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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on Twitter and Instagram.News Peter Pan.Disney will no longer include content warnings before classic films that feature racial stereotypes on its streaming service Disney+ as part of a shift in Dei strategy following President Trump’s second inauguration. In 2020, the company began appending an introductory text to movies like Dumbo (1941) and Peter Pan (1953) cautioning viewers of “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures,” insisting that “these stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.” Now, a disclaimer stating that a film “may contain stereotypes or negative depictions” will be buried in its “details section.”Shiori Ito has pledged to reedit sections of her film, Black Box Diaries (2024), which chronicles her own sexual assault case, to remove unauthorized content.

When reading Claude Lanzmann’s 2009 memoir The Patagonian Hare, director Guillaume Ribot was struck by insights into making the monumental Shoah. The book recounts the making of Shoah in four of its chapters, presenting Lanzmann’s own detective work finding perpetrators and witnesses and interviewing them. Maybe it was the investigative element of this method that initially drew Ribot to consider telling a sort of behind-the-scenes story, but what makes a perfect companion piece out of All I Had Was Nothingness is the way it surrenders to asking the most difficult questions in the deafening silence: the “why” of the Holocaust is hauntingly present.

Ribot, whose background is in photography and Holocaust memory, narrates the film using Lanzmann’s own words layered over archival footage unused in the final nine-hour cut of Shoah. A total of 220 hours of rushes were kept in the United States Holocaust Museum (online even), of...

Sales activity at the Berlin Film Festival and European Film Market revved up on Saturday as Sony Pictures Classics struck a deal for North American rights to Rebecca Zlotowski’s murder mystery “Vie Privée,” starring Jodie Foster.

Variety‘s Elsa Keslassy had the scoop on SPC’s deal for the film, which also covers key territories in Latin America. “Shot in Paris and Normandy, ‘Vie Privée’ is currently in post-production and will likely world premiere in the festival circuit,” Keslassy writes.

Foster, who speaks fluent French, stars in the film as renowned psychiatrist Lilian Steiner, who mounts a private investigation into the death of one of her patients after she becomes convinced that there has been a murder. Foster last starred in a French-language film 20 years ago in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Oscar-nominated “A Very Long Engagement.” Zlotowski ranks as one of France’s top filmmakers. “Vie Privée” marks her first deal with Sony Pictures Classics.

For many in the film world and beyond, Claude Lanzmann’s 566-minute documentary Shoah, first released in 1985, remains a milestone that has yet to be surpassed. Even Lanzmann himself, who went on to direct a handful of movies using footage that didn’t make Shoah’s original cut, would never again attain the heights, and existential depths, of an epic that explored the Holocaust with such profound candor and compassion. One doesn’t watch Shoah as much as one experiences it — most ideally, on the big screen over a two-day period — and the experience is often unforgettable.

It therefore seems almost sacrilegious for another filmmaker to have combed through more outtakes from Shoah to make his own separate movie, but that’s exactly what happened with the new feature, All I Had Was Nothingness (Je n’avais que le néant — “Shoah” par Lanzmann), which was produced by the late auteur’s widow,...

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps; it is also the 40th anniversary of the release of “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s groundbreaking film that redefined how the Holocaust was viewed. On Monday, documentary “All I Had Was Nothingness,” which looks at the making of “Shoah,” has its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Variety spoke to its director, Guillaume Ribot.

“All I Had Was Nothingness” is based on Lanzmann’s memoir “The Patagonian Hare” – which, read by Ribot himself, provides the voiceover to the film – and utilizes footage taken from 220 hours of outtakes from “Shoah.” The memoir gave Ribot “the possibility of seeing the train of thoughts of [Lanzmann] and the ingredients that he needed in order to make such an opus, which is his determination and courage,” he says.

The challenge for Lanzmann, Ribot explains, was that most of the camps had been obliterated.

As Berlinale contends and, even worse, complies with the German government’s censorship against expressing Palestinian liberation, the festival programmers are spotlighting perhaps the greatest cinematic work when it comes to illuminating historical persecution and genocide. Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour 1985 masterwork Shoah is part of the 2025 Berlinale Special programme and it will screen alongside the world premiere of Guillaume Ribot’s All I Had Was Nothingness, a new documentary capturing Lanzmann’s 12-year pursuit to tell the untold story of the Holocaust, using only the director’s words and never-before-seen footage.

Ahead of the new screening, mk2 Films has released a new trailer and poster for Shoah, the latter created by acclaimed Polish designer Aleksander Walijewski. “The artwork captures that it is only through the collective gaze of the many individuals featured in the film over the course of its 9 hours and 30 minutes that makes it possible to begin to...

