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In the contemporary field of Japanese animation, no one makes films and TV shows like Yuasa Masaaki. Compared to the lifelike backgrounds and careful detailing of facial animations that typify much of anime, Yuasa’s mash-ups of disciplines and methods recall the unorthodox approaches of Don Hertzfeldt and Soviet-era Hungarian animators like Marcell Jankovics and György Kovásznai. But Yuasa’s north star—in underlying motivation, if not aesthetic—may be Tex Avery, whose brand of unpredictable comedy can be seen in the filmmaker’s willingness to upend character continuity and even the fundamental outlines of drawings for the sake of pursuing a joke or feeling to its most outlandish conclusion.

The plots of the five films included in Shout! Factory’s new box set are, however fantastical their framings, often elementally simple, and many have reference points in another anime films and shows. A kind of lysergic take on Miyazaki Hayao’s Ponyo,...

This psychedelic Hungarian film from 1979 pulsates with crazed anxieties about modernity

Directed by György Kovásznai, who died of leukaemia in 1983, Hungary’s third ever full-length animated feature is a true curio and a work of minor genius: a gallopingly neurotic modernist-psychedelic musical from 1979 that bubbles and pulsates with anxieties about modernity.

It mostly takes place inside a single Budapest apartment, where medical student Anikó is suddenly visited by the walrus-moustached Zsolt. He’s having a major wobbly – palpitations, handkerchief-dabbing, manic hoedown music and everything – about his impending marriage to Klári, a society girl and Anikó’s best friend. Klári just wants babies, but would-be artist Zsolt and aspiring doctor Anikó start to bond over a more liberated idea of life.

Mubi has announced its lineup of streaming offerings for next month and amongst the highlights is a tribute to Tilda Swinton, featuring I Am Love and a trio of early films: Cycling Frame, The Box, and Egomania: Island Without Hope. There’s also a handful of notable festival favorites and new releases from the past year or so, including Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes’ The Tsugua Diaries, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Jane by Charlotte, Ted Fendt’s Outside Noise, Émilie Aussel’s Our Eternal Summer, and Kofi Ofosu-Yeboah’s Public Toilet Africa.

Also including films by Takashi Miike, Fatih Akin, Zhang Yimou, Albert Maysles, Andrew Dominik, Rick Alverson, and more check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

August 1 – Ichi the Killer, directed by Takashi Miike | Takashi Miike: A Double Bill

August 2 – Nest, directed by Hlynur Palmason | Brief Encounters

August 3 – Our Eternal Summer, directed by Émilie Aussel | Festival Focus:...

The Viennale posted its full program last night. Besides this year's festival standards (Kaurismäki's Le Havre, Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method and so on), there'll be a Chantal Akerman retrospective, a strand devoted to new work by Jean-Marie Straub, another to Sasha Pirker, and another to Lee Anne Schmitt, a focus on Austrian silent films of the 1920s, another on Reinhard Kahn and Michel Leiner, tributes to Soi Cheang, producer Jeremy Thomas and Harry Belafonte, and Ulrich Seidl will screen a work-in-progress.

In A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma (2009), Emilie Bickerton "restates the main polemical point" of her essay that originally appeared in the New Left Review in 2006, namely, as Bill Krohn puts it at Kino Slang, "that the Cahiers is dead as a doornail… As someone who has been writing for the Cahiers during the thirty-year period that Bickerton judges to have been one of steep decline, I'd better...

Here’s the full Underground Film Links post for today, 22 links in total:

According to Cineflyer, filmmaker Deco Dawson has issued a Cease and Desist Order to the The Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art for screening a film entitled The Lotus Eaters credited to artist Marcel Dzama, to which the museum has complied. At the heart of the matter is that Dzama’s film is really Dawson’s own Film(dzama), but with the proper credits cut off that attribute the film to Dawson. A strange and sad case.The Brooklyn Downtown Star newspaper profiled underground film couple Penny Lane and Brian Frye about their work-in-progress documentary Our Nixon, which is put together out of home movies made by the original Watergate gang.Rodney Perkins reprints his review of the return of Coffin Joe in José Marica Marins’ Embodiment of Evil, which will be released on DVD/Blu-Ray this week.