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If you haven’t touched a board game since Monopoly or Chutes and Ladders, you might have missed out on the board game boom that’s been brewing for over a decade. Cmyk’s Wavelength, released in 2019, was primed for the pandemic era, but its continued popularity is owed to its easy-to-learn rules, great replay value, and playability in groups of various sizes. And of course, social media...

The Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park is located in the northern part of Los Angeles County, about a 45-minute drive from Hollywood proper (depending on traffic). They are a popular tourist destination because the layered rock formations jut out of the ground at strange, wild angles, giving them an alien look. They were named after Tiburcio Vásquez, a notoriously clever Mexican bandit who hid out among the rocks while eluding the cops back in the 1870s. Hikers have been hiding out among the rocks ever since, admiring their otherworldly beauty. 

Vasquez Rocks has been a popular shooting destination for dozens of major films and TV shows, largely because they're such a short drive from all the production offices in Los Angeles. It's easy to bundle the cast of "Star Trek" into a van, dress three stuntman as a Gorn character, and go to the Rocks to film actors pretend-fight each other.

The sweet spot for many of the best films of the year, arriving before the final month of 2024, November is packed with robust offerings of Cannes, Berlinale, and fall festival highlights, along with must-see documentaries, and even a major studio movie or two.

17. Dream Team (Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn; Nov. 15)

Following their singular take on the Western genre with Two Plains and a Fancy, filmmakers Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn returned to the festival circuit earlier this year with Dream Team, an absurdist homage to ’90s basic-cable TV thrillers. Starring Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai, with a producing team that includes I Saw the TV Glow director Jane Schoenbrun, Leonardo Goi said in his Rotterdam review, “Like its predecessors, Dream Team hangs in a hazy, oneiric region; what the film is about is a lot easier to discuss than the entrancing feeling it evokes. As corals the world over...

The Last Days of the Space Age hit Hulu on Oct. 2, telling the story of three ordinary families living in 1979 Western Australia when a power strike looms in the background, threatening to take away the region’s electricity. The city also hosts the Miss Universe pageant, and the U.S. space station, Skylab crashes just outside the city.

Created by David Chidlow, the show stars Radha Mitchell, Jesse Spencer, Deborah Mailman, Jacek Koman and more. The retro soundtrack plays a key role in the show as well, setting the tone of the series and signaling coming change for the characters and the Australian city.

Find the stacked soundtrack, by episode, to The Last Days of the Space Age below.

Episode 1: “Only Kids Dream About Being Spacemen”

“Xanadu” by Olivia Newton-John “Ca Plane Pour Moi” Deevox “Love Is a Beautiful Song by Barry Crocker “Jive Talkin” by the Bee Gees...

Teen Titans is primarily centered around the adventures of Robin, Starfire, Cyborg, Raven, and Beast Boy, but they're far from the only major characters in the series. Numerous other heroes and even more villains drive stories and receive development. Over the course of five seasons, an abundance of minor characters are also featured, some drawn from obscure DC lore, while others are entirely original.

With only thirteen episodes in each season, Teen Titans didn't have time to explore all the amazing characters it introduced. Fans would have loved to see more characters like Bumblebee, Speedy, and Red X and are largely in agreement that Blackfire should have been the main villain for an entire season centered around Starfire. Many of the Honorary Titans introduced in Season 5 were also criminally underserved and should have been explored for at least a single episode.

Bumblebee is the Leader of Titans East

Bumblebee is voiced by T'Keyah Keymah.

Teen Titans sees the series' five heroes fighting to stop a new main villain's evil plan. Some of their schemes are focused around the Teen Titans themselves, while others have much grander visions. The biggest difference between their plots is the amount of thought that evidently went into them, as some pale in comparison to others.

While all fearsome villains in their own right, Slade, Trigon, and Brother Blood weren't equally effective at combating the Teen Titans. Some of the series' antagonists let their personal failings get in the way of their masterplans, while others did nearly everything right and were simply bested by the heroes. The best evil plans in the series were successfully executed, while the worst ones never even got off the ground.

Brother Blood Didn't Have an Endgame

Brother Blood is the main villain of Teen Titans Season 3. Brother Blood's obsession with Cyborg distracted him from whatever his original goal was.

