Notícias

Susan Seidelman's 1985 comedy "Desperately Seeking Susan" is about an unhappy housewife named Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) who notices that two people appear to be communicating through mutually placed personal ads in her local newspaper. The correspondents are "Jim" and "Susan," and Roberta becomes involved in their progressing print-only drama. Audiences also see that Susan (Madonna) is an itinerant drifter who is having an affair with a mobster. She is involved in a crime drama of her own. All the same, Roberta manages to see a meeting between Susan and Jim from afar and then buys some of Susan's clothes after Susan sells them to a thrift store.

Naturally, through some exciting contrivances, Roberta is not only mistaken for Susan, but she hits her head and contracts amnesia, soon believing that she, too, is Susan. It's an exciting, high-concept comedy that introduced Madonna to the world and was inspired by Jacque...

Alena Lodkina’s first feature, “Strange Colours” (2017) took her deep into the Australian outback, to the rough-as-guts opal-mining town of Lightning Ridge, before bringing her to the Venice Film Festival, where the film premiered. It augured a distinctive new mood in Australian cinema – understated but keenly observed; a little sinister – as represented in recent editions of Rotterdam (David Easteal’s “The Plains”; James Vaughan’s “Friends & Strangers”) and Cannes (Thom Wright’s “The Stranger”).

Her second feature, produced by Kate Laurie at Arenamedia and funded by Screen Australia, VicScreen, the Melbourne International Film Festival Premiere Fund, Sbs, and Orange Entertainment, takes its bow at the 75th Locarno Film Festival.

In the evasively-titled “Petrol,” the Russian-born filmmaker turns her gaze towards the city she calls home: the film ascribes a certain kind of decadent mystique to Melbourne, where Lodkina has lived for the last 10 years. “You don’t see cities portrayed in Australia that much,...

By Jacob Oller

Seidelman and Rivette: BFFs. adies going on adventures in the city isn’t an inherently innovative plot. Wacky run-ins and the meshing of the uptight with the absurd are some of the small delights embraced by dozens of films. But Celine and Julie Go Boating and Desperately Seeking Susan are too similar to ignore their shared […]

The article How ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ was inspired by ‘Celine and Julie Go Boating’ appeared first on Film School Rejects.

Max and Trevor join Aaron to dig into the December releases and run through a busy period of news. We pay a little more attention to Abbas Kiarostami, Film Festivals, and Max provides some tidbits from his recent experience at Tiff.

Episode Links Safdie Brothers – Closet Video Abbas Kiarostami Final Film Sells to North America Telluride – Ed Lachman Interview New Restoration of Come and See Wins Venice Celine and Julie Go Boating Blu Ray Harry Dean Stanton Dies at 91 Episode Credits Aaron West: Twitter | Website | Letterboxd Max Covill: Twitter | Podcast | Film School Rejects Trevor Barrett: Twitter| Website Criterion Now: Facebook Group Criterion Cast: Facebook | Twitter

Music for the show is from Fatboy Roberts’ Geek Remixed project.

Although François Truffaut has written that the New Wave began “thanks to Jacquette Rivette,” the films of this masterful French director are not well known. Rivette, like his “Cahiers du Cinéma” colleagues Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer, did graduate to filmmaking but, like Rohmer, was something of a late bloomer as a director.

In 1969, he directed the 4-hour L’amour fou (1969), the now legendary 13-hour Out 1 (1971) (made for French TV in 1970 but never broadcast; edited to a 4-hour feature and retitled Out 1: Spectre (1972)), and the 3-hour Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), his most entertaining and widely seen picture. In these three films, Rivette began to construct what has come to be called his “House of Fiction”–an enigmatic filmmaking style involving improvisation, ellipsis and considerable narrative experimentation.

Celine and Julie Go Boating

In 1975, Jacques Rivette reunited with Out 1 producer Stéphane Tchal Gadjieff with the idea of a four-film cycle.

We pay tribute to the film stars and directors from around the world who sadly passed away in 2016.Hector BabencoArgentine-born Brazilian director Hector Babenco died on July 13 at 70-years-old.He found international success with Brazilian slum drama Pixote (1981), going on to make Kiss Of

We pay tribute to the film stars and directors from around the world who sadly passed away in 2016.

