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NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Roxy Cinema

Minority Report shows on 35mm Friday; The Beguiled, The Age of Innocence, and City Dudes play Saturday; Jean Rollin’s Lost In New York and The Sealed Soil screen on Sunday.

Film Forum

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town begins a 35mm run; The Umbrellas of Cherbourg‘s 4K restoration continues; Battling Butler screens Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

See It Big! Let It Snow brings Nanook of the North; Candyman screens on Saturday.

Museum of Modern Art

A dual celebration of Marcello and Chiara Mastroianni continues, this weekend bringing films by Fellini, Elio Petri and Antonioni.

Metrograph

Red Desert, L’eclisse, Playtime, Eyes Wide Shut, Moonstruck, and Con Air play on 35mm; The Holidays at Metrograph, It Looks Pretty from a Distance, Urban Ghosts, Absconded Art, and Nicolas Uncaged continue.

IFC Center

2001, Blood Simple, Eraserhead, and Society show late.

In addition to Sick, Scream Factory’s February home video line-up includes 4K upgrades for Galaxy of Terror, Ghosts of Mars, and Humanoids from the Deep.

Galaxy of Terror lands on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray on February 11. Produced by Roger Corman, the Alien-inspired 1981 sci-fi horror film has been newly restored in 4K from the 3mm interpositive with Dolby Vision.

Bruce D. Clark directs from a script he co-wrote with Marc Siegler. Edward Albert, Erin Moran, and Ray Walston star with future horror icons Sid Haig and Robert Englund. A young James Cameron served as production designer and second unit director.

Disc 1 – 4K Uhd:

4K Restoration Of The 3mm Interpositive (new) Presented In Dolby Vision (new) Audio: English DTS-hd Master Audio Mono Audio Commentary with Cast and Crew

Disc 2 – Blu-ray:

4K Restoration Of The 3mm Interpositive (new) Audio: English DTS-hd Master Audio Mono Audio Commentary with Cast and Crew Tales...

Michelangelo Antonioni, the iconic Italian auteur, has been immortalized in cinema history thanks to his acclaimed classics “L’Avventura,” “Blow-Up,” and “The Passenger,” which redefined film grammar.

Yet three years prior to his international breakthrough with “L’Avventura,” which won the Cannes Jury

Prize, Antonioni directed his lesser-known feature “Il Grido.” The 1957 drama is relatively obscure and has rarely been screened stateside; however, the film is an early look at the themes of loneliness and fractured relationships that Antonioni later became synonymous with.

The official synopsis for “Il Grido” reads: “Michelangelo Antonioni crafted his first masterpiece with ‘Il Grido,’ a raw expression of anguish that remains one of Italian cinema’s great under-appreciated gems. Bridging Antonioni’s early, neorealism-inspired work and his hallmark stories of existential rootlessness, ‘Il Grido’ centers on Aldo (Steve Cochran), a sugar-refinery worker in the Po Valley. When Irma (Alida Valli), his lover of seven years, learns that...

Roberta Torre with Anne-Katrin Titze on Gitt Magrini, Michelangelo Antonioni’s costume designer for Red Desert and with Bice Brichetto for L'Eclisse: “With Massimo Cantini Parrini we have thought a lot about this before making the film. So he went to all the beautiful costumes for Monica Vitti to see what remains today.”

A little over an hour and a half into Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, Monica Vitti’s Giuliana visits Richard Harris’s Corrado Zeller at his hotel. “Mi fanno male i capelli” she says, her hair hurts, as do her eyes, her throat and her mouth. Roberta Torre’s Mi Fanno Male I Capelli with a score by Wong Kar Wai’s longtime composer Shigeru Umebayashi takes the sentence as a starting point to investigate time and the mind, memory and the fluidity of identity.

Edoardo (Filippo Timi) with Monica (Alba Rohrwacher) in dress inspired by Monica...

A little over an hour and a half into Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert, Monica Vitti’s Giuliana visits Richard Harris’s Corrado Zeller at his hotel. “Mi fanno male i capelli” she says, her hair hurts, as do her eyes, her throat and her mouth. Roberta Torre’s Mi Fanno Male I Capelli with a score by Wong Kar Wai’s longtime composer Shigeru Umebayashi takes the sentence as a starting point to investigate time and the mind, memory and the fluidity of identity.

In a bravura performance Alba Rohrwacher interacts not only with her newly found guiding light of identification Monica Vitti, but also with the melancholy screen Marcello Mastroianni of 1961, the Alain Delon of L’Eclisse, Claudia Cardinale, and later Alberto...

Richard Harris and Michael Gambon introduced distinct yet iconic portrayals of Dumbledore in Harry Potter. While the Fantastic Beasts franchise wasn't as beloved, Law's performance offered a promising albeit flawed depiction of the character. In the end, the best Dumbledore is decided not by style but by substance, leaving the number one choice logical but surprising.