France’s mk2 Films has boarded Lionel Baier’s 2025 Berlin Competition selection The Safe House (La Cache) and is launching international sales at EFM.

The comedy is about a nine-year-old boy living with his family of eccentric contemporary artists in their Parisian apartment during the famous French student protests in May 1968 who discovers a hidden secret dating back to the Second World War. The family drama is adapted from Christophe Boltanski’s novel of the same name inspired by his own life.

It is Swiss filmmaker Baier’s follow-upto Continental Drift (South) which premiered in Directors’ Fortnight in 2022.

“Lionel Baier...

Ahead of the Berlinale 2025 taking place February 13-23, they’ve unveiled their lineups for Berlinale Special, Panorama, Generation and Forum sections. Highlights include confirmation of Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 alongside Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day, Ancestral Visions of the Future from This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, a documentary on the making of Shoah, a new Jacob Elordi-led series from Justin Kurzel, and more.

See the lineup below via Deadline and check back for the competition lineup next week.

Berlinale Special

Ancestral Visions of the Future

by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese | with Siphiwe Nzima, Sobo Bernard, Zaman Mathejane, Mochesane Edwin Kotsoane, Rehauhetsoe Ernest Kotsoane

France / Lesotho / Germany / Saudi Arabia 2025

Berlinale Special | World premiere | Documentary form

A poetic allegory of the filmmaker Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s childhood, an ode to cinema and an inner nod to his mother. Through fragmented narratives and mythic imagery,...

The Berlin Film Festival has confirmed that Bong Joon Ho‘s highly anticipated Mickey 17, the director’s first feature since his historic Oscar sweep with Parasite, will have its international premiere out of competition in Berlin. The film will bow first in South Korea on Jan. 28, and will roll out in the U.S. on March 7. Warner Bros. is releasing the film worldwide.

The Robert Pattinson-starrer will get a Berlinale Special gala screening at the 2025 Berlinale. The sci-fi film features an ensemble cast including Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo alongside Pattinson.

Dylan Southern’s family drama The Thing With Feathers, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, also secured a Berlinale Special slot. The adaptation of Max Porter’s novel follows a father grappling with his wife’s sudden death while raising their young children.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the upcoming series from Australian director Justin Kurzel (The Order,...

The Berlin Film Festival has confirmed that Bong Joon Ho’s Robert Pattinson movie “Mickey 17” will play at the festival, in the Berlinale Special section, alongside a new – and equally glitzy — addition, Justin Kurzel‘s series “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” starring Jacob Elordi.

Variety first reported last week that “Mickey 17” would have its international premiere at Berlinale.

“The Narrow Road of the Deep North” will world premiere at the festival. Adapted from Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel, the highly anticipated series stars Elordi as a celebrated World War II hero who is haunted by his experiences in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and memories of an affair that took place just before the war.

Also joining the Berlinale Special roster is “The Thing with Feathers,” Dylan Southern’s film starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Richard Boxall. The movie, which will have its European premiere at the fest,...

Aussie filmmaker Justin Kurzel’s series adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, starring Jacob Elordi, will screen at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North was among several titles added to Berlin’s lineup this morning.

The festival describes the series as a “riveting new Australian drama” about a WWII hero haunted by his past. The show will screen as a Berlinale Special Gala. Also in Specials strand is The Thing with Feathers starring Benedict Cumberbatch. The pic screens at Berlin following a debut bow at Sundance and is from filmmaker Dylan Southern. The pic is an adaption of Max Porter’s novel about a grieving father wrestling with the sudden death of his wife while also raising their young children. As previously reported, Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 will also screen. Scroll down...

Mk2 Films has taken on international sales rights for Frenchdrama Enzodirected by Robin Campillo, who stepped in todirect the feature after his friend and the film’s co-writer Laurent Cantet died unexpectedly in April of last year.

Anatomy Of A Fall producer Marie-Ange Luciani of Les Films de Pierre produces the film shot in and set in La Ciotat in the south of France. It follows a 16-year-old boy who defies his bourgeois family’s expectations by starting a masonry apprenticeship where he meets a charismatic Ukrainian colleague who shakes up his world. Newcomers Eloy Pohu and Maksym Slivinskyi star...

Some movies are just too long, but it's truly special when a movie feels like it will never end. There are plenty of great three-hour movies that don't feel like their runtime (Lawrence of Arabia and the first two Godfather films are perhaps the easiest to mention), so it's not like making a three-hour movie automatically means that it's going to be too long. Shoah is one of the most powerful documentaries of all time, and that's about nine and a half hours long (acclaimed critic Roger Ebert watched it all in one viewing).