Hector Babenco

Argentine-born Brazilian director Hector Babenco died on July 13 at 70-years-old.

He found international success with Brazilian slum drama Pixote (1981), going on to make Kiss Of The Spider Woman (1985), for which he earned a best director Oscar nominee and William Hurt earned an Oscar win for best actor.

Babenco went on to direct Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in Ironweed (1987) and Tom Berenger and John Lithgow in At Play In The Fields Of The Lord (1991).

After undergoing cancer treatment in the 1990s, he returned to the director’s chair for films including Brazilian prison...

Aux quatre coinsOrigins in art are forever in doubt. Popular culture seems to imagine that what we now call the French New Wave emerged from thin air with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), but that blinkered narrative ignores features ranging from Agnès Varda’s Le pointe courte (1955) and Claude Chabrol’s Le beau Serge (1958) to Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima, mon amour (1959). Even before these, the filmmakers we associate—through later fame, scandal, obscurity, venerability, and legend—with the New Wave made short films, a medium encouraged by the theatrical practice, now long gone in France, of regularly exhibiting dramatic and documentary short films in cinemas. Early shorts by Jacques Demy, Chris Marker, Truffaut, Godard, and others reach back into the mid-50s, but only two of the New Wave’s anointed truly began their filmmaking at the halfway point of the 20th century: Eric Rohmer,...

The films of the great French director Jacques Rivette, who died earlier this year of complications related to Alzheimer’s, have long suffered from spotty distribution in the United States. His most widely revered film, the freewheeling Celine And Julie Go Boating, has never had as much as a DVD release in this country, and much of his best work has either never been released here or is long out of print. There’s something bittersweet to the fact that it’s only in the last couple of years that Americans have started to get wider access to the films of one of the most important figures to come out of the French New Wave, a master fascinated with performance and paranoia.

Just last year, the mammoth Out 1, once one of the Holy Grails of cinephilia, had its first run in U.S. theaters. (It’s currently on Netflix ...

This August, Mubi is paying tribute to the great, but too-often-forgotten, Jacques Rivette. His conspiratorial films, deliciously and collaboratively playing with genre, theatre, painting, literature and cinema itself, constitute the best kept secret of the French New Wave. Only a precious few, including sprawling magnum opus Out 1: noli me tangere (1971), mostly unseen until recently, and his canonical masterpiece that he made immediately after that 12-hour experiment, Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), could be described as well known. In a belated tribute to one of our very favorite filmmakers, we're showing three rarities by Jacques Rivette, hardly screened in most countries.Additionally, for those in Los Angeles we're presenting our three films plus Celine and Julie Go Boating at the Cinefamily and for New Yorkers, we're presenting Rivette's 1981 masterpiece Le Pont du Nord at Videology in Brooklyn.Duelle (1976), August 7The Queen of the Night (Juliet Berto) battles the Queen...

Out 1The late, great Jacques Rivette’s long-unseen serial Out 1 (1971) begins in a state of febrile convulsion, a seizure or shared hallucination, a frenzied, excruciating, hypnotic baptism of fire that reveals Rivette’s many-headed monster entering into being. Indistinguishable in a mass and huddle of contradicting limbs, this theatre troupe of performers – enchanted, ever-improvising movers and shakers – then pack their bags, tidy up, and leave one Parisian rehearsal space for another. Never too far away from each other in this 20-arrondissement Venn-diagram, and never inseparable, the circumstances of individual characters are slowly knitted together, first those of a character played by Juliet Berto, then one by Jean-Pierre Léaud. Individual narratives become interdependent, and Out 1 becomes a multi-plot film. Just as two theatre troupes use various imaginative, improvisational means to adapt two of Aeschylus’s Greek tragedies, Berto and Léaud’s two outliers approach and endlessly orbit some central conspiracy or secret underground society.

Last year, the three-part, six-hours-and-twenty-two minutes long epic Arabian Nights by Portuguese director Miguel Gomes rejected a slot in the Cannes Film Festival’s second-rung Un Certain Regard section, opting instead to be premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs ), taking place in the same French Riviera city at the same time. Why wasn’t Arabian Nights in Cannes’ official competition? Gomes’ previous film, Tabu, won two prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival, finished 2nd Sight & Sound’s and Cinema Scope’s polls of the best films of 2012, 10th in the Village Voice’s, and 11th in both Film Comment’s and Indiewire’s; he was exactly the kind of rising art-house star who should have been competing in the most prominent part of the official festival. But organizers balked at the idea of offering such a lengthy film a slot in competition where two or three others could be chosen,...