Three actors played the powerful Dumbledore in the Harry Potter universe, and soon, there will be a fourth one when HBO's Harry Potter TV show begins production. J. K. Rowling's legendary book series introduced a fascinating wizarding world where everything is fueled by magic. In a moving battle between good and evil, Harry Potter learns the most important life lesson from Albus Dumbledore, the Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The character is regarded as one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful wizard in the universe created by Rowling.

Margia Dean, who co-starred in the cult sci-fi classic The Quatermass Xperiment and appeared alongside the likes of Clint Eastwood, Vincent Price, Esther Williams and George Reeves in other movies, has died. She was 101.

Dean died June 23 in her apartment in Rancho Cucamonga, California, her niece Denyse Barr told The Hollywood Reporter.

From 1948-56, Dean worked in about 20 features for producer Robert L. Lippert, founder of the B-movie studio Lippert Pictures, thus earning the nickname “The Queen of Lippert.”

She acted for Sam Fuller in two of those films, the first two features he ever directed, in fact — I Shot Jesse James (1949), in which she portrayed a saloon singer, and the Price-starring The Baron of Arizona (1950).

Based on a popular BBC serial, Hammer Films’ The Quatermass Xperiment (1956), directed by Val Guest and starring Brian Donlevy, told the story of an astronaut (Richard Wordsworth) who crash-lands back on Earth and...

Monsters in the horror genre are endlessly nuanced. They can be physically daunting, emotionally horrifying, violent, manipulative, abject, paranormal, and so on. But a consistent thread is that they all start from somewhere. Now, we may not have the luxury of being granted a fully fleshed-out backstory for every monstrous creature, villain, or anti-hero ever to grace the screen, but we can normally chalk their inception up to two scenarios: They're either deeply othered non-human beings, invading the norm and representative of an external threat on society, or there are homegrown, society-made monsters — an amalgamation of humanity's pitfalls, ugliness, and actions that led to a creation that reflecting humanity's misdeeds back to it.

Oftentimes, this perspective can be interpreted as conservative or reactionary, but that doesn't really apply to the "Good for Her" horror subgenre.

Good For Her

Feminist horror has been around for a while but has been sliding...

Sqürl is the musical outfit featuring legendary indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch alongside Carter Logan, a co-producer on Jarmusch’s recent movies. After releasing a series of soundtracks and EPs, the duo have just unveiled their first proper full-length studio album, Silver Haze.

Music has been an integral part of Jarmusch’s movies throughout his career, starting with his groundbreaking ’80s films Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, and continuing in the ’90s with Dead Man and Ghost Dog. For his recent films, he and Logan have teamed up to compose the scores.

Now, the pair have unveiled Silver Haze, a guest-filled album that was just released via Sacred Bones Records. Among the notable contributors are Marc Ribot, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Anika.

Consequence caught up with Jarmusch and Logan to discuss the new album, along with its various guest musicians. During the conversation, the pair also talked about their process of scoring movies,...

Sqürl is the musical outfit featuring legendary indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch alongside Carter Logan, a co-producer on Jarmusch’s recent movies. After releasing a series of soundtracks and EPs, the duo have just unveiled their first proper full-length studio album, Silver Haze.

Music has been an integral part of Jarmusch’s movies throughout his career, starting with his groundbreaking ’80s films Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, and continuing in the ’90s with Dead Man and Ghost Dog. For his recent films, he and Logan have teamed up to compose the scores.

Now, the pair have unveiled Silver Haze, a guest-filled album that was just released via Sacred Bones Records. Among the notable contributors are Marc Ribot, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Anika.

Consequence caught up with Jarmusch and Logan to discuss the new album, along with its various guest musicians. During the conversation, the pair also talked about their process of scoring movies,...

The 5 Seconds of Summer Show, the tenth anniversary celebration that the pop-rock band hosted at the close of 2021, was part career-spanning concert film and part Saturday Night Live skit poking fun at their decade-long evolution. It featured a recreation of the video for one of their earliest releases — 2012’s “Gotta Get Out” — alongside their biggest hits, like “Youngblood” and “She Looks So Perfect,” and a funeral for their faded black skinny jeans. But the one thing that has never changed about 5Sos is their commitment to delivering an unrelenting live show.

On the run from a ruthless Las Vegas casino owner and his fixer, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) hits the road and winds up everywhere from the New Mexico desert to Kenosha dive bars in “Poker Face,” using her unerring ability to spot a lie to solve the murders she routinely stumbles into. Peacock’s mystery-of-the-week series did take advantage of the New Mexico sun to shoot Episode 2 and some exterior sequences, but ironically once Charlie hits the road, landing in a new two every week, “Poker Face” itself stayed rooted in upstate New York. That left the burden of turning the Hudson Valley into different states with production designer Judy Rhee.

