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98% of interviews follow the same pleasantries-exchange / question-and-answer / pleasantries-exchange format, yet there are those rare times an incredible opportunity arrives. Which is to say that when I interviewed Paulo Branco at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival I couldn’t have anticipated he––maybe the greatest producer in film history––would ask me to screen Manoel de Oliveira films that, per him, were receiving no notice from United States programmers. Just five months later I’m delighted to unveil Mirror of Life: Manoel de Oliveira 1996—2004, comprising ten features (and nine restorations debuting in North America) that will screen at Bam from March 28 to April 3.

Featuring John Malkovich, Michel Piccoli, Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, and (of course) Ricardo Trêpa, the program finds Oliveira, who turned 90 during this time, in a period both decadent and reflective––note the Word and Utopia / Porto of My Childhood double-feature or 2001’s I’m Going Home...

The 71st Venice Film Festival announced its lineup this morning, highlighted by films from American directors, including David Gordon Green, Barry Levinson, Peter Bogdanovich, Lisa Cholodenko, Andrew Niccol, and James Franco. As had been previously announced, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, starring Michael Keaton and many others, will be the opening film when the festival begins on Aug. 27.

Click below for the entire list of 55 films playing in Venice.

Competition

The Cut, directed by Fatih Akin

Starring Tahar Rahim, Akin Gazi, Simon Abkarian, George Georgiou

A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence, directed by Roy Andersson

Starring Holger Andersson,...

Oldest person in movies? (Photo: Manoel de Oliveira) Following the recent passing of 1931 Dracula actress Carla Laemmle at age 104, there is one less movie centenarian still around. So, in mid-June 2014, who is the oldest person in movies? Manoel de Oliveira Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira will turn 106 next December 11; he’s surely the oldest person — at least the oldest well-known person — in movies today. De Oliveira’s film credits include the autobiographical docudrama Memories and Confessions / Visita ou Memórias e Confissões (1982), with de Oliveira as himself, and reportedly to be screened publicly only after his death; The Cannibals / Os Canibais (1988); The Convent / O Convento (1995); Porto of My Childhood / Porto da Minha Infância (2001); The Fifth Empire / O Quinto Império - Ontem Como Hoje (2004); and, currently in production, O Velho do Restelo ("The Old Man of Restelo"). Among the international stars who have been directed by de Oliveira are Catherine Deneuve, Pilar López de Ayala,...

The first-ever manufacturer of light bulbs in Portugal, Manoel de Oliveira’s father died in 1932, nine years after Raul Brandão wrote a play called Gebo and the Shadow. In the year 2012 Oliveira turned the play into a film, making a grimy, dim oil lamp its legitimate character: elderly accountant Gebo burns the midnight oil in it as he plods away at his books. In an early scene, meanwhile, his wife lights the lanterns outside their house with a match. No one seems yet to have heard of electricity; the time setting is unclear; presumably, it’s the turn of the century.

Presumably. Oliveira’s Benilde, or The Virgin Mother (1975) opens with a title-card of this word to gradually lure us into a province of utter chronological disorder. This very same word has ever since been unchallenged as the most accurate description of the bizarre, atemporal effect that grows stronger in each subsequent Oliveira film.

Dear Danny,

Rushing from screen to screen with Tiff’s closing weekend just around the corner, that mix of excitement and exhaustion (a condition Manny Farber once dubbed “Festivalitis”) does indeed become more and more pronounced. Fortunately, the ratio of excitement has for me remained high even when my eyes occasionally grow heavy, thanks largely to alternately stirring and maddening films like Terrence Malick’s latest vision of Eden lost.

Malick’s To the Wonder feels curiously anchorless, which is especially weird as its story aims for the tightest focus on romantic couples since the days of Borzage. “Love makes us one,” go the murmurs on the characteristically dense soundscape as the camera swirls and swoons with the characters’ rush of infatuation, following them from Mont St. Michel to Oklahoma. The vertiginous impressionism accelerates, but the lack of character detailing—the lovers played by Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko become abstractions,...

