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Japanese black-and-white film Teki Cometh took the top Tokyo Grand Prix prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

The film also won Best Director for Yoshida Daihachi and Best Actor for Nagatsuka Kyozo.

Teki Cometh is based on a novel by Tsutsui Yasutaka. The film follows Watanabe Gisuke, a 77-year-old widower and retired college professor of French literature, living alone in an old Japanese-style house his grandfather had built. However, one day, an unsettling message appears on his computer saying that the enemy is coming.

The festival’s Special Jury Prize went to Colombian film Adios Amigo by Ivan D. Gaona.

Anamaria Vartolomei from Traffic took the Best Actress prize.

Chinese film My Friend An Delie, the debut feature by actor-director Dong Zijian, received the award for Best Artistic Contribution.

The Audience Award went to Yang Lina’s Big World, which follows Chunhu, who has cerebral palsy. During one summer,...

Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) will present a Lifetime Achievement Award to Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr in recognition of his “extraordinary career and long-standing contributions to the film industry”.

The award will be presented during a Special Talk event at the festival, featuring Bela Tarr and Japanese filmmaker Yoji Yamada, to be held on November 1 at the festival’s Tokyo Midtown Hibiya venue. TIFF is taking place October 28-November 6.

Bela Tarr’s credits include the 438-minute film Satantang, which received the Berliner Zeitung Reader’s Jury award at Berlin film festival in 1994; Werckmeister Harmonies, which premiered in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 2000, and The Turin Horse, which won the Silver Bear Jury Grand Prix and the Fipresci Prize at Berlin in 2011. Since then, he has been working to foster the next generation of filmmakers by establishing a film school in Sarajevo.

In February 2024, Bela Tarr led a filmmaking workshop in Fukushima Prefecture in Japan,...

The Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) has announced they will present renowned Hungarian director Béla Tarr with a lifetime achievement award at this year’s event. Tarr is known for groundbreaking films that changed the style of international cinema. His four and a half hour long 1994 movie “Satantango” was an early work that captured global attention for its unique storytelling and visuals.

Ichiyama Shozo, TIFF’s programming head, recalled “Satantango” screening over 20 years ago saying it “broke boundaries of traditional films through its distinct pacing and kept viewers engaged for its full runtime.”

Throughout his decades long career, Tarr’s films have been selected for major festivals around the world. His 2000 film “Werckmeister Harmonies” played at the Directors’ Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival in France. In 2011, “The Turin Horse” won both the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize and a critic’s award at the Berlin International Film Festival in Germany.

The Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) has unveiled Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr as the recipient of its lifetime achievement award for the upcoming 37th edition of the festival.

Tarr, known for his distinctive cinematic style, gained international recognition with his 438-minute film “Satantango” (1994), which earned him an award at the Berlinale. His 2000 film “Werckmeister Harmonies” screened in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, while “The Turin Horse” (2011) won the Silver Bear Jury Grand Prix and the Fipresci Prize at the Berlinale.

Since announcing his retirement from feature filmmaking after “The Turin Horse,” Tarr has focused on educating the next generation of filmmakers. He established the film.factory school in Sarajevo in 2012 and has conducted workshops worldwide.

The 37th TIFF will showcase short films created during a recent workshop led by Tarr in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. The festival will also host a special talk event featuring Tarr and present the lifetime achievement...

From Caligula to Forrest Gump and My Neighbour Totoro, rereleases are hitting the big screen once again – and are proving lucrative at the box office

Glance at the lineup of films at your local cinema and you might briefly believe you have passed through a time portal. Stirring athletics biopic Chariots of Fire sits cheek by jowl with schmaltzy Tom Hanks fable Forrest Gump; magical Japanese animation My Neighbour Totoro finds houseroom next to melancholic Hungarian art film Werckmeister Harmonies; 1990s action yarn The Mummy galumphs alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid 70s classic The Conversation. The surge of reissues and restorations appears unstoppable. This week sees the release of a new edit of the notoriously sleazy Caligula, first released in 1979, with the Tex-Mex crime story Lone Star (1996) and Coraline (2009) to follow shortly.

Previously they were largely the preserve of organisations such as the BFI making archive treasures available on the big screen,...

Comedy animation Harold And The Purple Crayon heads the new releases at this weekend’s UK-Ireland box office, opening in 595 cinemas through Sony.

The live-action/animation fantasy comedy is adapted from Crockett Johnson’s 1955 children’s book of the same name, with the film serving as a sequel to the book.