Rhee disguises the series’ home base into convincing facsimiles of the Southwest, the Rockies, the Midwest, and beyond, but she had little time to do it. “It was actually less than two weeks; it was every 10 days that we were shooting [a new episode],” Rhee told IndieWire.

Above: US Teaser poster for Crimes of the Future. Design by Bangers & Mash.In the middle of the Venice Film Festival, and in the lead-up to the Toronto and New York fests, still the most “liked” poster of the last six months of my Movie Poster of the Day Instagram was a teaser poster that appeared in the run-up to Cannes in the spring. The poster was for was one of the most anticipated films of Cannes, a film that has since been disseminated to the world with a much tamer big-head poster and even tamer home video art. The Crimes of the Future teaser racked up nearly 2,000 likes and not far behind it was a gorgeous art print for Cronenberg’s 30-year-old Naked Lunch by the very talented (and seemingly Cronenberg-obsessed) Nick Charge that I posted a few months later. As I’ve been doing for the past few years,...

Human Flowers of Flesh.For its second edition under director Giona A. Nazzaro and the first fully physical iteration since 2019, the Locarno Film Festival sought to reestablish itself in 2022 as one of the preeminent destinations for cinephiles looking to simultaneously discover fresh talent, take in new work by veteran directors, and dive deep into film history. While Nazzaro’s stated intention to make the festival more audience-friendly—if not outright commercial—was met with skepticism by critics accustomed to Locarno’s tradition of championing art cinema, it’s clear after two years that these comments didn’t portend a drastic realignment of programming values so much as anticipate a reevaluation of the festival’s perceived strengths. Due to the elimination of a couple of sidebars, the curatorial focus is now centered directly on the International Competition and Filmmakers of the Present sections, with even some clever cross-pollination between these strands...

If Cristian Mungiu isn’t the most prolific filmmaker to emerge from Romanian cinema’s gilded age, he does tend to cause a stir. Cristi Puiu was first in the door at Cannes, bringing Stuff and Dough to Director’s Fortnight in 2001, and the first to win a prize with The Death of Mr. Lazarescu in 2005, but it was Mungiu who got the big one.

Since 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days achieved that feat in 2007, Mungiu has released just three films. “I’m a filmmaker, this is what gives some sense to my life,” Mungiu explained last week in an office just inland from the Lumiere Theatre where his latest had premiered a few nights previous, “I’d like to make a film every two years, but I’m not smart enough to come up with something important to say. I think that there’s already too much material, too many films.

Above: Italian poster for The Girl with a Pistol. Artist: Giorgio Olivetti.Monica Vitti, who died on February 2nd at the age of 90, was an icon of modern cinema—one of its most famous and most beautiful faces—but she is best known outside Italy for just four films, all of which she made for her one-time partner Michelangelo Antonioni. In the original Italian poster for L’avventura (1960), the film that made both their names, her head is tilted to the side, her face barely visible: she is mostly a shock of blonde hair. But in the posters that were created as that film travelled the globe, and in her ensuing posters for Antonioni's La notte (1961), L’eclisse (1962), and Red Desert (1964), she gets her close-up, usually staring into the middle distance or directly at the viewer. Always impassive, never smiling. But of course, in a career that lasted another 25 years there were many more films,...

To cite Monica Vitti as an icon, following her death in Rome this week at 90, is somehow unsatisfying. She could never be summed up as something so inert — she was far too vividly alive. If her sensuality has been called “chilly,” it nonetheless animated every frame she stood in or fast-tapped through in high heels. If the landscapes her greatest creative partner Michelangelo Antonioni directed her across were at times sprawling or forbidding, she always held the eye, whether with a look or a highly kinetic outburst.

To a young film buff crammed into a swaybacked seat at a Manhattan arthouse, beholding her for the first time was to risk a schoolboy crush. She’s been called “Impossibly lovely” on this site, and that’s true enough — impossible, and yet there she is onscreen. The sturdy lips forming a blossom of a mouth, the eyes that seem focused just a...

Star of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films in the 1960s who later turned to light comedies

Although she was often described, perhaps with a touch of irony, as the “muse of incommunicability” for her dramatic roles in several of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, Monica Vitti, who has died aged 90, always aspired to be a comic actor. In 1962, she had an offer to do a film for Agnès Varda, but turned it down; as she explained in an interview, “I want to remain loyal to Michelangelo, who has promised to make me the Carole Lombard of the second half of the century.” Though Vitti certainly had comparable looks and verve, and did eventually succeed in becoming a popular comedic star, she will probably remain in most film buffs’ minds as Giuliana, the complicated young blond woman in Antonioni’s Il Deserto Rosso, his first colour feature.

