News

Now that they’ve set the year’s best film for a December 10 debut, the Criterion Channel have unveiled the rest of next month’s selection. John Waters’ films are inseparable from John Waters’ presence, making fitting Criterion’s decision to pair an eight-film retrospective (Multiple Maniacs to Cecil B. Demented) with his own “Adventures in Moviegoing” wherein the director extols virtues of Bergman, Chabrol, Barbara Loden, and Samuel Fuller. His own Polyester will have a Criterion Edition alongside the Bob Dylan doc Don’t Look Back, an iconic film in its own right and, I think, fitting companion to The Unknown with Lon Chaney, also streaming on Criterion. No Country for Old Men and Election receive likewise treatment; the latter appears in “MTV Productions,” a series featuring Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, The Original Kings of Comedy, and (coming close to Freddy Got Fingered for least-expected 2024 addition) Jackass: the Movie.

Animated blockbuster Despicable Me 4 will be aiming to set records across its UK-Ireland run, as it opens in 688 cinemas this weekend through Universal.

Produced by Universal-owned animation stalwarts Illumination Entertainment, the Despicable Me franchise is among the most profitable of recent decades. The first film opened to £3.9m on its way to a £20.2m total in 2010; before the sequel started with £10m and ended on £47.5m in 2013; and was in turn surpassed by Despicable Me 3, which opened to £11.2m and closed on £47.9m.

The two Minions spin-off films landed in a similar territory as the two sequels. Minions...

Disney blockbuster “Inside Out 2” led the U.K. and Ireland box office for the fourth consecutive weekend with £5.1 million ($6.5 million). It now has a running total of £40 million, taking it past Warner Bros.’ “Dune: Part Two” to become the year’s highest-grossing film in the region. It also surpassed the lifetime box office of 2015’s “Inside Out.”

Paramount’s “A Quiet Place: Day One” held onto second place in its sophomore frame, earning £1.6 million and bringing its cumulative total to £6.1 million. “Bad Boys: Ride or Die” from Sony rounded out the top three in its fifth week, adding £446,578 to reach a total of £11 million.

Universal’s horror entry “MaXXXine” debuted at No. 4 with £388,043, while the studio’s “The Bikeriders” dropped to fifth place in its third week, collecting £374,066 for a total of £3.1 million.

Indian sci-fi epic “Kalki 2898 Ad” from Dreamz Entertainment landed at sixth with £187,610 in its second week,...

Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam plays a lightly fictionalised version of himself in David Schickele’s restored 1971 film reflecting on race and nationality

Here is a unique document: a 1971 work by US musician and film-maker David Schickele, long neglected but now restored and reissued. It is a vividly beautiful and dynamic monochrome work resembling something by Godard or Cassavetes but with something special and specific; an amazing real-time transcription of the life of a young black man in San Francisco in the fraught year of 1968.

The focus is Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, a young Nigerian nonprofessional actor playing a lightly fictionalised version of himself called Gabriel: enrolled in college in San Francisco, hanging out, having romantic relationships with black and white women, trying to earn money. Scenes from Garbriel’s life are interleaved with an interview he is apparently giving to an off-camera questioner, speaking with warmth and articulate charm about...

David Schickele’s Bushman opens with Gabriel (Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam), a young Nigerian immigrant, walking down a San Francisco highway and conspicuously balancing a pair of shoes on his head while trying to thumb a ride. The image announces the film’s neorealist intentions, alluding to postwar Italian films’ on-location, street-oriented settings, and even puns on the title of Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine. Which isn’t to say that Bushman intends to turn neorealism on its head exactly. Rather, it aims to consider how the contexts the bred neorealism might relate to the late-1960s, when the United States was at war in Vietnam and Nigeria was in year two of a civil war following its decolonization in 1960.

After a playful opening sequence in which Gabriel is picked up by a motorcyclist (Mike Slyre) who looks as though he just stepped off the set of Easy Rider, the...

U.K. distributor Other Parties has launched a new production arm headed by former Amazon Studios U.K. exec Emily Guarino.

Guarino, who was most recently head of business affairs at Amazon Studios, will be the new CEO of Other Parties Productions, working alongside Other Parties founder and director of distribution Aneet Nijjar. The duo previously collaborated during film industry development program Inside Pictures.

Guarino has over two decades of experience developing and producing content, having begin her career at NBCUniversal’s international studio in London. She went on to head up legal and business affairs at A+E Networks Emea and most recently the European Originals Business Affairs team at Amazon Studios’ London HQ.

Other Parties Film Company launched in 2021 and quickly assembled a dynamic team including co-founder Aduke King, who oversees acquisition and development, former Wunderman and Thompson exec Tom Lancaster and Esmé Gartside, who heads communications.