Harold And The Purple Crayon follows a character in a book who can make anything come to life by drawing it; and who draws himself off the book’s pages and into the physical world.

Zachary Levi leads the cast, which also includes Lil Rel Howery, Zooey Deschanel, Jemaine Clement,...

Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s 2000 film moves slowly around a small town where a very strange circus has arrived. Its eerie power has only grown in a time of rising fascism

Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr and his co-director and editor Ágnes Hranitzky now have their 2000 film rereleased, 24 years on as part of a career retrospective; it is an eerie monochrome vision of power, group hysteria, cosmological breakdown and the end of the world. When I first saw this film I responded to what might be called its spiritual aspect, its mystery, its unknowability, and of course its distinctive style: the extended dream-tempo takes, the murmuringly restrained dialogue achieved through overdubbing and the long trudging walks through an unforgiving landscape. There is a quite extraordinary closeup sequence in which two men simply walk together down a city street in wordless silence, for minute after minute, their faces juxtaposed in semi-profile. That...

Disney’s “Deadpool & Wolverine” made a splash in its debut weekend, earning £17.3 million ($22.2 million) at the U.K. and Ireland box office, according to numbers from Comscore.

The superhero team-up film easily claimed the top spot and became the highest opener of the year in the territory, outpacing its nearest competitor by a wide margin. Universal’s “Despicable Me 4” held strong in its third week, adding £3.1 million in second spot for a cumulative total of £25.3 million. Warner Bros.’ “Twisters” maintained its position at No. 3, pulling in £1.5 million in its second week for a £7.9 million total.

Disney’s “Inside Out 2,” the previous highest opener of the year, continued its steady performance in its seventh week, crossing the £50 million mark with a £1.1 million weekend in fourth place.

Rounding out the top five, “Longlegs” added £724,320 in its third week for a total of £5.6 million. Further down the chart, Paramount’s...

If Béla Tarr’s mammoth 1994 opus Sátántangó allegorized the fall of communism on Hungary in its depiction of widespread social anomie and grotesque jockeying for power, 2000’s Werckmeister Harmonies (the first of three features on which he receives a co-director credit with wife Ágnes Hranitzky) might be taken as an extreme literalization of Francis Fukuyama’s notion that the end of the Soviet Union represented the so-called “end of history.”

But where Fukuyama’s words summarized a new world order of Westernized democracy and internationally inter-reliant capitalism, Werckmeister Harmonies runs with the idea to apocalyptic ends. Set in a small Hungarian town, the film presents a haunting monochrome world where the overcast gray sky represents the closest thing to full daylight as one can get. Otherwise, everything seems to exist in an inky void of starless night, dotted only by the faint glow of fading streetlights.

Populating this fading world...

Werckmeister Harmonies released in the Criterion Collection on April 16th.

Béla Tarr is an auteur with a reputation befitting the Criterion Collection. The Hungarian filmmaker utilizes beautiful visuals — typically in black and white — and unsettling realism to explore the unpleasant truths of existence. It’s fitting that his first feature to receive a proper physical release in the Criterion Collection is 2000’s whimsical mystery The Werckmeister Harmonies. Even better, we get two for the price of one with the inclusion of his debut feature, Family Nest, included in the special features.

Werckmeister Harmonies Plot

A peculiar circus, consisting of a massive and mysterious whale, sets up shop in the center of a small town. As curious spectators flock to the unconventional attraction, a primal violence bubbles to the surface of the sleepy village.

The Critique

A spectator examines the mysterious whale.

Also Read: Criterion Collection: The Runner Review

Werchmeister Harmonies...

I was very gratified by the response to last year’s interview with Rob Tregenza, a Zelig-like figure of modern cinema. Our very long, multi-Zoom conversation covered a life in film: four features, cherished experiences with Jean-Luc Godard, and hopes he hadn’t reached the end. What I didn’t quite find time for was, and I am embarrassed to even note it, the matter of his shooting stretches of Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies, most notably its iconic opening sequence. By any token this is a major contribution to contemporary cinema for Tregenza’s part and––by that token, at least in my estimation––a major oversight on my own.

With Criterion’s 4K Uhd release of Werckmeister Harmonies arriving this month––about a year since Janus Films’ extremely successful theatrical tour––I figured it was time to ask Tregenza about his experience shooting the film. I did not...