Giuliana was perhaps Vitti’s most credible and identifiable characterisation.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Monica Vitti in Red Desert (1964). (Courtesy of Janus Films)One of the most captivating presences in Italian cinema, actress Monica Vitti has died at age 90. She started as a stage and television actor before becoming known for her roles in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960), La notte (1960), L'eclisse (1962) and Red Desert (1964). After the end of her professional and romantic relationship with Antonioni (the two would return for The Mystery of Oberwald in 1980), Vitti turned to lighter fare by international directors, including a small part in Luis Buñuel's surrealist comedy The Phantom of Liberty (1974). In the official announcement of Vitti's death, Italy’s culture minister Dario Franceschini wrote, “Goodbye to the queen of Italian cinema.”The groundbreaking artist James Bidgood, whose artistic output spanned from photography and music to films like Pink Narcissus (1971), has also died.

Italian actress Monica Vitti, best known internationally for starring in Michelangelo Antonioni’s breakthrough cinematic trilogy “L’Avventura,” “La Notte” and “L’Eclisse,” as well as in the director’s “Red Desert,” has died. She was 90.

The news of her death was tweeted by former Rome mayor and film critic Walter Veltroni on Wednesday.

Roberto Russo, il suo compagno di tutti questi anni, mi chiede di comunicare che Monica Vitti non c’è più. Lo faccio con dolore, affetto, rimpianto.

— walter veltroni (@VeltroniWalter) February 2, 2022

(Roberto Russo, her companion in these years, asks me to communicate that Monica Vitti is no more. I do so with great grief, affection, and nostalgia)

Vitti, known for her enigmatic, distant beauty — the All Movie Guide termed her the “high priestess of frosty sensuality” — had been retired for more than a decade due to Alzheimer’s.

Vitti and Antonioni had certainly enjoyed a fruitful collaboration, but in...

Monica Vitti, the Italian screen icon known for a string of 1960s classics, died Wednesday at 90, according to reports in Italy.

The news was conveyed by writer, director and politician Walter Veltroni on behalf of Vitti’s husband, Roberto Russo:

Roberto Russo, il suo compagno di tutti questi anni, mi chiede di comunicare che Monica Vitti non c’è più. Lo faccio con dolore, affetto, rimpianto.

— walter veltroni (@VeltroniWalter) February 2, 2022

The feted actress, best known for movies including L’Avventura (1960), Red Desert (1964), L’Eclisse (1962) and La Notte (1961), had been battling Alzheimer’s disease for two decades.

Born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli on November 3, 1931, in Rome, Vitti acted in amateur productions as a teenager then trained at Rome’s National Academy of Dramatic Arts.

The actress shot to global fame following spectacular collaborations with legendary director Michelangelo Antonioni in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Vitti starred in L’Avventura as a detached and...

After a hiatus where New York’s theaters closed during the pandemic, we’re delighted to announce the return of NYC Weekend Watch, our weekly round-up of repertory offerings. While many theaters are still focused on a selection of new releases, a handful of worthwhile repertory screenings are taking place.

Metrograph

“We Won’t Grow Old Together” includes The Brood and Carol on 35mm; a 4K restoration of Possession is running; two of Clint Eastwood’s greatest films, A Perfect World and White Hunter, Black Heart, screen this Saturday.

Film at Lincoln Center

NYFF’s Revivals winds down with new restorations of Assault on Precinct 13, Ratcatcher, and Ed Lachman’s Songs for Drella.

IFC Center

In anticipation of Bergman Island, films by Mia Hansen-Løve screen side-by-side with Ingmar Bergman; while the 4K restoration of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterpiece Cure continues and World of Wong Kar-wai keeps going, Arrebato, Crash, and Mulholland Dr. have showings.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.Closeup of Fay Wray from Doctor X after restoration work. Image from https://www.cinema.ucla.eduNEWSAfter working together in the film Rojo (2018), director Benjamin Naishtat and actor Alfredo Castro reunite to talk about the terror, pleasure and mystery involved in the process of creating a film. They agree that for both director and actor, the seed of creation is the irrationality of madness, and that uncertainty is an essential factor in filmmaking. Castro and Naishtat call for a subversive cinema that cannot be domesticated by current narrative paradigms and that is also capable of using the imagination as a means and a catalyst to reinterpret our history. To listen to this episode and subscribe on your favorite podcast app, click here.The great French film director Jacques Rozier is being evicted from his...

When director Guillermo Del Toro asks for quarantine entertainment recommendations, his famous friends sure don’t disappoint.

Del Toro took to Twitter Monday for help in passing the time during the pandemic. “What are you reading, what are you watching, what are you listening to, and how many days have you been indoors?,” Del Toro posted Monday morning.

Del Toro added that he has “been indoors for over a month… self-imposed. I have gone out only for primary needs: food, supplies, etc., and I have been mostly rewatching and re-reading.”

