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Making movies is a hard business, but it’s much easier when you’re doing it with someone you value and respect. It seems the same can be said of picking movies, as collaborators Mike Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste joined forces once again to take on the Criterion Closet. The two are currently promoting their most recent film together, “Hard Truths,” which is garnering Jean-Baptiste tremendous awards buzz, including recognition from the NYFCC, the Lafca, and the BIFAs this past weekend. She was previously nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Leigh’s 1996 Palme d’Or winner, “Secrets & Lies,” a film the pair look back on with fondness in the video below.

“Here’s a film you’re really going to like,” Leigh said, reaching for the film, to which Jean-Baptiste jokingly responded, “What’s that one about?”

After they both grabbed Charles Burnett...

A restored, curated collection of Japanese silent films are going on an international tour courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s The Art of the Benshi 2024 World Tour. The Art of the Benshi 2024 will open at Bam in Brooklyn, and then travel to Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and Tokyo throughout the month of April. The tour, presented by the Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, will run from April 5 through 26 across 12 dates at six venues in the aforementioned five cities.

The exhibit centers on films with Benshis, a term derived from “katsudō benshi” or “movie orator.” Benshi were the captivating live narrators of Japan’s silent film era. Benshi are artists that introduced films and provided live narration, portraying characters and articulating the onscreen action to theater-going audiences. More than 7,000 benshi were employed at the peak of the industry’s silent era.

Pioneering filmmaker and actress was second woman to direct a feature in history of Japanese cinema.

The Locarno Film Festival will celebrate the work of Japanese director and actress Kinuyo Tanaka at its upcoming 73rd edition (August 5-15), in its first ever retrospective dedicated to a female artist.

Tanaka (1909 –1977) was a pioneering figure in Japanese cinema throughout her 50-year career, appearing in the films of legendary directors Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi before striking off to direct her own films.

“This is the first time that the festival will be dedicating its retrospective to a female director, after 73 years,” said...

A Story From Chikamatsu is one of Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi's more well-known films, along with Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, and The Life of Oharu. This 1954 film also goes by The Crucified Lovers here in North America, which refers to an early scene in the film, in which adulterers are tied up on horses and paraded through town in shame on the way to their execution. Yes, they are crucified. Seems a little extreme of a punishment for the crime, but this is ancient Japan and there was a strict code of ethics to uphold, no matter how dubiously one could twist the "facts" or the "law." That means that certain citizens were either above the law or a lot higher up on the ladder when...

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

For 11 years running, our end-of-the-year tradition on the Notebook has been to poll our roster of contributors to create fantasy double features of new and old films. But what about the curators behind Mubi itself? This year we begin what we hope to be a new tradition: publishing the favorite films of the year as chosen by our programming team: Daniel Kasman in the U.S., Anaïs Lebrun and Chiara Marañón in the U.K. We each have two lists: our top new films that premiered in 2018, and then a selection of revivals screened in cinemas.PREMIERESDaniel Kasman1. Blue (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)2. The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland)3. Support the Girls (Andrew Bujalski, USA)4. The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, USA)5. The Waldheim Waltz (Ruth Beckermann, Austria)6. Unsane (Steven Soderbergh, USA)7. The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack, USA)8. The Red Shadow [director's cut]9. What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.News We are devastated to learn that the late Theodoros Angelopoulos' home, which housed the director's archives, has burnt down amidst the Attica wildfires in Greece. It is currently unclear what has been lost in the fire. This is the house that housed the whole archives of late director Theo Angelopoulos. Everything has been burnt. A massive loss to not only modern Greek culture but world culture. pic.twitter.com/DM60QxWP6a— Konn1e (@ntina79) July 25, 2018Recommended Viewing The ever-elegant "Mandopop diva" Faye Wong reprises her cover of The Cranberries' "Dreams"—best known for its appearance in Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express—in the first episode of Phantacity, a Chinese variety show that creates "music video-worthy performances." The full episode can be viewed here. Lucrecia Martel has directed a music video for Argentine...

Within the first ten minutes of Nicholas Ray’s unimpeachable classic Rebel Without a Cause Jim Stark (James Dean) wails, “You’re tearing me apart!!!!!” This is not an instance where the film crescendos with an emotional breakdown, but begins. Jim Stark is a staggering portrait of apocalyptic masculine adolescence ripping apart a young body through expectations put on him by society and his own self-imposed fears that he could turn into his passive father. Jim Stark is one of the defining characters of cinematic melodrama with his unbridled emotional honesty laid bare for the world to see. He physically cannot keep himself from gnashing, wailing, and screaming in the face of emotions that bubble to the surface. Melodrama opens the lid on these reactions and rides that feeling to cinematic honesty and authenticity. Melodrama is realer than real; a hyper-stylized evocation of feelings that we’re all familiar with as human beings.

Any list of the greatest foreign directors currently working today has to include Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. The directors first rose to prominence in the mid 1990s with efforts like “The Promise” and “Rosetta,” and they’ve continued to excel in the 21st century with titles such as “The Kid With A Bike” and “Two Days One Night,” which earned Marion Cotillard a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

Read MoreThe Dardenne Brothers’ Next Film Will Be a Terrorism Drama

The directors will be back in U.S. theaters with the release of “The Unknown Girl” on September 8, which is a long time coming considering the film first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016. While you continue to wait for their new movie, the brothers have provided their definitive list of 79 movies from the 20th century that you must see. La Cinetek published the list in full and is hosting many...