Following the Toronto International Film Festival line-up earlier this week, the 69th Venice Film Festival has weighed in with their choices this morning. Outside of films also premiering at Tiff — including most notably Ramin Bahrani‘s At Any Price and Terrence Malick‘s To the Wonder – they have a strong batch of films not at that fest. We have the highly anticipated next feature from Olivier Assayas (Summer Hours, Carlos), titled Something In The Air, as well as Brian De Palma‘s sensual thriller Passion with Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace.

Then things get a little silly with Harmony Korine‘s James Franco and Selena Gomez gangster/party film Spring Breakers. Rounding out the other major titles are Susanne Bier following up her Oscar win with Love Is All You Need and Spike Lee’s Michael Jackson documentary Bad 25. The lack of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s heavily rumored The Master...

The Strange Case of Angelica

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira

Portugal, 2010

If a portrait is a window into the soul, then centenarian director Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica aims to look through its celluloid covering and photographed subjects and uncover the power of the medium.

As with many de Oiveira films, the plot is simple. Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa) is asked by a local family to photograph their recently deceased daughter Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala). When he looks at the peaceful corpse through his lens, she opens her eyes and smiles at him. More than distressed, Isaac becomes obsessed with Angelica. She literally haunts his dreams as a glowing, transparent ghost. At the same time he cannot help but photograph a group of farm workers near to his apartment.

De Oliveira is as close to a modern Luis Buñuel as you can come. Though less scathing than the old master,...

Michel Piccoli, We Have a Pope

Nanni Moretti's Habemus Papam / We Have a Pope was the top movie of 2011 according to the Cahiers du Cinéma editors and film critics. The Cahiers du Cinéma list is available in the December print edition of the French magazine.

A Vatican-set satire about a newly elected, psychologically fragile pope (European Film Award Lifetime Achievement winner Michel Piccoli) and his therapist (Moretti himself), earlier this year We Have a Pope won six awards from the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists, including Best Director and Best Producer (there's no Best Film category). Margherita Buy co-stars as another psychotherapist.

Tied in second place were Manoel de Oliveira's Portuguese drama O Estranho Caso de Angélica / The Strange Case of Angelica, about a photographer (Ricardo Trêpa) who becomes obsessed with the dead daughter (Pilar López de Ayala) of a wealthy hotel owner, and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life,...

Whenever a filmmaker lives and works as long as centenarian Manoel de Oliveira, it’s hard not to see each new piece of work as potentially the last, making it a kind of summary statement on life and art. The Strange Case Of Angelica encourages that kind of reading with its premise alone. Ricardo Trêpa plays a photographer who’s summoned in the middle of the night to shoot a portrait of a corpse: a lovely young woman named Angelica (played by Pilar López de Ayala). Her family has posed her with an enigmatic smile, which strikes Tr ...

"The Strange Case of Angelica" is helmed and screenwritten by Manoel de Oliviera and finds release at the IFC Center in New York on December 29th. Starring in the indie flick are Ricardo Trêpa, Pilar López de Ayala, Leonor Silveira, Luís Miguel Cintra, Ana Maria Magalhães and Isabel Ruth. François d’Artemare, Maria João Mayer,Luís Miñarro, Renata de Almeida and Leon Cakoff produce. "The Strange Case of Angelica" is a magical tale of a young photographer who falls madly in love with a woman he can never have, except in his dreams. One night, Isaac is summoned by a wealthy family to take the last photograph of a young bride, Angelica, who has mysteriously passed away...

"The Strange Case of Angelica" is helmed and screenwritten by Manoel de Oliviera and finds release at the IFC Center in New York on December 29th. Starring in the indie flick are Ricardo Trêpa, Pilar López de Ayala, Leonor Silveira, Luís Miguel Cintra, Ana Maria Magalhães and Isabel Ruth. François d’Artemare, Maria João Mayer,Luís Miñarro, Renata de Almeida and Leon Cakoff produce. "The Strange Case of Angelica" is a magical tale of a young photographer who falls madly in love with a woman he can never have, except in his dreams. One night, Isaac is summoned by a wealthy family to take the last photograph of a young bride, Angelica, who has mysteriously passed away...