It was just yesterday we learned Robert Zemeckis was taking another ambitious formal gamble in his career with Here. His adaptation of Richard McGuire’s comic, which spans a single space from 500,957,406,073 Bce to the year 22,175 Ce, was shot from a single Pov, without movement or zooms. A Forrest Gump reunion between Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, and writer Eric Roth, the first trailer has now arrived ahead of a November 15 release. Call it his The Tree of Life, Wavelength, or Tsai Ming-liang film, but it’s fascinating to see a director take this approach on a wide studio release.

Here’s the synopsis: “From the reunited director, writer, and stars of Forrest Gump, Here is an original film about multiple families and a special place they inhabit. The story travels through generations, capturing the human experience in its purest form. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, screenplay by Eric Roth & Zemeckis...

Beware, spoilers! You may witness the most astonishingly beautiful allegory of death in a movie. The kind of long takes that flashed your mind and remains diffused long after the details of the plot are forgotten. But Shh… these few words should be enough to convince you to watch “Tomorrow is a long time”, the first feature-length film of Singapore's brilliant new formalist, Jow Zhi Wei.

Tomorrow is a Long Time is screening at Black Movie

In a fantasized Singapore, as an archetype of any tropical Asian modern city, the 17 years old Meng is raised alone by an austere hard-working father after his mother has left home, seemingly without an address. Meng's narrative has been clearly devised upon two distinct movements. The first part immerses us in the day-to-day life of this dysfunctional family surviving in a cold and harsh society. While the silent Meng is struggling to exist among...

Shrooms.This year’s edition of TIFF Wavelengths opened with an unannounced extra. It was a 1967 film called Standard Time, an eight-minute series of circular pans around an apartment. The camera speeds up and slows down; it pans right, then left, then right again. Later, the film describes a truncated arc, showing one small section of the flat. Then, the camera pans up and down. Living beings can be glimpsed along the way, most notably a cat perched in a window, artist Joyce Wieland, and a surprise visitor at the end. But they are given the same relative attention as the objects in the space: a TV, a stereo, a cooktop, a blender, and a hutch full of china. Which is to say that all things in the field of the camera’s vision are abstracted, turned into pure painterly velocity.Of course, Standard Time is by Michael Snow, a...

The Toronto International Film Festival has announced this year’s Wavelengths and Classics sidebars, the former section known for its politically charged, geographically diverse fare with a wide range of work drawn from the worlds of documentary, contemporary art, and international art-house cinema.

Wavelengths this year counts 12 feature films and 19 shorts, as well as a suite of four restored early films by the singular Chantal Akerman.

Of note in the Wavelengths short section, North American audiences will finally get to see Jean-Luc Godard’s swan song short, Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: Phony Wars, which played Cannes this past spring.

Another highlight in the Classics sidebar is the 4K uncut restoration of Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, the only movie from China to win the Palme d’Or. The original film had 20 minutes cut by then Miramax Boss Harvey Weinstein much to the chagrin of jury...

The Toronto International Film Festival has added an additional 17 films to its 2023 lineup, with the new entries the work of a variety of bold international directors, from Radu Jude and Kleber Mendonca Filho to the late Jean-Luc Godard and Chantal Akerman.

The Wavelength section contains 12 features, two films paired in a single program and 19 shorts grouped in three separate programs. It is devoted to “artist-driven experimental films,” in the words of TIFF Chief Programming Officer Anita Lee. “Wavelengths continues to be a celebration of subversion, personal expression, and the vast, inexhaustible capabilities of cinema to enlighten, inspire, awe, resist, disrupt, and propose new ways of seeing and being in the world.”

Films in the section include “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” from the fiery Romanian satirist Radu Jude, “Here” from Belgian director Bas Devos,” the “Oedipus” retelling “Music” from Angela Schanelec, Brazilian Kleber Mendonca...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.REMEMBRANCEIsland in the Sun.The singer, actor, and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte has died, aged 96. Christina Newland wrote a piece on Belafonte for Notebook in 2020, praising his politics, his style, his music, and his work ss stage and screen. "His impact on American mid-century life has been so significant that it’s difficult to define him as any single thing, or to see him occupying only one role."NEWSNo Bears.Jafar Panahi has left Iran for the first time in fourteen years, it is being reported. Posting from an airport, his wife Tahereh Saeedi tweeted that, “after 14 years, Jafar’s ban was cancelled" and, that finally, the pair are "going to travel together for a few days…”The Cannes Film Festival have...

The Wavelength title debuted at Telluride.

UK-based sales firm MetFilm Sales has acquired worldwide sales rights excluding US, Germany and France to Thomas von Steinaecker’s documentary Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer.