The Notebook is the North American home for Locarno Film Festival Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian's blog. Chatrian has been writing thoughtful blog entries in Italian on Locarno's website since he took over as Director in late 2012, and now you can find the English translations here on the Notebook as they're published. The Locarno Film Festival will be taking place August 3 - 13. Jacques Rivette in Locarno in 1991 when he received the Pardo d’onore. © Festival del film Locarno 1. Writing as a filmmaker “The only true criticism of a film is another film,” wrote Jacques Rivette, commenting on Ingmar Bergman’s Sommarlek (Summer Interlude) in 1958. He was making his intentions quite clear, and indeed his colleagues of the time recall how he was the first to be sure he would be a filmmaker. So a film cannot be explained in words, but Rivette still tried to put into words his own adventures as a spectator.

Above: French poster for Paris Belongs to Us (Jacques Rivette, France, 1960).Over the years I have often wanted to write about the films of Jacques Rivette, but I have always been disappointed by the quality both of the posters for many of his films and of the scans available for even the better designs. With the sad news that Rivette has left us this morning at the age of 87—so soon after the triumphant resurrection of his magnum opus Out 1—I feel I should at least showcase the handful of posters that do this great director justice.The best Rivette posters are top-loaded at the beginning of his career. His adaptation of Denis Diderot’s La religieuse, starring Anna Karina, seems to have inspired the most varied work (so much in fact that I will save most of it for a later post). And there are a few other terrific designs,...

Jacques Rivette: Nouvelle Vague director with a reputation for lengthy films Photo: Unifrance

A French film director who was an integral part of the French New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague), has died in Paris at the age of 87.

Jacques Rivette’s celebrated films include Paris Belongs To Us, Celine And Julie Go Boating in 1974 and the four-hour La Belle Noiseuse with Emmanuelle Béart, Michel Piccoli and Jane Birkin in 1991 (dealing with an elderly artist and his creative rebirth). He worked alongside the likes of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol in whose apartment he shot his first short film Le Coup de Berger. He was also a writer with Cahiers du Cinema magazine and assumed the editor’s chair from 1963 to 1965.

He borrowed money from the magazine to fund his first feature, Paris Belongs To Us, which was released in 1961. Its plot revolved around a group of actors...

Update with Martin Scorsese statement: Veteran French filmmaker Jacques Rivette has died at the age of 87. The French New Wave director has an illustrious list of credits including La Belle Noiseuse, Celine and Julie Go Boating and L’Amour Fou. The news was confirmed today by French culture minister Fleur Pellerin, who tweeted Rivette was "one of the greatest filmmakers of intimacy and impatient love." Rivette started his career alongside New Wave luminareis Jean Luc…...

The French New Wave director’s noted films included La Belle Noiseuse, Celine And Julie Go Boating and Out 1.

Director Jacques Rivette, the director of titles including Celine And Julie Go Boating and La Belle Noiseuse, has died at the age of 87.

Rivette was a notable film-maker of the French New Wave movement during the 1950s and 60s, alongside the likes of François Truffautand Jean-Luc Godard.

He was also a critic for influential film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, writing with Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and others under the tutelage of editor Andre Bazin.

Often noted for the length of his films, Rivette’s 1971 feature Out 1 ran for a remarkable 729 minutes (depending on which cut you watch) and has since become a cult hit for cinephiles.

Fleur Pellerin, the French culture minister, tweeted that Rivette was “one of the greatest filmmakers of intimacy and impatient love”.

Martin Scorsese issued the following statement: “The news of Jacques Rivette’s passing...