Depicting the scale and scope of the Holocaust, undeniably the gravest example of inhumanity ever to take place, is a daunting task for any filmmaker. There exists a duty to be completely honest in presenting the facts and honor the memory of those whose lives were taken away by mass killing on an industrial scale. Reporting the information to a viewing audience and detailing the experiences of those who endured unspeakable barbarism ensures that we never forget what occurred.

Several documentaries have dealt with the Holocaust. Night and Fog, directed by Alain Resnais, was one of the first and utilized juxtaposition through archival footage and color photography of the camps as they appeared less than a decade after their liberation. Shoah, a documentary made up entirely of interviews with oppressors and victims alike, is one of the most notable examples of oral tradition.

One of the most harrowing efforts to...

In 1961, a key architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, was tried in Israel and sentenced to death. An odd thing happened. Officials didn’t want to bury him and risk creating a shrine, so they decided on cremation. That is strictly against the Jewish religion and there were no crematoria in the country.

So Shlomi Zebco (played by Tzahi Grad), a former Israeli paramilitary soldier who owns a commercial oven factory, was asked by the government to make one big enough to incinerate Hitler’s former top lieutenant, handing him a manual with instructions – in German. Zebco’s assistant realized with horror the model was used in Nazi death camps.

The story is told from three points of view: of a 13-year-old Jewish Libyan boy who is kicked out of school, finds a job at the factory and helps build the oven; Eichmann’s guard, a Moroccan Jew tasked with...

Green Border.Agnieszka Holland begs to differ with Claude Lanzmann. The director of Shoah (1985) had attacked the idea of depicting the Holocaust in a fiction film, claiming that its unfathomable horrors would inevitably be trivialized. In a 2013 National Gallery of Art lecture, “Viewing History through the Filmmaker’s Lens,” Holland made two counter-arguments: that feature films are a tool to educate as many people as possible about the Holocaust, and that “taking on issues that are impossible to explain or grasp rationally is one of the most important challenges of an artist.” Holland had made a number of provocative Holocaust dramas, including Angry Harvest (1985), Europa Europa (1990), and In Darkness (2011), all of which involve the plight of Jews who have improbably escaped capture and death. With these films, Holland looked back at events from decades in the past. In her latest film, she is dramatizing history while it is unfolding.Urgent without sacrificing artistry,...

No major film festival is complete without at least one Love Letter To Cinema™ from a filmmaker of some renown, to advocate the joys of the medium to an audience that doesn’t have to be told twice. French writer-director and Cannes regular Arnaud Desplechin brings that to the Croisette this year with “Filmlovers!,” a duly warm and nostalgia-washed cine-valentine, but one with a little more to say than just, “Movies, amirite?” Indeed, the film’s somewhat inelegant English-language title risks concealing the more specific focus of this unassuming but winning hybrid documentary: The French title, “Spectateurs!,” makes clear this is first and foremost a celebration of spectatorship rather than filmmaking, probing the dynamics of cinema audiences and their relationship to the screen. In either language, it’s impassioned enough to earn its exclamation point.

Not a major work but a bright, pleasurable one, with its director on more limber...

For his tenth Cannes feature premiere, Arnaud Desplechin chose to present a docu-fictional love letter to cinema. Two years after Brother and Sister was in Competition, Spectateurs (or Filmlovers!) is one of the festival’s Special Screenings, an effervescent walk down memory lane with a director who has helped shape contemporary French cinema for the better. It’s not hard for a Frenchman to be a cinephile––almost everyone is trained in film knowledge, either formally or informally, as part of their cultural upbringing. But Filmlovers! manages to set itself apart from all the other meta-documentaries or essays about how cinema made their director the person they are today. Instead it is both an honest and highly poetic feature that quite naturally absorbs film and literary references to address the structural role cinema has played for both Desplechin himself and our way of viewing the world.

Filmlovers! is narrated by Paul Dédalus,...

If an animated film turns up in the Competition at Cannes, chances are it’s not going to be another Bambi — although, if it were made today, the traumatic shooting of Bambi’s mother would certainly tickle the selection committee. No, Cannes prefers its animation to be skewed towards adults, like René Lalou’s surreal sci-fi Fantastic Planet (1973), Robert Taylor’s raunchy sequel The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat (1974) or Ari Folman’s wartime docudrama Waltz with Bashir (2008). And with The Most Precious of Cargoes, actor turned director and now graphic artist Michel Hazanavicius has turned to the most controversial topic it is possible to approach with pen and ink: the Holocaust.