Ugetsu

Blu-ray

Criterion

1953 / B&W / 1:33 / Street Date June 6, 2017

Starring: Mitsuko Mito, Masayuki Mori, Kikue Mouri, Sakae Ozawa, Kinuyo Tanaka

Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa

Film Editor: Mitsuzô Miyata

Written by Matsutarô Kawaguchi, Yoshikata Yoda

Produced by Masaichi Nagata

Music: Fumio Hayasaka, Tamekichi Mochizuki, Ichirô Saitô

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

In 1941 Orson Welles was busy giving the film industry a hot foot with Citizen Kane, a bullet-train of a movie whose rhythms sprang from the ever accelerating hustle and bustle of contemporary American life. That same year one of Japan’s greatest filmmakers, Kenji Mizoguchi, was taking his sweet time with a four hour samurai epic set 240 years in the past, The 47 Ronin.

The story of a band of loyal soldiers seeking revenge on a corrupt landowner, The 47 Ronin plays out in a precisely measured, ceremonial style, its 241 minutes leading up to the moment when the fierce band of brothers...

Anytime I watch Mizoguchi’s work…really any of it, but especially from this later period of his career – which includes The Crucified Lovers, Sansho the Bailiff, The Life of Oharu, and The Woman in the Rumor – I really am put face to face with how relatively little we gladly settle for in much of the rest of cinema. It’s not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with all those other movies. Many of them I value a good deal more than I do Mizoguchi. But in Mizoguchi, as one often does in Bergman, you’re granted a rare combination of imagination, audacity, and mastery that few films even attempt and very, very, very few manage to pull off. You can too often pick apart some tonal shift, some acting choice, some extraneous scene or shot or just something that doesn’t fit. In Mizoguchi’s best work, everything fits.

Stars: Kinuyo Tanaka, Toshiaki Onoe, Benkei Shiganoya, Tsukie Matsuura | Written by Kenji Mizoguchi, Yoshikata Yoda | Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

The overarching Buddhist message of Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1952 epic should provide a clue as to the sheer depth of misery our eponymous heroine must endure in her lifetime. Death, and another chance in the next life, seems like her only solace. As Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) traverses 17th-Century Japan, at every turn events transpire against her, and glimpses of redemption are swiftly consumed by the shadow of despair.

It actually starts off okay. As a young woman, Oharu is spoiled by the romantic ideals of love. “The nobility makes sport of sincerity,” says her admirer, Katsunosoke (Toshiro Mifune), “turning it into mere wordplay.” He breaks through the caste order and wins her heart. But their love is forbidden and their affair begins the snowball of catastrophe.

There is an essential irony in...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries.NEWSLast weekend the generally derided yet fiercely observed Golden Globes winners were announced 2016, which included La La Land (Best Director, Screenplay, Song, Score and Actor, Actress and picture for a musical/comedy), Moonlight (Best Drama), and Elle (Best Foreign Language film, Best Actress for a drama).Okay, it's not strictly cinema news, but 18 episodes of new moving pictures directed by David Lynch counts as news to us! Showtime has revealed the number of episodes of the upcoming season of Twin Peaks, all directed by Lynch, and that the two-hour premiere of the show will be on May 21, immediately followed by the digital release of the third and forth episodes. Those film professionals who will be in Cannes at the time better plan on skipping their Monday morning screenings!Great news for those, like us, still enamored by celluloid: Kodak has...

Street of Shame is a beautiful drama film that follows the daily lives of five prostitutes situated in Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s red light district, during the mid-1950s. The American occupation has ended and the majority of the Japanese population is still struggling to get by after the destructive Second World War that ended over a decade ago. For the sex-workers times have become extra challenging as the Diet is considering to ban prostitution, which would mean losing their income. But for some it would also mean a way out of the life they are stuck in.

Street of Shame is the last film of legendary Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi, director of timeless classics like Ugetsu (1953) and The Life of Oharu (1952). He died a few months after the film was released, leaving his audience with a strong motion picture as a closure to a prolific career. The film was a...

By Daniel Walber.

What makes a film theatrical? It’s a word that gets bandied about a lot. Often it just means that the script is like that of a play, with a limited number of locations and lots of dialogue. Or it can be used to describe a style of acting, playing to the rafters rather than the more intimate audience of the camera lens. Rarely, however, do we use the word “theatrical” to describe elements of direction, cinematography and editing.

Yet this underserved implication of the term is the key to understanding The Story of The Last Chrysanthemum, an early triumph of iconic Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi that has just been released by the Criterion Collection. This epic family drama was a proving ground of sorts for the filmmaker’s signature use of long takes, which would elevate such later masterpieces as Ugetsu and The Life of Oharu.

September tends to be the time of year that movie studios start busting out the big guns, and 2016 finds the Criterion Collection following suit, as the boutique home video label will be releasing one of the most significant cinematic landmarks on which they’ve yet to put their stamp.

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s mammoth “Dekalog” makes the company’s September lineup something of a bumper crop in and of itself, but — lucky for us — it’ll be accompanied by an essential Kenji Mizoguchi classic, two ample doses of Jacqueline Susann-inspired campiness, some old school Coen brothers and much more. Check out the full release slate below, listed in rough order of our excitement for each title.

1.) “Dekalog” (dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1988), Spine #837

This would be at the very top of the list regardless of what else Criterion is releasing in September. One of the greatest achievements in all of film (though...