The German-uk co-production had its world premiere at Telluride Film Festival in September, before going on to play Cologne, IDFA, Cork and Santa Barbara film festivals.

Radical Dreamer combines archive material and interviews with both German director Herzog, and collaborators including Christian Bale, Nicole Kidman and Werner’s wife Lena Herzog.

It is presented by US studio Wavelength, and produced by the UK’s Spring Films and Germany’s...

Human Flowers of Flesh (2022).In Helena Wittmann’s first feature, Drift (2017), two women holiday in Sylt, the northernmost island in Germany. Theresa and Josefina return to the port city of Hamburg temporarily and then, across a cut, Theresa appears alone in Antigua. Soon afterward, she sails across the Atlantic, via the Azores, back to Hamburg—but before she sails, Theresa stops at a beach in Antigua, where she gathers shells and dried coral.Within the first ten minutes of Human Flowers of Flesh, Wittmann’s follow-up to Drift, a woman hands another woman a piece of dried coral—“from Antigua,” she says in French. She is not Theresa and the film does not return to Antigua. Ida, played by Angeliki Papoulia, nonetheless shares with Theresa the experience of a trip there, where she came across a shoreline “like the cemetery of a coral reef.”Human Flowers of Flesh shares a...

Llewellyn Radley, Laura Austin Little, Jill Silfen and Mike Shanks join John Friedberg.

Black Bear is moving into direct UK distribution and has unveiled the Black Bear International senior leadership team months after John Friedberg left STX to set up the company with Teddy Schwarzman.

Llewellyn Radley, Laura Austin Little, Jill Silfen and Mike Shanks all join Friedberg at the new venture and worked together at STX International. Last week Screen was first to report that STX was understood to be winding down its UK office in London, which houses the international sales and the distribution teams.

Radley joins as EVP,...

Exclusive: We can tell you first that Oscar- and Emmy-nominated producer David Permut has picked up the rights to produce a narrative adaptation of Netflix’s acclaimed docuseries The Pharmacist which premiered earlier this year.

Permut is producing the film through his Permut Presentations banner alongside Jenner Furst, Julia Willoughby Nason and Mike Gasparro at The Cinemart, the team that directed and produced the docuseries. Brandon Riley and Keenan Porterfield will serve as EPs.

The docuseries tells the story of Dan Schneider, a small-town pharmacist in Louisiana who took it upon himself in 1999 to seek justice after the mysterious murder of his teenage son. Through his own detective work, Dan discovers that his only son was addicted to opioids and was murdered while on a desperate attempt to buy oxycontin. His obsession with convicting his son’s murderer leads him to uncover a string of highly illegal pill-mills, and ultimately...

Wavelength Productions, the company predominantly helmed by women behind acclaimed features such as Knock Down The House, Where’s My Roy Cohn?, The Infiltrators and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, recently launched the Wave (Women at the Very Edge) Grant a new initiative which is dedicated to fostering and supporting female filmmakers of color and are looking to tell their “own great f***ing story.”

The newly launched initiative will help first-time female filmmakers of color with the production of their first documentary or narrative film. Producers, directors or first-time filmmakers are invited to apply for the grant on the company’s website. In addition to putting money in your pockets for a film project, Wavelength will provide mentorship when it comes to producing, development, fundraising, and distribution strategy.

“At Wavelength Productions, we know that women have the power to not just break down barriers in this industry but to change the industry fundamentally,...

Chuck Smith at The Bowery Hotel on Barbara Rubin: "I think Walt Disney fascinated her all the time and fairy tales." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Through interviews with Jonas Mekas, Amy Taubin, Gordon Ball, Richard Foreman, J Hoberman, Ara Osterweil, Rosebud Feliu-Pettet, Debra Feiner Coddington, and illustrated by film clips, and photographs, Chuck Smith is in search of answering questions such as, who is Barbara Rubin and why haven't you heard about her?

Chuck Smith on Barbara Rubin friend Amy Taubin, seen here with Richard Gere and Oren Moverman: "She's in Michael Snow's Wavelength, the legendary experimental film." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Barbara Rubin And The Exploding NY Underground, with an original score by Lee Ranaldo, resurrects the filmmaker and instigator to take her place as a vital interconnected thread for the likes of Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Federico Fellini, Lenny Bruce, and many others.