Jacques Rivette, the Cahiers du Cinema critic and director of "The Nun" (1966), "L'amour fou" (1969), "Celine and Julie Go Boating" (1974), Cannes Grand Prix winner "La belle noiseuse" (1991), and other classics of the French cinema — more than 20 features in all — died Friday morning at home in Paris. He had Alzheimer's disease, the New York Times reported his producer Martine Marignac as saying, while the French culture minister, on Twitter, called today one of "profound sadness." He was 87. Along with Cahiers colleagues Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer, Rivette reinvented both film and film criticism in the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond. Truffaut may have been correct that the French New Wave began "thanks to Rivette" — his 1961 film "Paris Belongs to Us," inspired by Italian neorealist Roberto Rossellini, was shot in 1958, after Chabrol's "Le Beau Serge" but...

This article accompanies the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s dual retrospective of the films of Jacques Rivette and David Lynch and is part of an ongoing review of Rivette’s films for the Notebook, in light of several major re-releases of his work.Lost Highway and Duelle: two post-surrealist reformulations of noir potboilers and '40s programmers. In both, a nymph-like blond battles a raven-haired cipher for spiritual, epistemological, and moral dominance, leading side-characters to their deaths in the progress. A protagonist, impossibly in over his/her head, is caught in some ur-reality in which the whole world seems given over to high artifice. Parallel worlds, one by Jacques Rivette in 1976 and the other David Lynch twenty years later, where one might look on strange things unstrangely: prosaic twilight duels, as in Val Lewton films, are realised in impossibly mysterious, banal, expressionistic urban vistas. Duelle begins with a very...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

“Lynch/Rivette” enters its final weekend, and some terrific things are in store. On Friday, Rivette‘s Paris Belongs to Us and Duelle will play at 3:30 and 9:15, respectively, while Lynch‘s Lost Highway screens at 6:30. The great, inevitable double feature is this Saturday, when Celine and Julie Go Boating...

This article accompanies the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s dual retrospective of the films of Jacques Rivette and David Lynch and is part of an ongoing review of Rivette’s films for the Notebook, in light of several major re-releases of his work.Two uneasy debuts whose directors evince a canny feeling for the way the world, photographed with simultaneous emphasis and naturalism, might be turned inside-out by the camera. Working with a minimum of resources in their first features, these directors' ability to take their characters’ familiarity with their own living spaces (cramped hotel rooms, dingy apartments) and constituent clutter (lamps, drawings, notepads) and turn it against them, cast every anonymous object as part of a larger conspiracy, gives their movies their peculiar, anxious zest.1 It means that, in a similarly wigged-out way in Eraserhead and Paris Belongs to Us, both long gestating projects by nervous filmmakers in their late twenties,...

Fallen Objects. Image: Courtesy of the artistHey Fernando, are you at a film right now? Sneaking away from the festival always feels so wrong, doesn't it? We're here to grind through, to fill every empty moment in our day with yet another film or another few dashed words of writing, and so stepping out of the multiplex to grab a leisurely meal with a friend or to explore a new neighborhood inspires in me nothing but guilt. Luckily, the festival has thought of such things and has given me reasons to get away from the festival center...more films! The Wavelengths section, which curates a more radical type of cinema than the rest of the fest, has often featured video art pieces installed both near and far during the festival (you may recall last year I reported on a wonderful piece in Future Projections, the old name of the Wavelengths...

The 68th Locarno Film Festival will honor international cinema nonpareil Bulle Ogier, 75, with a Pardo alla carriera, the Swiss festival's annual lifetime achievement prize. A selection of films and a conversation with the audience will accompany the tribute. With this award the festival looks back at the legacy of the Nouvelle Vague and its most iconic figures, including past recipients Anna Karina and Jean-Pierre Léaud. A stage actress before moving to film, Bulle Ogier (née Marie-France Thielland) broke out in Jacques Rivette's "L'amour fou" (1969). This sparked a collaboration on six more films including "Celine and Julie Go Boating," "Pont du Nord" and "Gang of Four." Major European directors continued to cast her in films, from Luis Bunuel, Rw Fassbinder and Manoel de Oliveira to Claude Chabrol and Claude Lelouch, as well as her husband Barbet Schroeder. Alain Tanner's 1971 Swiss drama...