Among the content Del Toro said he was revisiting were several films by director Mitchell Leisen, including “Death Takes a Holiday” and “Easy Living.” For literature, Del Toro said he’s re-reading “The Devils of Loudon,” a thriller by dystopian author Aldous Huxley, calling it “incredibly pertinent to what we are going through and how autonomy can be destroyed in times of crisis.

With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

Beneath the glassy surfaces of nearly every Todd Haynes’ movie lives a woman pressing against them, about to break out. Julianne Moore has played two of those: a suburban housewife chained to the social order of racially segregated 1950s Connecticut in “Far From Heaven,” and as another psychically shackled housewife, this time in 1980s Southern California, in “Safe.”

More from IndieWireStream of the Day: How 'Ganja & Hess' Became Much More Than a Black Vampire StoryStream of the Day: Sofia Coppola's 'Bling Ring' Knows What It's Like to Feel Disconnected

Though released in 1995, “Safe” is set in 1987, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in America. Haynes’ roots as a queer filmmaker often find him responding to that crisis, most...

Since any New York City 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.

Anthology Film Archives

Presented by Screen Slate, “1995: The Year the Internet Broke” includes Ghost in the Shell, Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, and more.

It’s the final weekend of a Dušan Makavejev retrospective.

Film Forum

“The Women Behind Hitchcock” features Rebecca, The Lady Vanishes, Shadow of a Doubt, and more.

French Institute Alliance Française

The...

“Swallow” opens behind the blonde head of a young woman as she stares out at a placid lake, in a Hitchockian shot that recalls moments of “Vertigo” that loom behind the golden swirl atop Kim Novak’s own head. With his first feature, writer/director Carlo Mirabella-Davis interrogates just that kind of Hitchcockian movie: the one where a male auteur terrorizes his leading lady through voyeuristic content and form. Haley Bennett stars as Hunter, a blonde afflicted with a self-destructive impulse to consume inedible household objects, putting her character, and the actress, through the emotional wringer.

But Mirabella-Davis imbues his take on the myth of the feminine mystique, here gone awry in the form of a housewife coming undone, with hope, redemption, and female agency often missing from movies like “Vertigo” or “The Birds.” In this vision, Hunter suffers a buried, distinctly female trauma that, by the end of the film,...

A significant subplot of Quentin Tarantino's ninth feature, Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood, involves the offer of work to fading movie stars from the Italian film business, where a few got lucky and reinvigorated their careers and others merely paid the rent or tarnished their reputations, if any.This notion is certainly not one of Q.T.'s notorious counter-historical plot turns: Italy had been offering opportunities to Hollywood and European flotsam since the fifties.In the era of Il Boom, the post-war economic miracle, filmmakers, including actors, were offered a great deal: they could live and work in Italy tax-free for a year. Projects were not only re-written to take advantage of this possibility, they were conceived for it: it's uncertain Roman Holiday would exist without the big tax break incentive.For actors, there was clearly another consideration, beyond the big, or at least tax-exempt, bucks and...

[Editor’s note: Spoilers ahead for “Avengers: Endgame.”]

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo have come a long way since “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (2014) in harnessing the power of VFX and effectively integrating it into their four-film McU journey. Throughout the last five years, they’ve taken advantage of tech advancements in lighting, surfacing, rendering, compositing, and facial animation that have benefited Marvel’s seamless, photo-real, visual virtuosity. The finale demanded that they deploy all the skills they’ve learned to get the most from the wide range of challenging effects sequences they faced in one three-hour movie.

To bolster the action for “Winter Soldier,” the Russos led off with Industrial Light & Magic’s revamped, fully weaponized Helicarrier (the biggest CG model in Ilm’s history). Then, in “Captain America: Civil War” (2016), they choreographed the intricate airport battle (also handled by Ilm) featuring newcomer Spider-Man (Tom Holland), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), and Ant-Man (Paul Rudd). And,...

Ivana Miloš and Patrick Holzapfel continue our series of film dialogues. In collaboration with Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol, Margaret Tait's Blue Black Permanent (1992) is showing on Mubi from July 26 - August 25, 2018 in most countries.Patrick,Here is something I always wanted to tell you about—it is connected to tides, grasses on clifftops, birdsong in the morning, smoking tea cups. All of these come into view in Margaret Tait’s observational practice, leaning in and looking closer, looking in and looking into things. This poetess and filmmaker whose work has been off the radar for decades, as she spent the latter living on Orkney within reach of the waves, made only one feature film, the one you have now seen. Retelling another life’s essence, daughter Barbara travels through memories of her mother Greta’s mysterious death. The multiple voices we hear are joined by those of the landscape in its minutiae,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.News Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria.The lineup for this year's Venice Film Festival has been announced. In-competition titles include Carlos Reygadas' open-relationship romance Where Life is Born (the auteur's first feature in 5 years), Shinya Tsukamoto's much-anticipated samurai film Killing, and Jennifer Kent's The Nightingale, a Gothic revenge story set in Tasmania. The Venice Documentaries section joins an eclectic range of heavy-hitters, from Gastón Solnicki (Kékszakállú) and once-retiree Tsai Ming-liang, to Errol Morris and Frederick Wiseman, whose Ex-Libris: The New York Public Library screened in competition at the festival last year.Meanwhile, the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival has followed suit, releasing the names of the films set to premiere at its Special Presentations and Galas. Notably, this edition reunites the festival with Barry Jenkins, whose James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk will have its world premiere.