Five long years in the making, Hazanavicius’s adaptation of the 2019 novel by Jean-Claude Grumberg arrives in Cannes two years after the death of its narrator, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and, unfortunately, a year after the debut of Jonathan Glazer...

Competing for Cannes’ top prize, The Most Precious of Cargoes deploys animation to tell a semi-contemporary fairy tale about a lost baby girl who is thrown from a train bound for Auschwitz and found in the snow by a childless woodcutter’s wife. It’s the latest feature by French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius, who’s been a favorite of the Cannes programmers ever since his cinephile- and crowd-pleasing serio-comic pastiche The Artist (2011) broke him onto the international stage, going on to scoop up awards — including a best picture Oscar — and box-office records (for a near-silent film, at least) worldwide.

Sadly, Hazanavicius’ subsequent films haven’t enjoyed the same success. This latest effort, however, might just be his most commercially viable in a while since Holocaust films nearly always travel. Its portability is only enhanced by it being animated, making it easy to dub this for different territories. If nothing else,...

MK2 Films has acquired worldwide rights, including France, to French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s films, including his landmark documentary about the Holocaust, “Shoah,” which is inscribed in Unesco’s Memory of the World register. The deal was signed with Les Films Aleph.

“Shoah,” considered one of the most important works in world cinema, tells the story of the genocide of European Jews by the Nazis during World War II. With a duration of nine and a half hours, it is the result of 12 years of research, giving voice to the protagonists of the concentration camps — survivors, perpetrators and bystanders. It was edited over five years from 230 hours of footage and virtually no archival images. The film, first released in 1985, won two BAFTA awards. It is available in a restored 4K version.

In addition to “Shoah,” the agreement also includes five other films by the French filmmaker and writer: “The Karski Report...

When Jonathan Glazer began developing the project that became The Zone of Interest — nominated for five Oscars, including best picture and best international feature — he and producer James Wilson began to ask a series of questions that would require them to find the rationale behind making another film that depicts the events of the Holocaust.

The subject has been well-worn cinematic territory before and after Schindler’s List took best picture three decades ago — becoming the first film about the subject to win the Academy’s top prize. Both Glazer and Wilson knew that they had to do something completely different than what came before them, and Wilson tells THR the pair were less interested in depicting the extermination of European Jews than they were focused on grappling with the culture that contributed to those atrocities.

Using Martin Amis’ 2014 novel as their template — the book tells three interwoven stories surrounding the fictional commandant of Auschwitz,...

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission.

It was only a few days ago that the Criterion Collection had a surprise flash sale. The home video company’s entire catalog was slashed down to 50% off list prices. While that sale only lasted for 24 hours, there are a number of titles that are still on sale for half-off at Amazon.

We rounded up the best deals on Criterion Collection releases, including Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing,” Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider,” Whit Stillman’s “The Last Days of Disco” and much more. In fact, even a few boxed sets are half off, such as Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “The Dekalog” and Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology.

Ahead, check out the best Criterion Blu-ray discs currently on sale for 50% off at Amazon:

‘Do the Right Thing...

’No Me Llame Ternera’ features interview with a former leader of the Basque terrorist group Eta.

The San Sebastian Film Festival has rejected public calls for it to withdraw a Netflix documentary from its line-up that features an exclusive interview with a former leader of Basque terrorist group Eta.

Directed by Jordi Évole and Màrius Sánchez, No Me Llame Ternera is set to open the festival’s Made in Spain section on September 22.

The documentary explores some of Eta’s decisive moments until it disbanded in 2018, and has an interview between Évole and Josu Urrutikoetxea, also known as Josu Ternera,...

The San Sebastian Film Festival has issued a statement standing by its decision to screen a Netflix-backed documentary about Josu Urrutikoetxea, the former leader of the Basque separatist militant group Eta.

The documentary entitled No me llame Ternera revolves around an exclusive interview between renowned Spanish journalist Jordi Évole and Urrutikoetxea, who goes by the nickname of Josu Ternera. The title translates as “Don’t call me Ternera”.

Over its 60-year history, Eta killed 883 people as part of its campaign to create a separate Basque state northern Spain and southwest France, before it was dissolved in 2018.

On the run for 16 years, Urrutikoetxea was arrested in France in May 2019 having been found guilty in absentia of being a member of a terror group. He was acquitted in a retrial in 2021 for lack of evidence.

The inclusion of No me llame Ternera as the opening film of San Sebastian’s Made...