All week long our writers will debate: Which was the greatest film year of the past half century.  Click here for a complete list of our essays. I was one of the first to select years for this particular exercise, which probably allowed me to select the correct year. The answer is, of course, 1974 and all other answers are wrong. No matter what your criteria happens to be, 1974 is going to come out on top. Again, this is not ambiguous or open to debate. We have to start, of course, with the best of the best. "Chinatown" is one of the greatest movies ever made. You can't structure a thriller better than Robert Towne and Roman Polanski do, nor shoot a Los Angeles movie better than John Alonzo has done. Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway give the best performances of their careers, which is no small achievement. If you ask...

 

As we head into a chilly weekend, it may be tempting to curl up at home with a stack of rented movies or fire up Netflix streaming. That would be a great idea if it weren't for the fact that two of the most acclaimed films of 2014 are getting nationwide releases and hitting area theaters: Selma and Inherent Vice.

As if that wasn't enough, Austin Film Society is ramping back up with their January programming and it starts in fine fashion this evening with phenomenal Canadian documentarian Ron Mann (Grass, Comic Book Confidential) visiting the Marchesa with his movie Altman (which recently premiered on Epix). Several rare Robert Altman shorts will play before the feature and then you're also encouraged to buy a ticket for a 35mm screening of Altman's California Split, which follows.

Speaking of incredible documentary filmmakers, National Gallery focuses on the London-based museum and is the latest effort from Frederick Wiseman.

The first time I saw anything from a Godard film, I hated it.

My first encounter with his work was perhaps appropriately abrupt and fragmentary. I was in my first year as a Film Studies major, in an introductory class about the French New Wave. Having grown up on a steady diet of Hollywood classics, I was hoping this would be an exciting new discovery. Mid-lecture, the professor showed a clip from the near the end of Tout va bien, his 1972 film co-directed with Jean-Pierre Gorin. The scene was the famous ten-minute-long tracking shot in which the camera moves laterally along a supermarket’s checkout aisles as student demonstrators wreak havoc. Going in, the professor warned us that we would likely find the scene annoying and overlong, and that that was “the point.”

I watched. I waited for enlightenment.

I was unimpressed.

I did not get it, but I was a quiet,...

"You're unlikely to see a more peculiar debut than co-directors Bingham Bryan and Kyle Molzan's sneakily cryptic For the Plasma, the only world premiere at BAMcinemaFest this year," writes Indiewire's Eric Kohn. "Set in a solitary lakeside cabin in Maine and its surrounding forests, this strange, muted science fiction story suggests Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating by way of David Lynch." And more reviews have come in from the New Yorker, Artforum and the Atlantic. » - David Hudson...

In my first year at the Festival de Cannes, I think I walked the length of the Boulevard de la Croisette approximately 36 times. At first swarming through this crowded main street is like being trapped in a street fair full of confused rubber-neckers, all wandering in different directions, straining to see something that hasn't quite materialized. Gosling? Glitz? Justin Bieber? Jean-Luc Godard?

On my first stroll down this main drag, I saw Hummer-inspired yachts, an older European couple with his-and-her beige linen pant suits and matching grey-blond severe bobs, and a group of loud American students slugging rosé from the bottle on a bench. The police and bouncers (more so than the festival staff) control the crowds with alarmingly random assertions of authority. "Ne fais pas le rois juste!" shouted one pissed off teen when an officer decides on a whim, seemingly, that only some people are allowed to cross the street.

Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2013—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2013 to create a unique double feature.

All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2013 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch in that perfect world we know doesn't exist but can keep dreaming of every time we go to the movies.

How...

Looking back at 2012 on what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2012—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2012 to create a unique double feature.

All the contributors were asked to write a paragraph explaining their 2012 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch in that perfect world we know doesn't exist but can keep dreaming of every time we go to the movies.

How would you program some...

"I felt the past closing around me like a fog, filling me with a nameless fear..."

A cinema tragedy: the phrase can probably best be exemplified by the fact that Charles Laughton directed only one film, and that film is so great that one can only wonder at what we've been deprived of.

Another actor, Martin Gabel, a character thesp with a bulbous head and a genuine talent for playing creeps, likewise directed one film only: the blacklist put paid to his career. The level of tragedy is harder to assess, since Gabel's only movie as director is very good, but not a masterpiece on the level of Night of the Hunter. But The Lost Moment (1947) is mysterious, romantic, atmospheric and altogether intriguing; and if Gabel were set to build on this starting point and improve still further, we may well have been deprived of a truly major cinematic talent.