Given the uniqueness and weirdness of the films of Bela Tarr, it's surprising that more of his films are not part of the Criterion collection. Here's hoping that his masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies is but the first. A stark and deeply humanist portrayal of a small town sinking under the weight of its own desperation, it's a singular vision of a dystopian state that has already arrived, even if it's hidden in small parts of the world, and well worthy of a 4K/Blu-ray release. It's what must be a typical evening at the local bar in this (presumably) average town in Hungary, and the barman is calling the rather early closing time of 10pm. But before everyone leaves, they insist that János (Lars Rudolph), of the...

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

The Criterion Collection is constantly curating and adding the best and brightest of cinema to its collection, but its April 2024 is pretty stellar and adds two classic films that haven’t been in the collection previously that really deserved to be there.

The first film added to the collection in April is notable because of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. While Tarr is a giant of international cinema, specifically what’s often referred to as “slow cinema,” the addition of Tarr’s 2000 classic, “Werckmeister Harmonies,” is actually the first of the filmmaker’s movies ever added to the Collection (at least on DVD/Blu-Ray and not counting the Criterion Channel).

Continue reading Criterion Adds ‘I Am Cuba,’ ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ & More For April 2024 at The Playlist.

The Criterion Collection reaches out to encompass more radical works of cinema in April 2024, led by Mathieu Kassovitz's completely unsettling La Haine (1995); the seminal Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), described by Criterion as "a hypnotic parable of societal collapse from auteur Béla Tarr and codirector-editor Ágnes Hranitzky;" the remarkable I Am Cuba (1964) from director Mikhail Kalatozov; Nancy Savoca's under-appreciated Dogfight, starring Lili Taylor and River Phoenix; and Peter Weir's dreamy and mysterious Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), available in 4K. La Haine, Werckmeister Harmonies, and I Am Cuba are also being issued in 4K, so it's a splendid time for world cinema fans to dust off their wallets and indulge. (I say that knowing that April 15 is also looming as an important date...

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

We recently learned that five years after Dragged Across Concrete, S. Craig Zahler will soon announce his next feature. In the meantime, the director has unveiled his favorite music, books, and––most pertinent to this site––films he watched in the past year.

The 21-movie list includes not only his ten favorites of the year but revival screenings as well, including Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s Werckmeister Harmonies, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri, Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, Nagisa Ôshima’s The Pleasures of the Flesh, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.

When it comes to new releases, amongst the favorites of the Bone Tomahawk director were Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, Skinamarink, Godzilla Minus One, the Indian action-thriller Jawan, films by Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Glazer, and the latest in the Saw franchise.

Check out the list below.

Godzilla Minus One...

BÉLA Tarr Gets European Film Honor

Legendary Hungarian director Béla Tarr will receive the Honorary Award from of the Academy President and Board at the European Film Awards on Dec. 9.

“With this award the European Film Academy wishes to pay special tribute to an outstanding director and a personality with a strong political voice, who is not only deeply respected by his colleagues but also celebrated by audiences worldwide,” the Academy said in a press release.

Previous recipients of the award include Manoel de Oliveira, Michel Piccoli, Michael Caine, Andrzej Wajda and Costa-Gavras. Tarr is best known for his films “Damnation” (1988), “Sátántangó” (1994), “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000) and “The Turin Horse” (2011).

‘Tumse Na Ho Payega!’ Goes No. 1 In India

Disney and Hotstar film “Tumse Na Ho Payega!,” starring Ishawk Singh and Mahima Makwana, was the most-viewed film in the Indian Ott space between Oct. 2 and Oct. 8 with 4.6 million views.

The film tells the...

Hungarian director Béla Tarr will receive the Honorary Award of the European Film Academy president and board at the 36th European Film Awards in Berlin on Dec. 9.

“With this award the European Film Academy (Efa) wishes to pay special tribute to an outstanding director and a personality with a strong political voice, who is not only deeply respected by his colleagues but also celebrated by audiences worldwide,” Efa said on Wednesday. “Béla Tarr is the sixth filmmaker to receive this recognition – earlier recipients were Manoel de Oliveira, Michel Piccoli, Sir Michael Caine, Andrzej Wajda and Costa-Gavras.”

Born in Hungary, the auteur started experiments in filmmaking at the age of 16. His feature debut, Family Nest. In 1982, The Prefab People received a special mention at the Locarno Film Festival. Tarr followed that up with Almanac of Fall (1984) and Damnation, which was nominated for the first European Film Awards in 1988.

One of Tarr’s best-known films is Sátántangó,...