Probably too film school for most, this is a masterpiece by a master. A hard look at the disjunction of film and art in a ghostly setting. The top of the heap in atmospheric film making at the 2010 New York Film Festival, writer/director Manoel de Oliveira.s essay in spirituality stars his grandson Ricardo Trêpa as photographer Isaac. The photog responds to an emergency call in the middle of the night to photograph the deceased Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) as she awaits burial. As he is taking the photographs he makes a most remarkable discovery. Portuguese director Oliveira is the oldest director still actively involved in filmmaking and has had this distinction since 2001. He was over a hundred...

You probably already know that Twitch's tagline is "Spreading the News On Strange Little Films From Around the World" so it is without apology that I report that Manoel de Oliveira's latest is one of the strangest little films and littlest strange films I've seen in quite a while. 

Moreover, its strangeness, despite the title, does not derive so much from its subject matter but from its deadpan insistence on its own littleness. Recalling the shrinking of the moon down to a pocket-sized bauble in Despicable Me, The Strange Case of Angelica feels like a part-whimsical, part-magic-realist feature film that has been abridged to a short--then blown up again to 90 minutes. In the process we seem to have lost certain kinds of details, making this mildly supernatural allegory both pared down and quirkily meandering. 

Telling the tale of an old-fashioned photographer (meta-commentary alert!) who becomes obsessed with the recently departed title character,...

Knight And Day (12A)

(James Mangold, 2010, Us) Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard. 109 mins

Tropic Thunder proved that Cruise could laugh at himself, but despite a hint of self-parodying craziness here, we're not necessarily laughing with him this time. Never one to pass up an alpha-male role, Cruise plays an indestructible rogue superspy in this Grazia-friendly action comedy, co-opting civilian Diaz into a series of tense situations, most of which we never see them getting out of; he simply drugs her and she wakes up somewhere else when it's all over, in a different set of clothes. Who says romance is dead? He's supposed to be Bourne with a smile but he's more like the Milk Tray man as an international date rapist.

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (15)

(Jan Kounen, 2009, Fra) Anna Mouglalis, Mads Mikkelsen, Yelena Morozova. 119 mins

Almost a sequel to Audrey Tautou's Coco Before Chanel, this sketches out...

Often I get the sense that serious movies are the rarest kind of them all. I don’t mean the easily self-serious and pretentious films, films closed to mockery through riskless gravity. The most serious leave room—dangerous room—for failure. They need that room to necessitate a leap of faith—if the film isn’t willing to risk something, how can we truly take it seriously? As such, love stories can be the most serious of them all, and the hardest to beautifully pull off. We sing high praises for Hollywood’s sincere sentimentalist—and sentimental sincerest—Frank Borzage, and with The Strange Case of Angelica it is a delight to see Manoel de Oliveira apply a cerebral, shaded touch to a Borzagian, risk-taking, haunted love story.

As in all recent Oliveira, everything is deceptively simple: Isaac (Oliveira’s perennial youth, Ricardo Trêpa), a young photographer, falls in love...

Reviewed at the Venice International Film Festival

VENICE, Italy -- Portuguese director Manuel De Oliveira was born in 1908 and so to have a film in competition at the Venice International Film Festival in 2005 is an achievement worth applauding in itself. His movie, Espelho Magico (Magic Mirror) is an absorbing look at a rich woman wasting away for lack of the corroboration of faith.

The filmmaker's reputation will ensure healthy respect for the picture at festivals and in art houses, although mainstream acceptance is less likely.

Based on a novel, The Soul of the Rich, by Agustina Bess-Luis, Espelho Magico tells of Alfreda (Leonor Silveira), a wealthy but frail woman whose greatest desire is to have a vision of the Virgin Mary before she dies.

Alfreda is married to Bahia (Duarte de Almeida) who makes up for the absence of children of their own by providing the means for other people's offspring to learn music. Meanwhile, Alfreda surrounds herself by people knowledgeable in biblical scholarship including Professor Heschel (Michel Piccoli) and Priest Clodel (Lima Duarte).