This weekend brings what may be the year's ultimate clash of cinematic titans: Steven Spielberg's Lincoln battles The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 for the hearts, minds and wallets of America's moviegoers. Which one will take home the box-office gold? I think we all know the answer. Which one will take home the critical acclaim? We all know the answer to this question, too. Which one will your teenage daughter see? Hopefully, Lincoln. (Tell her that those who do not remember the past are condemned to fail their history exams.)

If you don't know Team Edward from Team Jacob and think the Civil War is so 19th century, how about a little French New Wave? On Saturday and Sunday at the Alamo South Lamar, the Austin Film Society presents Jacques Rivette's celebrated 1974 experimental narrative, Celine and Julie Go Boating (pictured above). This surrealistic tale recounts the adventures of two women who,...

News.

Above: Harris Savides. Photo by Brigette Lancombe for Interview magazine.

We were saddened and shocked to hear of the passing of one of film's great cinematographers, Harris Savides. Our brief note includes an indelible clip from Gerry, one of his collaborations with Gus Van Sant. David Hudson has rounded up commentary at Fandor.

One of Savides' chief collaborators, director David Fincher, is also in the news with an animated film project that's appealing to Kickstarter to get funded.

Two big trailer debuts have sprung on us over the last week. One's the second trailer for Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained:

...and the other is the first full trailer for Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty:

Filmmaker Jon Jost has started a petition calling for Ray Carney to return underground director Mark Rappaport's film materials. As the petition explains:

"In 2005, when Mark Rappaport moved to France, Ray Carney,...

After much media hoopla about "Vertigo" toppling "Citizen Kane" in its poll, Sight and Sound magazine have now released the full version of its once a decade 'Top 250 greatest films of all time' poll results via its website. The site also includes full on links showcasing Top Tens of the hundreds of film industry professionals who participated in the project.

For those who don't want to bother with the individual lists and to save you a bunch of clicking, below is a copy of the full 250 films that made the lists and how many votes they got to be considered for their positions:

1 - Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) [191 votes]

2 - Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) [157 votes]

3 - Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953) [107 votes]

4 - La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939) [100 votes]

5 - Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927) [93 votes]

6 - 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) [90 votes]

7 - The Searchers (Ford, 1956) [78 votes]

8 - Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 1929) [68 votes]

9 - The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer,...

Cinema's Architects Of The Uncanny, London

Artist Pablo Bronstein has taken over the Ica and temporarily remodelled it to disorienting effect, but you'll find no refuge in the cinema. Instead, you'll get a selection of great artists who've achieved similarly surreal architectural effects on celluloid. The weirdest ones seem to last the longest. Buñuel mischievously swapped dining rooms and lavatories for The Phantom Of Liberty's infamous dinner party, and prevented guests from leaving another one in The Exterminating Angel. There are spooky houses exerting sinister influences in the likes of Dario Argento's Inferno, Rivette's Celine And Julie Go Boating and Orson Welles-led oddity Malpertuis. In Repulsion, all Roman Polanski needed was a London apartment and Catherine Deneuve.

Ica Cinema, SE1, Wed to 30 Jun

Ray Davies, London

You can hear the Kinks on screen in everything from Hot Fuzz to Juno, but how many have seen Ray Davies's acting?...

Marie-France Pisier, the stunning actress who launched her career as go-to gal for the leading filmmakers of the French New Wave, died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer, Var, France on Sunday, April 24. She was 66 years old.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Mme Pisier appeared in seminal films of the Nouvelle Vague by Francois Truffaut (Love on the Run, Stolen Kisses), Jacques Rivette (Celine and Julie Go Boating) and Andrew Techine (1969’s Pauline is Leaving, Techine’s first film). She became a staple in French cinema and television over the years, appearing in dozens of TV and film productions, including the international cross-over comedy Cousin Cousine. She even did a little slumming in Hollywood, popping up in such silly fare as French Postcards and the high-trashy TV miniseries Scruples.

A hardworking career actor, Mme. Pisier was seen most recently in the 2009 French TV legal drama Les Chasseur.

Much of Marie-France Pisier’s movie canon...