It was dead of winter in Montreal and the first thing that production designer Dennis Gassner asked director Denis Villeneuve was how to describe his vision for “Blade Runner 2019” in a single word. The answer: Brutality. Thus began the journey of incorporating the harsh climate of Villeneuve’s home city into the dystopian world of “Blade Runner” 30 years later.

For Gassner, it’s all about defining the pattern language and he had plenty of brutalist inspiration when scouting the angular, concrete buildings in Budapest, where they shot the movie — because London didn’t provide enough studio space.

First Came the Flying Spinner

However, Gassner’s first priority was tackling an updated Spinner, the iconic flying police vehicle. “The Spinner would create the pattern language, which we could then spin-off into the rest of the world,” Gassner said. While the original Spinner driven by Harrison Ford’s Deckard had a soft quality,...

With “Blade Runner 2049” playing on the big screen (where it must be seen in all its glory) amid debates about mismarketing and spoiler phobia, director Denis Villeneuve was relieved to be able to sit down and talk openly about making the movie — with a few well-placed spoiler alerts.

Like “Life of Pi,” and “Mad Max: Fury Road,” along with its main Oscar rival “Dunkirk,” critically hailed “Blade Runner 2049” pushes the state of motion-picture making to its apex. And the Academy — from the picky directors branch and the crafts to actors with a fondness for long-overlooked Harrison Ford — should reward the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 “Blade Runner” with multiple nominations. (The original landed just two craft nods.)

Read More:‘Blade Runner 2049’ Could Finally Nab Harrison Ford and Roger Deakins Those Elusive Oscars

I’m not the only one who came out of this complicated two-hour, 43-minute...

With “Blade Runner 2049” playing on the big screen (where it must be seen in all its glory) amid debates about mismarketing and spoiler phobia, director Denis Villeneuve was relieved to be able to sit down and talk openly about making the movie — with a few well-placed spoiler alerts.

Like “Life of Pi,” and “Mad Max: Fury Road,” along with its main Oscar rival “Dunkirk,” critically hailed “Blade Runner 2049” pushes the state of motion-picture making to its apex. And the Academy — from the picky directors branch and the crafts to actors with a fondness for long-overlooked Harrison Ford — should reward the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 “Blade Runner” with multiple nominations. (The original landed just two craft nods.)

Read More:‘Blade Runner 2049’ Could Finally Nab Harrison Ford and Roger Deakins Those Elusive Oscars

I’m not the only one who came out of this complicated two-hour, 43-minute...

The subject of “Blade Runner” never came up during any of cinematographer Roger Deakins’ discussions with director Denis Villeneuve about the sequel, “Blade Runner 2049.” Although the two movies obviously share the same world, and there’s a mysterious connection between Ryan Gosling’s K and Harrison Ford’s Deckard (current and former L.A. blade runner detectives) when the story picks up 30 years later, the only thing that mattered to Deakins was grounding the lighting in reality. Which makes perfect sense: he’s the master of naturalism and “Blade Runner” was grounded in expressionism.

“It was more of a film noir detective story, but we just went by our script,” said Deakins. “We needed to get the settings straight and then storyboarded it all for the concepts of the world and the spaces.”

However, the one imperative that Montreal native Villeneuve stressed was snow. “Right from the get-go, Denis said,...

Carlo Di Palma and Woody AllenThe only thing more consistent than the quality of Carlo Di Palma’s cinematography is the routine variance of his work. Though his most prominent titles were primarily those done in collaboration with two key directors—Michelangelo Antonioni and Woody Allen—what he demonstrated over the course of his career, in these films and dozens more, revealed a remarkable exhibition of visual range. His decades-spanning career produced a gallery of fluctuating colors, lighting techniques, temperatures, movements, and tones. And more often than not, what he refined in this richly varying field proved to be a directly corresponding realization of profound psychological consequence.Born April 17, 1925 in Rome, the son of a camera repair man, Di Palma’s cinematic commencement went from focus operator on Neo-Realist essentials like Rome, Open City (1945) and Bicycle Thieves (1948) to serving various capacities on largely subpar Italian fare. A turning point came...