Finally, an all-but-lost masterpiece lives again.

Hungarian filmmaker György Fehér, a protégé of his fellow countryman and master director Béla Tarr, died in 2002, but more than two decades later, his strange and stirring anti-mystery “Twilight” has been restored for the world to see.

You might recognize the story of a retiring detective pulled back in for One Last Job as he’s pushed to obsessive ends over a dead girl found missing in an ominous forest. “Twilight” is based on a 1955 novella by Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt that itself was adapted by Sean Penn into the 2001 film “The Pledge,” starring Jack Nicholson as the wizened alcoholic private eye chasing a serial killer who may or may not exist.

In Feher’s “Twilight,” the detective is played by Péter Haumann, and he’s looking for a murderer known only as The Giant and who only seems to exist in scratch drawings...

It’s been a good time to be a Béla Tarr fan. While the Hungarian master hasn’t made a full-fledged new feature since 2011’s The Turin Horse, we’ve seen recent restorations of Damnation, Sátántangó, and Twilight, for which he consulted on. Now, his mesmerizing turn-of-the-century masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies, co-directed with Ágnes Hranitzky, has received a 4K restoration. Following a TIFF premiere last fall, Janus Films will release it in theaters starting later this month and the new trailer has landed.

Here’s the synopsis: “One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown era in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus—complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy,...

"We're not going anywhere. Neither now nor later." Janus Films has unveiled a new official trailer for a 4K restoration re-release of a film from 2000 titled Werckmeister Harmonies, which originally debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in the Directors' Fortnight section. This new 4K version premiered last year at the Toronto & Taipei Golden Horse Film Festivals, and will play in a few art house theaters, starting at Film at Lincoln Center in NYC. Worth catching in the cinema if you have the chance. "Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance." In this, a young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction - featuring a massive stuffed whale and strange man known as "the Prince." The film stars Sandor Bese, Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla, plus many other locals.

Few figures tower over contemporary cinema like Hungarian director Béla Tarr, even though Tarr hasn’t made a film since 2011’s “The Turin Horse.” Now, twenty-three years after its initial release, Tarr’s modern classic “Werckmeister Harmonies” gets a 4K restoration from Janus Films and a theatrical re-release to go with it.

Read More: ‘Twilight’ Trailer: György Fehér’s Underseen 1990 Serial Killer Classic Gets The 4K Treatment In NYC On April 21

Based on László Krasznahorkai‘s 1989 novel “The Melancholy Of Resistance,” “Harmonies” takes Tarr’s signature long-take style in exciting and evermore haunting directions.

Continue reading ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ Trailer: A New 4K Restoration Of Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzsky’s Modern Classic Hits NYC On May 26 at The Playlist.

A trailer has arrived for the 4K restoration of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s 2000 film Werckmeister Harmonies from Janus Films. Based on the 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, the film will be re-released in New York later this month with more cities to follow. An official synopsis reads: One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown […]

The post Trailer Watch: 4K Restoration of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s Werckmeister Harmonies first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A trailer has arrived for the 4K restoration of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s 2000 film Werckmeister Harmonies from Janus Films. Based on the 1989 novel The Melancholy of Resistance by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, the film will be re-released in New York later this month with more cities to follow. An official synopsis reads: One of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies unfolds in an unknown […]

The post Trailer Watch: 4K Restoration of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s Werckmeister Harmonies first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

It’s Béla Tarr season this year, as not only is the Hungarian filmmaking making a rare appearance in the United States for a Los Angeles American Cinematheque retrospective of his work, but Janus Films is also re-releasing his 2000 masterpiece “Werckmeister Harmonies.”

Per distributor Janus Films, one of the major achievements of 21st-century cinema, Béla Tarr’s mesmeric parable of societal collapse is an enigma of transcendent visual, philosophical, and mystical resonance. Adapted from a novel by the celebrated writer and frequent Tarr collaborator László Krasznahorkai, “Werckmeister Harmonies” unfolds in an unknown era in an unnamed village, where, one day, a mysterious circus — complete with an enormous stuffed whale and a shadowy, demagogue-like figure known as the Prince — arrives and appears to awaken a kind of madness in the citizens, which builds inexorably toward violence and destruction. In 39 of his signature long takes, engraved in ghostly black and white, Tarr...

Bleak Week just got a whole lot bleaker.