Hara Kazuo’s Minamata Mandala is a testament to how the body becomes politicized when it’s subjected to the ruinous practices of industry. The documentary’s overall effect is similar to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah for its painstaking interest in the aftermath of human-made catastrophe, and its refusal to sentimentalize or exploit those whose lives have been inexorably altered—and in many cases defined—by corporate malfeasance and corruption.

Minamata disease, a neurological disorder caused by mercury poisoning, gets its name from the Japanese city where it was first discovered. Starting in the 1930s, a chemical factory owned by Chisso Corporation began releasing toxic chemicals into industrial wastewater, and five years after the factory, in 1951, changed the co-catalyst in its acetaldehyde-producing system, of which mercury is a byproduct, the first case of what is now known as the disease was detected.

Divided into three parts, Minamata Mandala begins, following...

Whether or not you agree with Quentin Tarantino’s unsparing assertion that “’80s cinema is, along with the ’50s, the worst era in Hollywood history,” there’s a curiously undeniable truth to his follow-up statement: “Matched only by now! Matched only by the current era.” Revisiting the defining movies of the ’80s from our current perspective at the height of Barbenheimer summer, two things become abundantly clear.

The first is that modern Hollywood would probably need a Barbenheimer every month in order to equal the creative output of a studio system that used to be capable of releasing “Blade Runner” and “The Thing” on the same night as if it were just another Friday. The second is that, in a wide variety of different ways both negative and not, the ’80s provide a perfect match for the movies of our current moment — if not the current moment itself.

Perhaps that...

With his latest film “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan has returned to war; World War II, specifically. Although the J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic doesn’t feature any scenes of soldiers heading into battle, it’s a war movie at its heart, with the conflict in Europe and Asia motivating the morally reprehensible actions of the Manhattan Project in the States. “Oppenheimer” makes, in some ways, a good companion piece to Nolan’s 2016 hit “Dunkirk”: a more conventional (relatively speaking) depiction of the war, from the perspectives of the ordinary soldiers during the Dunkirk evacuation.

From the moment it ended, World War II has proven fertile ground for hundreds of directors, as Hollywood stars have geared up to fight some Nazis. But, perhaps due to the relative recency and large scope of the conflict, the war has also invited an unexpected level of nuance and diversity of perspectives. One of the earliest...

Italian actor-turned-director Andrea Di Stefano, whose sleek cop thriller “Last Night of Amore” just had its U.S. premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, is in advanced stages of development on “Karski” a feature about Jan Karski, the World War II Polish resistance fighter who risked his life to blow the whistle on the Holocaust.

Di Stefano’s high-profile project, which is titled “Karski,” is being developed by New York City-based production company Phiphen Pictures, the indie founded by Molly Conners most recently behind Netflix’s “Like Father” and “It’s Bruno!,” the director said. Italy’s expanding Indiana Production, which shepherded “Amore,” is also on board.

Karski in 1942, defying great danger, twice infiltrated Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto to witness its horrors and managed to give first-hand accounts of the Holocaust from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Allies, including U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943. But his alarm cries fell on deaf ears.

Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. A24 releases the film in select theaters on Friday, December 15.

Holocaust cinema has so implicitly existed in the shadow of a single question that it would no longer seem worth asking if not for the fact that it’s never been answered: How do you depict an atrocity? The most urgent and indelible examples of the form offer equally simple yet perfectly contradictory responses. Documentaries like “Shoah” and Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” suggest that you don’t, while historical epics like “Schindler’s List” insist that you must. If the latter argues that seeing is believing, the former maintains that seeing wouldn’t help — that some things are too unfathomable for the human eye to comprehend from a distance, and can only hope to be understood by their absence. A tsunami might not seem much bigger than...

We walk among ghosts in cities, storied urban constructs with layers of misty memories one can sense in their distinct smells, and perceive in their dated cracks and imperfections. There are hundreds of thousands of such ghosts that haunt Steve McQueen’s audacious documentary essay “Occupied City,” a 2023 Cannes premiere that is as much a hypnotizing and cumulatively disquieting cinematic artifact about the Holocaust and World War II-era Amsterdam as it is a stubbornly single-minded historical art installation.

The simplest way to describe “Occupied City” would be calling it an extensive guided tour of Amsterdam’s past that uses Bianca Stigter’s book, “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945)” as a compass. McQueen’s camera travels through 130 specific addresses in the present-day of his adopted town. Let’s call it near-present-day to be exact — “Occupied City” strolls through the Dutch capital mostly during the earliest days of the Covid lockdown,...