The cinematographer for Antonioni and Woody Allen deserves better than this reverential profile

Here’s a choice. Either you spend 90 minutes watching people trying to find different ways to say that cinematographer Carlo Di Palma “sculpted with light”. Or, better, you seek out the work that is so temptingly trailed in this documentary, films such as Antonioni’s Red Desert and Blow-Up or Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. This film by Fariborz Kamkari is well intentioned and reverential but it feels like a tombstone for the oeuvre of a man whose photography was vividly, mercurially alive.

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Venice Classics will include a wide range of restored classics this year, including the 1964 Michelangelo Antonioni Golden Lion winner Red Desert, starring Monica Vitti and Richard Harris. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976), starring Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu, will make its big comeback, as will Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), starring Richard Dreyfuss and Francois Truffaut.

Italian director Giuseppe Piccioni (Not of This World, Light of My Eyes) will chair the jury, which will award the Venice Classics Award for best restored film and best documentary on cinema.

Other highlights of the lineup include Kenji...

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Antichrist (Lars von Trier)

Like the majority of Lars von Trier films, from the first moments of Antichrist, one will be able to discern if it’s an experience they want to proceed with. For those will to endure its specific unpleasantness, there’s a poetic, affecting exploration of despair at its center. Chaos reigns, indeed. – Jordan R.

Where to Stream: FilmStruck

Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly)

Last year marked...

“Visual geometry” might not be the first phrase that comes to mind when thinking of Michelangelo Antonioni, but a new video essay published by Fandor makes a strong argument for it being among the Italian master’s essential tools. (Well, that and Monica Vitti, of course.)

Read More: Why ‘Mulholland Drive’ Is the Most Essential Film David Lynch Will Ever Make — Watch

The minute-long video offers a brief rundown of Antonioni’s recurring visual motifs, from showing characters looking through windows (“L’Avventura,” “The Passenger”) and walking through doorways (“The Mystery of Oberwald,” “Identification of a Woman”) to being shown through fences (“Red Desert,” “Zabriskie Point”) and traversing vast landscapes (“La Notte,” “Blowup”). It also takes note of his geometric compositions, namely his frequent use of straight, vertical and converging lines.

Read More: ‘American Gods’ Review: Bryan Fuller Paints a Beautiful, Bloody, and Unblinking Portrait of American Duality

“Creating depth,...

Each month, the fine folks at FilmStruck and the Criterion Collection spend countless hours crafting their channels to highlight the many different types of films that they have in their streaming library. This April will feature an exciting assortment of films, as noted below.

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Monday, April 3 The Chaos of Cool: A Tribute to Seijun Suzuki

In February, cinema lost an icon of excess, Seijun Suzuki, the Japanese master who took the art of the B movie to sublime new heights with his deliriously inventive approach to narrative and visual style. This series showcases seven of the New Wave renegade’s works from his career breakthrough in the sixties: Take Aim at the Police Van (1960), an off-kilter whodunit; Youth of the Beast (1963), an explosive yakuza thriller; Gate of Flesh (1964), a pulpy social critique; Story of a Prostitute (1965), a tragic romance; Tokyo Drifter...

Elle

Blu-ray

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

2017 / Color / 2.40:1 widescreen / Street Date March 14, 2017

Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Anne Consigny, Charles Berling.

Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine

Film Editor: Job Ter Burg

Written by David Birke

Produced by Saïd Ben Saïd and Michel Merkt

Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Michèle Leblanc, glamorous entrepreneur of a successful video game company, is the calm at the center of many storms. Her son’s girlfriend has given birth to another man’s child, an employee is stalking her with anime porn and her botox-ridden mother is betrothed to a male prostitute.

In the face of all this outrageous fortune, Michèle remains cool, calm and collected, even in the aftermath of her own harrowing sexual assault.

Elle, the new film from the Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven, begins with that already infamous assault, our heroine struggling under the weight of her attacker while an unblinking cat perches nearby, watching.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveriesNEWSSexy DurgaThe Hivos Tiger Awards of the International Film Festival Rotterdam have been announced, with Sanal Kumar Sasidharan's Sexy Durga taking home the Tiger, Niles Atallah's Rey winning the Special Jury Award, and Caroline Leone's Pela janela being picked by Fipresci.New York's Whitney Museum has revealed its full film program for the 2017 Biennial, with a focus on such filmmakers as Mary Helena Clark, James N. Kienitz Wilkins, Kevin Jerome Everson, Eric Baudelaire and Robert Beavers.Recommended VIEWINGThe eagerly awaited trailer for Sofia Coppola's new film, a remake of Don Siegel's bizarre and wonderful The Beguiled, with Colin Farrell in Clint Eastwood's role.The glorious full trailer for James Gray's Amazonia exploration melodrama, The Lost City of Z."The screen is a neutral element in the film-going experience. Or is it? It projects dreams...