The American Cinematheque in Los Angeles has set the second edition of its “Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair” series, and this year’s guest of honor will be none other than Béla Tarr, Hungarian master of plumbing the nadirs of the human experience from his last feature “The Turin Horse” to his beloved epic “Sátántangó,” about a farming village in crisis. IndieWire can announce that Tarr will make a rare appearance in the U.S. beginning June 6 at the Aero Theatre for a series of Q&As.

“Hi LA! It will be nice to see you again, after a very long time. I am curious how you are now and what is going on in the town! I hope we will have a good meeting and we will spend a good time together. See you there!” said the filmmaker in a statement shared with IndieWire.

Stateside cinephiles know György Fehér for his collaborations with fellow Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr on his masterpieces “Sátántangó” and “Werckmeister Harmonies.” But the late Fehér was a filmmaker of his own right, although his films prove challenging to see outside his native country.

Read More:

American audiences get a chance to see one of Fehér’s two feature films next month in NYC, when Film Society At Lincoln Center screens a 4k restoration of “Twilight,” Fehér’s 1990 serial killer drama.

Continue reading ‘Twilight’ Trailer: György Fehér’s Underseen 1990 Serial Killer Classic Gets The 4K Treatment In NYC On April 21 at The Playlist.

György Fehér may be best known as a producer on Béla Tarr classic “Sátántangó” and as a collaborator on Tarr’s “Werckmeister Harmonies.” But the fellow Hungarian filmmaker made two feature films of his own, mostly notably 1990’s “Twilight,” about a detective who comes out of retirement to help find a small girl’s killer. The all-but-lost film has mostly been relegated to the realm of torrenting, but now you’ll get a chance to see it burnished on the big screen thanks to a new restoration from Arbelos.

A brand new 4K restoration from the National Film Institute – Hungarian Film Archive and FilmLab, supervised by Gurbán, will make its way to Film at Lincoln Center on April 21. IndieWire has the exclusive trailer for the film below.

After discovering the murdered body of a young girl deep in a mountainous forest, a hardened homicide detective pushes himself to increasingly obsessive...

After last month kicked off with Sight and Sound unveiling of their once-in-a-decade greatest films of all-time poll, detailing the 100 films that made the cut that were led by Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, they’ve now unveiled the full critics’ top 250. While the discourse up until now has featured many wondering why certain directors were totally absent and why other films that previously made the top 100 were left out, more clarity has arrived with this update.

Check out some highlights we clocked below, the full list here, and return on March 2 when all ballots and comments will be unveiled.

The films closest to making the top 100 were Rio Bravo, The House Is Black, and Vagabond, which tied for #103. Four directors absent in the top 100––Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Jacques Demy––have two films each in the top 250: The Tree of Life...

Toronto events around the festival will include musical performances and free screenings.

The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has revealed details of this year’s Festival Street events and Cinematheque programme.

Back for its seventh year, Festival Street will unfold Sept 8-11 on Toronto’s King Street West and Sept 8-18 in David Pecaut Square.

Events will include musical performances by Buffy Sainte-Marie and others inspired by films in the festival and a live art walk created by StreetARToronto.

TIFF’s new open air cinema, Olg Cinema Park in David Pecaut Square, will screen films showcasing stars from the festival’s current official selections,...

Hungarian auteur will also mentor young Egyptian filmmakers at the festival.

Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr is to receive a lifetime achievement award at the 44th Cairo International Film Festival (November 13-22).

The award-winning film director, producer and screenwriter will also mentor a workshop with young Egyptian filmmakers at the festival and will separately deliver a masterclass at the event.

The festival will also screen 4K restorations of Tarr’s 2000 feature Werckmeister Harmonies and 2011 drama The Turin Horse, considered two of his finest works. This will make Ciff “one of the early platforms to screen Tarr’s newly restored film copies,...

Festivals

American narrative feature projects in rough or final cut seeking finishing funds are now invited to submit to the 2022 edition of U.S. in Progress, which takes place Nov. 9-11 during the 13th American Film Festival (Nov.8-13) in Wroclaw, Poland. The strand pairs American projects in final production stages with European buyers and top Polish image and sound post-production companies and provides awards worth totally $100,000. The head of the Polish Film Institute, Radosław Śmigulski, will award one project with a $50,000 cash award to be spent on post-production, image, sound and/or VFX in Poland and Polish post-production companies Fixafilm, Orka Studio, Black Photon, Xanf and Soundflower Studio are each offering a $10,000 in-kind award.