Exclusive: Fresh off the heels of selling their films Where’s My Roy Cohn? and Knock Down the House at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Wavelength Productions announces their involvement as producers of the feature documentary Chippendales, directed by award-winning documentarians Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce (HBO’s Believer).

Chippendales tells the true story of the first strip club for women whose rise during the drug, sex and rock-and-roll fueled world of 1980’s Los Angeles left a trail of greed, extortion, jealousy, mob infiltration, and murder. The nightclub arose at the epicenter for the women’s liberation movement and was in part responsible for changing the culture. Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratton, her pimp husband Paul Snider, a newly arrived immigrant from Calcutta named Somen “Steve” Banerjee, and a flamboyant New York choreographer named Nick DeNoia would all play a part in the founding of the nightclub.

The documentary...

We’re sitting in the middle of the street, a truck is heading toward us, and we can’t move. Not on principle — we’re not staging a sit-in. It’s because we’re mic’ed up and shooting a TV show at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival. King Street is closed, but festival-approved vehicles still have the right of way. Luckily, the driver sees us and as soon as it passes, without skipping a beat, our host launches into “Hello, and welcome to BBC Culture at the Toronto International Film Festival. I’m Tom Brook.”

With decades of experience under his belt, Brook is unflappable. No wonder his show, “Talking Movies,” is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. If you’re a movie lover and have never heard of “Talking Movies” there’s a gaping hole in your cinephilia: this half-hour show airs monthly in the Us and around the world...

An Image of Complicity. Films by Luis Donschen and Helena Wittmann is showing May 23, 2018 at Berlin's Volksbühne in collaboration with Acropolis Cinema.Two young women go on vacation; the weather is bad. They return home. Josefina departs for Buenos Aires, Theresa wanders, by car, boat, and train, in her absence. In the end, they are brought back together, if only briefly. Sketched as such, Helena Wittmann’s first feature, Drift, might be taken for the sort of film à la short fiction perfected by Eric Rohmer in the 1980s. It is not this. The activity I have condensed as Theresa’s “wandering” in fact comprises nearly two thirds of the film, and much of it, particularly once she boards a boat crossing the Atlantic, is seen in such a way as to force us to consider whether we have locked entirely into her lonely gaze, or if she has disappeared from the film altogether.

In 1976, a crudely published fanzine devoted to the experimental film scene made its debut. It was called Idiolects and the first issue offered a definition of its name: “An idiolect is the language of an individual at a particular time.” That definition certainly could be applied to both the filmmakers covered in the zine and to the writers who contributed articles.

Although not an official publication of New York City’s Collective for Living Cinema screening society, Idiolects was closely tied to the organization, offering a “temporary” publication address of 52 White Street, New York, 10013 in the indicia. That was the Collective’s then permanent screening space in 1976 after having bopped around Manhattan for several years prior.

In addition, the Living Cinema was formed in the early 1970s by students who had studied filmmaking at Binghamton University in upstate New York and then moved to New York City. While Idiolects #1 gives no clear main editorial voice,...

The once-intriguing possibilities of 3D films have become a gimcrack commodity, one used by producers to inflate the price of movie tickets and increase revenue. For Hollywood films, it’s usually done as a post-production conversion, nothing more than a brummagem, money-grabbing afterthought devoid of sincere artistic purpose. It is, in a way, a bastard descendant of the crafty stratagems of William Castle (Smell-o-Vision, the flying skeletons, etc.), but without his passion and showmanship, and certainly without his thriftiness. Prototype, Blake William’s hour-long, innominate new feature, is the rare film to not only take advantage of the unique possibilities of 3D technology, but to become symbiotic with it. In the film one find flickers of hope for the medium. You cannot watch Prototype in 2D; it simply does not work. The ineluctable ambition of the film—of its formal experimentation, its assured daring—needs, and deserves, to be experienced as intended,...

After stumbling across a positive review of this 1983 science fiction oddity on Letterboxd, I put my fingers to researchin' and discovered the entire film is available watch online. In short, it's a fantastic, weird and a fascinating forgotten gem that fans of cult genre movies will appreciate checking out.

Wavelength stars real life rock star Cherie Currie ("The Runaways") as a psychic who can link with a group of alien children who are stranded on earth. The synth soundtrack is also a standout by 80's mainstay Tangerine Dream, whose OSTs I generally don't like.

Synopsis:

Two young lovers learn that a small group of child-like space aliens are marooned on Earth and are being held prisoner at a top secret military faci [Continued ...]...