The woman is very pleased to learn from her scholars that Mary came from a well-off family and that therefore Jesus Christ was a wealthy man. Her concern has to do with the inconvenient image of a camel and the eye of a needle when it comes to rich folk and heaven.

Introduced into her life is a young man recently released from jail named Luciano (Ricardo Trepa), a decent individual who is not above thinking that it might be helpful to provide Alfreda with the apparition she wishes. Filipe (Luis Miguel Cintra), a forger and piano tuner Luciano befriended in prison, suggests he find a young girl to portray Mary and ease Alfreda's path to the hereafter.

Nothing quite turns out the way anybody expects and there are suggestions of the super-natural with elements unexplained but Oliveira's touch is sure and the result is an atmospheric piece of work that lingers in the mind.

ESPELHO MAGICO

Filbox Productions

No MPAA rating. Running time 137 min.

You have to hand it to 89-year-old Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira.

Not only does he regularly make films when others have long retired, but his latest is an ambitious, tremendously satisfying experience. "Anxiety" (Inquietude) is visually superb, narratively complex and ultimately moving in ways few films even aspire to.

Alas, this supremely artistic effort -- a special screening selection at the Cannes film festival -- is not commercial enough to warrant more than a minor domestic U.S. release, but it's a sure-fire hit for the festival circuit.

A composite film with three distinct but interconnected sections, "Anxiety" opens with an exquisitely rendered tete-a-tete between a philosophically suicidal old man (Jose Pinto) and his aging son (Luis Miguel Cintra) that tricks one into expecting a rich but stagey meditation on the bodily and mental deterioration that afflicts even the most well-respected and successful of men when they enter their autumn years.

Indeed, about 35 minutes in, both protagonists have fallen to their deaths, and the curtain falls on what has been a 1930s stage production of Helder Prista Monteiro's "The Immortals", with two well-heeled gents in the audience. The story picks up with the middle-aged unnamed "him" (Diogo Doria) and his younger "friend" (David Cardoso) becoming involved with a pair of high-class courtesans, picking up a thread from the play that the love of women can make men of any age feel young.

Mildly jealous of the more substantial patrons they must contend with, the two men develop a theory about Suzy (Leonor Silveira) and Gabi (Rita Blanco). Skilled in lovemaking, but essentially exotic caged animals, the beautiful sophisticates have inherited the stoic legacy of Marcus Aurelius, taking pleasure in sacrifice.

In a melancholy, fatalistic confession, not-long-for-this-world Suzy reveals that "happiness is a small thing" when she has had everything else she's ever wanted in the way of fine living.

Late at night, the "friend" sets out to console "him" with a strange tale called "Mother of a River", based on a short story by Oliveira collaborator Agustina Bessa-Luis.

In this gorgeously composed finale, a socially constricted village girl (Leonor Baldaque) turns to the mystical 1,000-year-old Mother (Irene Papas) in a metaphorical suicide that results in the former being declared a witch and being chased off by a swarm of black-robed matrons. She turns away from the lover (Ricardo Trepa) who encouraged her trying to break with traditions and becomes the new "Deep Water", magically merging with nature to become a guardian of humanity.

ANXIETY

Madrago Filmes, Gemini Films,

Wanda Films and Light Night

Screenwriter-director: Manoel de Oliveira

Producer: Paulo Branco

Director of photography: Renato Berta

Art direction-costumes: Isabel Branco

Editor: Valerie Loiseleux

Sound: Philippe Morel, Jean-Francois Auger

Cast:

The Immortals

Father: Jose Pinto

Son: Luis Miguel Cintra

Marta: Isabel Ruth

Suzy

Him: Diogo Doria

Friend: David Cardoso

Suzy: Leonor Silveira

Gabi: Rita Blanco

Mother of a River

Mother: Irene Papas

Fisalina: Leonor Baldaque

The Fiance: Ricardo Trepa

Running time -- 112 minutes...