Over the past 15 years, Steve McQueen has become one of my favorite filmmakers. He’s made only a handful of features, but in almost every case he takes a subject of extraordinary magnitude and uses it to box open your heart and mind. And he does it all with a storytelling vibrance that’s at once heady and populist. So when it was announced that McQueen would be directing his first documentary feature, and that it would tackle the subject of the Holocaust, dealing with the victims of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam (the city where McQueen now lives), my anticipation took the form of thinking: How, with a director of McQueen’s skill and imagination and gravity, could this be less than fascinating?

But “Occupied City,” it’s my sad duty to report, is a good deal less than fascinating. I’ll be blunt: The film is a trial to sit through,...

In cinematic form, how do you tell history without archive footage? Occupied City shows how it can be done, and to what effect.

Steve McQueen’s audacious documentary, which premiered at Cannes on Wednesday in the festival’s Special Screenings section, undertakes a portrait of Amsterdam during the Dutch city’s occupation by the Nazis from 1940-45. But it does so without making use of a single frame of film or stills from the era itself – no German tanks rumbling over the thoroughfares, no jackbooted troops on patrol, no black-and-white imagery of terrified civilians running for safety.

Director Steve McQueen

The remarkably bold approach, instead, uses only scenes of Amsterdam today while a narrator (Melanie Hyams) recounts in almost clinical fashion what took place virtually door to door and street to street during the Nazi occupation. For instance, at the opulent Concertgebouw we learn the invaders took a shine to...

While we’ve known the results of Jeanne Dielman Tops Sight and Sound‘s 2022 Greatest Films of All-Time List”>Sight & Sound’s once-in-a-decade greatest films of all-time poll for a few months now, the recent release of the individual ballots has given data-crunching cinephiles a new opportunity to dive deeper. We have Letterboxd lists detailing all 4,400+ films that received at least one vote and another expanding the directors poll, spreadsheets calculating every entry, and now a list ranking how many votes individual directors received for their films.

Tabulated by Genjuro, the list of 35 directors, with two pairs, puts Alfred Hitchcock back on top, while Chantal Akerman is at number two. Elsewhere in the top ten are David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Orson Welles, Yasujirō Ozu, and Stanley Kubrick, and tied for the tenth spot is Wong Kar Wai and Ingmar Bergman.

Check out the list below,...

One of my earliest cinematic memories came from watching the films of Jennifer Jason Leigh. The actress has given countless performances that are utterly stunning. I was utterly taken in by films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Hitcher, The Big Picture, Rush, Single White Female, and many others. And as of late, she has grown to be one of the most versatile and talented performers working today, with movies like The Hateful Eight and Possessor. Now, she performs stunningly in the second and final season of Hunters.

Speaking to someone who has long held a high spot in your list of favorite actors, it was a joy to take a moment with Jennifer. She opened up about taking on the role of Chava Apfelbaum and working with series creator David Weil. It may have been brief, but I chatted with the great Jennifer Jason Leigh. And, of course,...

U.S. director-producer Laura Poitras, who won an Oscar and an Emmy with Edward Snowden film “Citizenfour,” and recently took the Golden Lion at Venice with opioid epidemic pic “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” will be the Guest of Honor at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. The 35th edition of the festival takes place from Nov. 9 to 20.

Poitras will be honored at IDFA with the Retrospective and Top 10 programs, in which she curates 10 films. The Top 10 program includes reflections on political imprisonment (“Hunger” by Steve McQueen; “This Is Not a Film” by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb), incarceration and psychiatry (Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies”), and genocide (Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”). As part of the Top 10, Poitras will be in conversation with several of her selected filmmakers during the festival’s public talks program.

In the Retrospective section, IDFA presents all seven films directed by Poitras from 2003 to today.

Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras will be guest of honor at the 35th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), running from November 9 to 20.

Poitras is currently on a packed festival tour with All The Beauty And The Bloodshed, which won the Golden Lion in Venice and is now an awards season contender. After Venice, the title screened in Toronto and has dates set for New York and the BFI London Film Festival.

As guest of honor at IDFA, Poitras will be feted with a retrospective and has also been given carte blanche to curate 10 films that have influenced her work and shaped her view of the world.

Her Top 10 selections include Steve McQueen’s Hunger, Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s This is Not A Film, Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.

As part of the sidebar, Poitras will also conduct on-stage conversations with a number of the selected filmmakers.

Click here to read the full article.

Laura Poitras, the Oscar-winning director of Citizenfour, whose latest doc, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, will be this year’s guest of honor at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).

IDFA will host a retrospective of Poitras’ work, screening all 7 documentaries she has directed, from her 2003 feature debut Flag Wars, made in collaboration with artist Linda Goode Bryant, a cinéma vérité film on the gentrification of a working-class African American neighborhood by white gays and lesbians, to All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which follows the career of photographer and artist Nan Goldin and her campaign to hold Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family responsible for the opioid addiction crisis. Poitras is perhaps best known for her portraits of Edward Snowden (the Oscar-winning Citizenfour) and Julian Assange (2016’s Risk).

