were treated to the incredible one-two punch announcement of Black Narcissus and the Red Shoes as upgraded DVD/Blu-ray editions. This time around we have even more to be excited about.

First up, a couple of films that we’ve actually already covered on the podcast will finally be getting Blu-ray upgrades. One of our very first episodes was on Mike Leigh’s Naked (a film that I wasn’t too hot on, but I loved Leigh’s Topsy Turvy). Now you’ll finally be able to see this incredibly daring and raw look at England in the early 90s, with David Thewlis as the immortal Johnny. I found the dialogue to be a little too rapid and not very naturalistic,...

As I always say there can never be enough black film festivals and now you can add Gary Indiana to the list of cities with their own black festival. The Gary International Black Film Festival will be held from Feb.11-13 with all films screened at the Glen Theater.

Though it’s unclear from the website for the festival if this is the first time the festival has been held in Gary films such as Night Catches Us, I Will Follow, Night.Fighter.Boy will be screened and feelers have been put out to get The First Grader and Kinyarwanda as well. (Boy if they get those films that’ll be a real coup) For more info on the festival go Here.

Chicago – They just don’t make movies like “Videodrome” all that often. Well, there just aren’t that many filmmakers like David Cronenberg out there, especially not those working in the psycho-sexual milieu that typified the work from the first half of his career. Arguably the best film from the early period of one of our best filmmakers, “Videodrome” has been granted the Blu-ray treatment from The Criterion Collection.

Blu-Ray Rating: 5.0/5.0

“Videodrome” is straight-up weird in all the right ways. It represents the work of a confident filmmaker expressing his unique voice in a riveting way. Cronenberg wrote and directed this commentary on sex, politics, censorship, and the power of the media and the result is one of the most unique films of a relatively-safe era of cinema. There weren’t a lot of filmmakers taking chances like “Videodrome” in the early to mid-’80s. Between “Scanners,” “The Dead Zone,...

Here we are with the last Criterion Collection new release announcement for 2010, and there are a couple amazing releases to talk about.

Last week we uncovered that Criterion was in fact prepared to finally release David Cronenberg’s Videodrome on Blu-ray on December 7th. This is the last of the Amazon pre-order announced titles that forced Criterion to reveal their cards a little early. I still haven’t seen the film, and I’m pretty glad that I waited, so that I can see this film in all of it’s high def insanity. While I’m sure there is something charming about watching the film on VHS, given the material, watching a recent fan edit trailer in HD, makes me really excited for the Blu-ray. The cover doesn’t necessarily change up the design much, aside from the color bars on the spine logo.

Now to the main course.

Michelle Obama got her ohm on yesterday at the Red Rock National Conservation Area in Las Vegas while swearing in a group of junior rangers. It's all part of her "Let's Move!" initiative. There have been developments in the plans for a Jackson Family museum in Gary Indiana. And there may be some truth to the concept of dying from a broken heart. Plus, guess what kind of cake will be served at Lala Vasquez and Carmelo Anthony's wedding.