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson

Rating (out of 5): ***½

One of the legendary members of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette was always a bit more experimental than his colleagues. One of the ways in which he played around was with lengthy running times. His monumental Out 1 (1971) runs nearly 13 hours (here's hoping a DVD box set comes sometime soon). His masterpiece Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974, not on DVD in the Us) runs just past three hours. Another masterpiece, La Belle Noiseuse (1991), runs four hours.

"No more Lubitsch," said Billy Wilder, at the Great Man's funeral.

"Worse than that," said William Wyler. "No more Lubitsch movies."

The suspicion, amounting almost to a certainty, that Jacques Rivette will make no more feature films to follow the very lovely Around a Small Mountain, can inspire the fan with an irrational, vertiginous fear: no more Rivette movies? But in fact, there are numerous existing Rivette movies still not seen, or not seen in anything like ideal circumstances. The iceberg-tip of his oeuvre that's commercially available is supported by a vast submerged continent of unreleased work. And the films themselves are so rich, so palatial, exploring them would take lifetimes.

Still, if one was looking either for Rivette-related work to supplement his great mad corpus, or something that sheds an interesting sidelight on a major Rivette work, Sérail (a.k.a. Surreal Estate, 1976), by the Argentinian writer-director and...

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) isn't my favorite Howard Hawks film, musical, Marilyn Monroe picture, or use of Technicolor, but watching it again in a frighteningly flawless new restored print for a run opening this Friday New York's Film Forum, I happily realized there was something I really loved about this movie that so-often left me cold: a truly swimming picture of friendship.  With constant reminders that the buddy cop genre in the 1980s and the conversational, sitcom-style sidekick of 90s romantic comedies have mostly blandly evolved friendship into a "bro"-like and/or snarky camaraderie in the 2000s, one seems hard pressed these days for shining examples of pure cinematic friendship, different personalities, characters, ideologies, beauties in a teetering equilibrium of assistance, support, and true affection, as Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe are in this picture. Suddenly it made so much sense to me that Jacques Rivette modeled the relationship between...

Last Year at Marienbad is often relegated to a peak of the separate-but-not-quite-equal Left Bank branch of the French New Wave, but as revealed in a longform interview with director Alain Resnais by André Labarthe and Jacques Rivette (Cahiers du cinéma, September 1961) Marienbad was major influence on French New Wave filmmaking strategies, particularly on Rivette. In fact, the seeds of a style that we have come to think of as definitively Rivettian are seen germinating in that director's questions, analysis and dubiousness about Resnais's declarations in segments from the interview reprinted below.

The co-authors begin the piece by describing Marienbad as "a 'sealed' work, without detail" and then go on, as their logic follows, to immediately question Resnais about the game played throughout the movie by the two leading men, which is a motif, an obsession and a linchpin.

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Alain Resnais: It was the game of Nim, of which...

Note: This is our first review in a smaller series of coverage from the 2010 San Francisco International Film Festival.

One of my favorite living film directors is Jacques Rivette. Rivette was once part of the original "French New Wave," a group of film critics for Cahiers du Cinema that decided to turn director and make their own films. The group also included Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. The other four achieved some measure of fame, but Rivette was always the "outcast" of the group. He was the most "experimental." He completed three "New Wave" style films in the 1960s, the latter of which, L'amour fou (1968), ran over four hours. and followed them with his monumental Out 1 (1971), which ran nearly 13 hours. (The film has rarely been shown, and I keep hoping for a DVD box set someday soon.)

After that came arguably his most beloved film, though...

(Filmmaker Susan Seidelman, above.)

by Jon Zelazny

In the early 80’s NYC cultural lull between Patti Smith’s retirement and Jay McInerney’s breakout, Nyu film school graduate Susan Seidelman did the scrappy shoestring indie film thing, resulting in her acclaimed feature debut Smithereens (1982).

Best known for her hit sophomore effort, Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Seidelman continues to direct movies and TV shows featuring female protagonists… including the pilot for “Sex and the City” and her Oscar nominated short film The Dutch Master (1994), about a shy dental technician who ventures “into” a museum painting for flights of erotic fantasy.

Susan Seidelman: My husband Jonathan Brett—who co-wrote and produced The Dutch Master—and I had committed to living in Paris for a year because I was set to direct a feature for Polygram, a company that unfortunately went bankrupt. So we were kind of in a funk over there, and...