Poitras will also curate...

Steven Spielberg's most highly acclaimed film, "Schindler's List," pivoted away from the summer blockbusters for which the director was known and into more serious territory, dealing head-on with the Holocaust. Though it won the Academy Award for Best Picture and the American Film Institute recognized it with a Top 10 spot on its list of the greatest movies of all time, Spielberg's dramatization of World War II genocide still faced criticism from some quarters, including fellow filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, known for his own sober, BFI-recognized Holocaust documentary, "Shoah." Spielberg, who comes from an Orthodox Jewish background, was therefore no stranger to hearing from detractors when he took on another project dealing with Jewish history in his...

The post Steven Spielberg Knew He Was Walking Into A 'Minefield' By Directing Munich appeared first on /Film.

Isabella Rossellini in The Rabbit Hunters

Guy Maddin’s The Rabbit Hunters, co-directed with Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, stars Isabella Rossellini as a “merged version” of Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina. Marcello Mastroianni and a red scarf, David Niven in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter Of Life And Death (aka Stairway To Heaven), commissions and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Luis Buñuel and a line from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Héctor Babenco’s widow Barbara Paz and her dance to Singin’ In The Rain, Ella Emhoff and knitted pants - all came up after Guy Maddin shared with me his memories of Bertrand Tavernier, who died in Paris at the age of 79 on March 25, 2021, the date of our conversation.

Guy Maddin with Anne-Katrin Titze: “Fellini and Giulietta Masina are merged together so often in Fellini’s dreams …”

“Last night I dreamt that I was alive again,” we...

Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah director Adam Benzine: “It’s really a film about how Shoah was the making of Claude Lanzmann.” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

When Claude Lanzmann passed away in Paris on the morning of July 5, 2018, Arnaud Desplechin and Antonin Baudry sent tributes in honour of the man who directed the documentaries Shoah, The Last Of The Unjust, Napalm, Israel, Why, and Shoah: Four Sisters (Les Quatre Soeurs). Adam Benzine’s revealing Oscar-nominated Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah shows us the man who was behind the making of one of the most important films in the history of cinema.

Adam Benzine with Anne-Katrin Titze on Claude Lanzmann: “He fought in the resistance as a teenager, he was a lover of Simone de Beauvoir, he was in Algeria with Sartre and Nelson Algren.”

After Adam interviewed Albert Maysles, Robert Drew, Michael Apted, D A Pennebaker for a book on documentarians,...

Oscar-nominated documentary “Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah” is the first Academy Award nominee to be released as an Nft (non-fungible token).

The film, which examines the life and work of the “Shoah” director, was a contender in the 2016 documentary short Oscar race and aired on HBO; however, it’s never been made available for public purchase, either physically or digitally.

Enter the Nft: the latest fad in digital commerce. The tokens effectively provide a method of authenticating a piece of digital content, based on blockchain technology, allowing anyone to trace it back to the original owner. In this way, it certifies and tracks the ownership of a unique digital asset.

The market for NFTs has skyrocketed in recent weeks, as some buyers have speculated that the value of their NFTs could appreciate in value. Last week, a piece of digital artwork by Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist known as Beeple,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Siân Heder's Coda (2021). The winners of this year's Sundance Film Festival have been announced, with Siân Heder's Coda and Questlove's Summer of Soul sweeping the top prizes. Chloé Zhao's Nomadland, David Fincher's Mank, and Jason Woliner's Borat Subsequent Moviefilm lead the Golden Globe film nominations, also announced today. See more hereThe international jury of the 71st Berlinale includes six previous winners of the Golden Bear: Mohammad Rasoulof, Nadav Lapid, Adina Pintilie, Ildikó Enyedi, Gianfranco Rosi and, finally, Jasmila Žbanić. The festival's industry event will be taking place March 1-5, with a "summer special" taking place in June. More information has emerged regarding Tilda Swinton and Joanna Hogg's next collaboration, The Eternal Daughter. Executive-produced by Martin Scorsese and filmed in Wales during lockdown, the film follows a middle-aged daughter and...

The late Luke Holland directed and produced film over 10 years.

Focus Features announced on International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27) it has picked up worldwide rights excluding Israel to Participant’s Holocaust documentary Final Account.

Directed and produced by the late Luke Holland over the course of 10 years, the film premiered in Venice last year.

