News

The fifth edition of First Look, "a festival for eye-opening and mind-expanding international cinema," opens tonight at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York with Alexander Sokurov's Francofonia and runs on through three consecutive weekends. We're gathering reviews and overviews, with the Village Voice on Jonathan Perel's Toponymy, "a disquieting glimpse at four eerily similar Argentinian towns established in the mid-1970s," Artforum on Dominic Gagnon’s controversial Of the North, and Reverse Shot on Manuel Mozos’s "elegiac essay-portrait" João Bénard da Costa: Others Will Love the Things I Have Loved, focusing on the legendary film scholar, programmer, and longtime head of Cinemateca Portuguesa. » - David Hudson...

The fifth edition of First Look, "a festival for eye-opening and mind-expanding international cinema," opens tonight at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York with Alexander Sokurov's Francofonia and runs on through three consecutive weekends. We're gathering reviews and overviews, with the Village Voice on Jonathan Perel's Toponymy, "a disquieting glimpse at four eerily similar Argentinian towns established in the mid-1970s," Artforum on Dominic Gagnon’s controversial Of the North, and Reverse Shot on Manuel Mozos’s "elegiac essay-portrait" João Bénard da Costa: Others Will Love the Things I Have Loved, focusing on the legendary film scholar, programmer, and longtime head of Cinemateca Portuguesa. » - David Hudson...

New York's Museum of the Moving Image has announced the lineup for the fifth edition of its annual First Look Festival, running from January 8 through 24 and featuring a slew of Us and NYC premieres. Opening with Aleksandr Sokurov’s Francofonia, highlights also include Manuel Mozos’s portrait of João Bénard da Costa, the late director of the Portuguese Film Museum; a playful autobiographical work by the French film critic and filmmaker Louis Skorecki; and a duo of intimate behind-the-scenes films about Jim Jarmusch. Plus films by Margaret Honda, Ken Jacobs, Bjoern Kammerer, and the late Andrew Noren; and formally innovative films such as Jonathan Perel’s structuralist study of oppressive Argentine architecture, and Dominic Gagnon's gonzo YouTube assemblages. » - David Hudson...

New York's Museum of the Moving Image has announced the lineup for the fifth edition of its annual First Look Festival, running from January 8 through 24 and featuring a slew of Us and NYC premieres. Opening with Aleksandr Sokurov’s Francofonia, highlights also include Manuel Mozos’s portrait of João Bénard da Costa, the late director of the Portuguese Film Museum; a playful autobiographical work by the French film critic and filmmaker Louis Skorecki; and a duo of intimate behind-the-scenes films about Jim Jarmusch. Plus films by Margaret Honda, Ken Jacobs, Bjoern Kammerer, and the late Andrew Noren; and formally innovative films such as Jonathan Perel’s structuralist study of oppressive Argentine architecture, and Dominic Gagnon's gonzo YouTube assemblages. » - David Hudson...

This year's poster for the Vienna International Film Festival is of a flame, and while around the world in other cinema-loving cities and at other cinema-loving festivals one might that that as a cue for a celluloid immolation and a move forever to digital, here in Austria cinema and film as film aren't burning up but rather are burning brightly.

The tributes and special programs in artistic director Hans Hurch's 2014 edition make this position clear: John Ford, Harun Farocki and 16mm, with new films by Tariq Teguia, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jean-Marie Straub accompanying older ones by the same directors. These aren't just retrospectives, they are revitalizing redoubts, inexhaustible fountains of flame, of sensitivity, of consciousness, and of intervention. With such a profound retrospective program, I hope you'll forgive me telling you very little of anything new at the festival; unless, that is, you like me count cinema revived as something always new.