The company...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSRei.Tanaka Toshihiko’s Rei (2024)—the director’s debut feature, which he also produced and edited, and in which he acts—has won the Tiger Award in Rotterdam. Mark Gustafson, acclaimed animator and co-director of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022), has died at the age of 64. Del Toro calls him “a pillar of stop-motion animation—a true artist.”In response to an open letter signed by more than 200 film workers (which has since been taken offline) the Berlin International Film Festival confirmed that it has invited two far-right German politicians to the opening ceremony but avers it stands “against right-wing extremism.”Recommended VIEWINGVia Dolorosa.The second part of Le Cinéma Club's two-week spotlight on Oraib Toukan features her film Via Dolorosa (2021), now streamable on the platform.

About an hour into the brief and dazzling Bushman, the central character announces, “I need a hamburger,” and then the screen goes black for a few seconds. When the movie resumes, it’s no longer a drama enlivened by a streetwise documentary sensibility, but a work of straight-up nonfiction. Relying on stills in this last stretch but maintaining the visual fluency of the preceding story, the final 10 minutes recount why director David Schickele stopped filming for a year: He was working instead on securing a release from prison for his wrongfully imprisoned leading man.

There are strong parallels between Gabriel, the onscreen outsider, and Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, the man who plays him. Both grew up in a Nigerian village. Like Gabriel, Okpokam was a graduate student at San Francisco State College. Schickele’s screenplay was to have ended with Gabriel being deported after falling into trouble with the law.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSGuy Maddin’s next film, Rumours, recently wrapped production in Hungary. The ensemble piece is led by Cate Blanchett and Alicia Vikander, who play world leaders who end up stranded in a forest during the annual G7 summit. Maddin has shared a breathless, spoof press release (below) announcing the film, describing the project as “an elevated dramedy and erotico-political threnody cum sylvan moodbank.”Paul Thomas Anderson is also at work on something new. So far, all we know is that his project is set in the present day and will star Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Regina Hall. Production begins in California later this year.Recommended VIEWINGOne of the most exciting rediscoveries of the 2023 Il Cinema Ritrovato festival was the restoration of David Schickele’s Bushman...

In the twilight of the 1960s, America was frothing with political unrests, assassinations, and racial tension. David Schickele's hangin' out movie cum documentary slash film essay from 1971, Bushman, gets a 4K restoration, and a handsome, grainy black and white poster. The theme of this gorgeous image is connection and reflection. as two University students share a quiet moment. Laying down on a glossy surface, you can see the strange reflection of the scene, where the title car sits. Credits, pull quotes, and restoration text stay out of the way, and let the moment speak for itself. These times were anything but simple, but it taking a simple approach to entice people into it, is a superb way to go....

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

What’s the border between ‘unseen’ and ‘underseen’? As a canister of images and a time capsule of the eyes that saw them get into the can, David Schickele’s Bushman (1971) exists on this spectrum of availability—mostly underseen in its time, mostly unseen in ours. But these visual designations are also a part of the film’s interests and strategies: what places and people get seen, underseen, ignored? And how does time unsee them, even before posterity enters the picture? Under Schickele’s playful direction spanning the space between fiction and reality, David Myers’ careful black-and-white photography, and a central performance from Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam at once light and deadly serious, Bushman centers a San Francisco and seventies from an exile’s eyes. Under the care of a new restoration from Kino Lorber and Milestone Film and Video, we’re thankfully invited to re-see the underseen.

Here’s...

Meta documentary “Bushman” is receiving a 4K restoration and, for the first time, a multi-city theatrical release.

Director David Schickele’s 1971 film began as a fictional comedy starring his friend Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, following the “adventures of a well-educated Nigerian immigrant in San Francisco,” per the official synopsis. However, after Okpokam was wrongfully accused of a real-life crime, “Bushman” shifts to being a documentary about how Okpokam was imprisoned before being deported.

Filmmaker Schickele shot “Bushman” in 1968 after returning from the Peace Corps. Schickele’s is billed as being in the docu-fictional style vein of John Cassavetes’ “Shadows.” Kino Lorber and Milestone Film & Video supported the 4K restoration, which will screen January 15 at MoMA’s To Save and Project festival.

The 75-minute black-and-white film was shelved for decades after its initial release but is regarded by film scholars as a milestone of Black representation in American cinema, especially...

Documentary festival IDFA, which runs Nov. 8 to 19 in Amsterdam, has revealed its first 50 titles, including the top 10 Chinese films selected by Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing, IDFA’s Guest of Honor.

The festival has also revealed the films playing in two of the three Focus programs: Fabrications, which probes the difference between reality and realism, and 16 Worlds on 16, an homage to 16mm film.

Wang’s selection will take the viewer “on a contemplative journey into contemporary Chinese cinema,” according to the festival. “The films and their politics are subtle in their film language, representing a wave of filmmaking rarely shown internationally.”

The selection (see below), which covers films produced since 1999, includes Lixin Fan’s 2009 film “Last Train Home,” which was supported by IDFA’s Bertha Fund. The film documents the millions of migrant factory workers that travel home for Spring Festival each year.

Fabrications explores the relationship of trust between documentary film and audiences,...