Eugène Green with Kleber Mendonça Filho's Aquarius star Sônia Braga Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, who have their film The Unknown Girl (La Fille Inconnue) screening in this year's New York Film Festival and are the co-producers for Cristian Mungiu's Graduation (Bacalaureat), also co-produced Eugène Green's Son Of Joseph (Le Fils De Joseph) starring Victor Ezenfis, Natacha Régnier, Fabrizio Rongione, Maria de Medeiros and Mathieu Amalric.

Vincent (Victor Ezenfis) Marie (Natacha Regnier) Joseph (Fabrizio Rongione): "I like Balthazar very much, but since my childhood I've always liked donkeys."

Following my conversation with Sônia Braga on her Oscar worthy performance in Kleber Mendonça Filho's Aquarius, we ran into Eugène Green whom I was meeting to discuss his film up at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. He spoke with me about Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert with Monica Vitti, Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar,...

“Imagine that we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind a door. In an instant the room we are sitting in is completely altered; everything in it has taken on another look; the light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed and the objects are as we conceive them.”-- Carl Th. DreyerOn the one hand, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman is the everyday portrait of a woman living her life, watching wedding videos, going to the pool, meeting a lover, driving her young niece around, washing her hands, picking up flowers, and so on. On the other, it’s a horror-noir straddling two rival strands of the genres: the nice anti-hero with the dark secret buried in the past that threatens to be unearthed (Out of the Past; so many...

By Jove, here’s a real find: in the 1980s, Michelangelo Antonioni traveled with his partner, actress and filmmaker Enrica Fico Antonioni, to Japan with the intent of creating a documentary, Trip to Japan, that would chronicle “the social transformations undergoing in Japan through the experimental use of new film technologies,” specifically the Betacam. The material hasn’t been seen since — but it wasn’t lost, either, and is now coming to the Venice Film Festival as part of a free exhibit on September 2. Before that (i.e. for less than two days), the material is made available, for free, via the Fondazione Prada-supported collective Belligerent Eyes.

While lacking an embed, the videos, called Japan 1984 – 7 Betacam Tapes, are easily accessible at their site and deserve a look. To anyone interested in the director, eastern culture, the ’80s, or ethnography, they make for deeply fascinating bits of history. There’s Antonioni...

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

Martin Scorsese talks about the making of The King of Comedy with Vanity Fair‘s Simon Abrams:

I didn’t really understand where I stood in relationship to the film, the story, Rupert Pupkin, and Jerry Langford, too, until I was in the process of making the film—the shooting, the editing. I don’t think I necessarily liked what I found. What I mean is: I saw myself in Rupert, on the surface, as somebody that came from that appreciation of early television of the 50s—particularly New York variety comedy shows. Steve Allen, Jack Paar. These personalities were so vivid and so strong that they became something very new to me.

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit the interwebs. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

The Boy and the Beast (Mamoru Hosoda)

Two worlds collide once young Kyuta (Shôta Sometani) and warrior Kumatetsu (Kôji Yakusho) meet in Mamoru Hosoda‘s The Boy and the Beast. The former was recently orphaned after his mother’s death (she had divorced his father years ago and her family refuses to get in touch with him), currently working his way towards becoming a solitary street...

When one considers the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, the terms "crackling pace" and "dialogue heavy" likely do not spring to mind. Yet, both apply quite prominently to the director's 1955 female-centric drama, Le amiche (The Girlfriends). Within five short years the director's reputation would be cemented as one of the foremost auteurs on the buzzing "world cinema" landscape. With 1960's radically groundbreaking L'Avventura, Antonioni would permanently turn a corner into the philosophical and sociological avant-garde. When it came to crafting stylized visuals while communicating themes of alienation in the modern world, he was the undisputed maestro. This phase gave way to Antonioni, via his latest works, being loudly proclaimed, debated and anticipated. Films such as Red Desert (1964) and Blow-Up (1966), love them or hate...

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Every week we dive into the cream of the crop when it comes to home releases, including Blu-ray and DVDs, as well as recommended deals of the week. Check out our rundown below and return every Tuesday for the best (or most interesting) films one can take home. Note that if you’re looking to support the site, every purchase you make through the links below helps us and is greatly appreciated.

Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson)

Charlie Kaufman, the writer behind Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, teams up with animator Duke Johnson to create a complex emotional drama starring lifelike puppets. The premise is riddled with existential dread of modern-day life, presented uniquely through Kaufman’s idiosyncratic point-of-view. For protagonist and self-help author Michael Stone (voiced soulfully by David Thewlis), everyone around him has the same voice (thanks to Tom Noonan) and nothing feels right. It isn’t...