The Final Account presents a portrait of the last living generation of people who participated in the Third Reich, and contains interviews with a range of subjects from members of the SS to civilians.

John Battsek and Riete Oord also serve as producers, while Participant’s...

“I consider Shoah to be the greatest documentary about contemporary history ever made, bar none, and by far the greatest film I’ve ever seen about the Holocaust.”

– Marcel Ophuls

Ten years after IFC Films theatrically re-released the epic documentary, Shoah arrives on demand platforms in the United States & Canada in March 2021. Check out this new trailer:

Fc Films announced today that they will be digitally releasing Claude Lanzmann’s landmark Holocaust documentary Shoah on March 2, 2021, marking the first time that the film will be available to own digitally and for rent in the United States and Canada.

Twelve years in the making, Shoah is Lanzmann’s monumental epic on the Holocaust and features interviews with survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators in 14 countries. The film does not contain any historical footage but rather features interviews which seek to “reincarnate” the Jewish tragedy and also visits places where the crimes took place.

Cambodian director Rithy Panh survived the brutal Khmer Rouge regime that took the lives of many of his friends and family. His latest film “Irradiated,” which premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, does not shy away from human horrors like those he experienced in his youth.

The film pieces together brutal black-and-white archival war footage spread across a tryptic of panels, juxtaposing footage of Hitler with the devastation of Hiroshima and a basket of decapitated heads, or executions and mass burials.

“Irradiated” is a difficult, visceral viewing experience — an artistic choice that Panh pondered seriously, he said in a recent masterclass at the Sarajevo Film Festival moderated by Variety.

“Of course there’s a moral question. Why do you want to show this body? It’s possible to show a body, or not to. It’s a difficult [decision]” in both the selection and editing process, Panh acknowledges.

A new wave of jam bands on YouTube reminds this Deadhead of the film that launched a thousand grooves

Read all the What I’m really watching choicesThe best arts and entertainment during self-isolation

You know the old Twilight Zone episode, when Burgess Meredith plays a bibliophile survives an H-bomb attack only to shatter his glasses? Well, my current situation is hardly that dire – even living so worryingly close to New York City’s Covid-19 epicentre, Elmhurst hospital. But there is considerable irony that my social calendar has been erased just as my ability to concentrate for anything longer than a haiku is shot.

I have access to as much high-investment/high-reward cinema as I could ever stream. But let’s be real: it ain’t happening. The link to the recent Lav Diaz film shall remain unclicked, as will the one for An Elephant Sitting Still. Now isn’t...

“I do think as you get older, it’s inevitable that you repeat yourself,” says Rob Brydon. “This is the fourth time we’ve been on one of these jaunts.” His dining companion Steve Coogan, who’s been digging lustily into a plate of braised lamb, shakes his head. “Originality is overrated. Everything’s derivative.” Just look at The Aenid — it’s “the greatest poem of the Roman Empire, and that was a rip-off.” By the time these two comedians are served dessert, they’re bickering over Coogan’s level...

Director Agnieszka Holland pulls off a difficult task — her true-life Holocaust tale neither trivializes the horror nor glamorizes individualized victims at the expense of the big picture. Marco Hofschneider is the inexperienced German teenager who by strange quirks of fate becomes a staunch Stalinist in a Communist school, then a Nazi war hero and candidate for Hitler Youth honors and adoption by a Nazi officer… if he can avoid being uncovered as a Jew in hiding. It sounds tasteless but it’s not — the true story of Solomon Perel reveals the ‘fluidity’ of ideology when survival is on the line. Our young hero must keep ‘becoming’ what he pretends to be. With André Wilms, René Hofschneider and Julie Delpy as a rabid Hitlerite.

Europa Europa

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 985

1990 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 112 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date July 9, 2019 / 39.95

Starring: Marco Hofschneider, André Wilms, René Hofschneider, Julie Delpy,...

A stark contrast from triumphalist Allied narratives of World War II, Elem Klimov’s spellbinding Belarus-set masterpiece Come and See–now playing in a beautiful new restoration from Janus Films–tells a harrowing story of the Eastern Front from the perspective of those for whom victory against the Nazis came at far too steep a price.

Based on Ales Adamovich’s painstakingly researched historical novel I Am from the Fiery Village (the author also co-wrote the screenplay with Klimov), Come and See follows Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), a young boy from rural Belarus seeking to enlist with the Soviet Partisans, eager for martial glory even as he ignores warnings of impending doom. Once war breaks out, Flyora’s reality begins to warp and fold in on itself as he bears harrowing witness to the Nazis’ war crimes and the existential horror of total war.

Klimov’s technique, and thus the film...