There is no entry fee, and films can be submitted through the U.S. in Progress website. The final deadline is September 11.

The program’s objective is to inspire U.S. producers to work with Poland,...

Filming a long, extended take in a movie is one of the best ways to win some acclaim and show off a bit of your directorial prowess. But it’s often so complex and so ambitious that still only a handful of directors have ever dared make their movie to appear as though it was filmed in one continuous, unbroken shot. Sam Mendes is the latest mad man to attempt the feat for his World War I epic “1917,” and boy did he nail it. Here are some other films that helped pave the way for him.

“Rope” (1948)

The master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock was the first to attempt a single-take feature film, taking on a radical experiment with a big budget and A-list stars that included James Stewart. His movie “Rope” was inspired by a play by Patrick Hamilton and concerned a pair of men who murdered someone, hid his...

After bursting onto the scene with his intense crime drama Animal Kingdom, Australian director David Michôd is now returning with his most ambitious film yet, The King. Led by Timothée Chalamet, Joel Edgerton, Sean Harris, Lily-Rose Depp, Robert Pattinson, and Ben Mendelsohn, Rory O’Connor said in our Venice review, “The King marks a return to form, a sharply directed period action film with a fine central performance from Chalamet as the wayward prince turned reluctant ruler.”

As the Shakespeare epic arrives on Netflix, we’re taking a look at the director’s favorite films of all-time. As voted on in the latest Sight & Sound poll, his picks range from classic Hollywood favorites to 1970s landmarks to a few modern gems and beyond. He gives fellow Aussie director Andrew Dominik his deserved due with his masterpiece The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Ford, while Terrence Malick’s WWII epic The Thin Red Line,...

With Carlos Reygadas‘ admirably bold, intimate new drama Our Time now in theaters and his first three films now streaming on The Criterion Channel (along with a recent extensive conversation), it’s thankfully easier than ever to catch up on the poetic works of the Mexican director. To celebrate, today we’re taking a look at his favorite films of all-time.

As voted on in the latest Sight & Sound poll, the influences of the ten selections can be seen throughout this work, most notably in the spiritual ruminations of Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman, the non-professional acting collaborations of Robert Bresson, as well as the striking patience of Béla Tarr. Speaking to one selection, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Mother and Son, Reygadas has said it would be the one film he’d show an alien if they came to our planet. Surprisingly, however, for those who have seen Silent Light, there is no Ordet.

It’s tempting to think of “An Elephant Sitting Still” as a suicide note written with blood in a dirty patch of hard snow. Hard to sit through and impossible to forget, this torpid four-hour anti-drama is suffused with the sort of hopelessness that cinema only sees every once in a long while (Werner Herzog’s “Stroszek” and Béla Tarr’s “The Turin Horse” come to mind), and the man who made it — a former student of Tarr’s — killed himself before the world premiere of his monolithic first (and last) feature. His name was Hu Bo, and he was 29 years old.

Hu had reportedly been feuding with his financiers, who wanted to cut the running time in half. But to presume the role that may have played in his death would be as problematic as assimilating Hu’s suicide — which inevitably casts a long shadow over the film — into...

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.

Quad Cinema

The wide-reaching “New York Woman” series, with something for everybody, is fully underway.

Museum of Modern Art

The legendary kung fu films of Lau Kar-leung are getting a retrospective.

Metrograph

A spotlight on Gus Van Sant continues, while Werckmeister Harmonies and Woman in the Dunes screen.

Museum of the Moving Image

Hoping to understand Putin’s Russia?...

Looking back on this still-young century makes clear that 2007 was a major time for cinematic happenings — and, on the basis of this retrospective, one we’re not quite through with ten years on. One’s mind might quickly flash to a few big titles that will be represented, but it is the plurality of both festival and theatrical premieres that truly surprises: late works from old masters, debuts from filmmakers who’ve since become some of our most-respected artists, and mid-career turning points that didn’t necessarily announce themselves as such at the time. Join us as an assembled team, many of whom were coming of age that year, takes on their favorites.

Upon the release of The Man from London, one might have been hard-pressed to consider Béla Tarr and his co-director Ágnes Hranitzky genre filmmakers beyond the broad designation of “European art house cinema.” While still fitting snugly...

In response to the outcome of a 2015 poll of the 100 Greatest American Films of All Time, BBC Culture recently threw critics a different question. Finding that last year’s results included only six films made since 2000, editors at the arts pages of the venerable broadcaster commissioned a new poll to determine the 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century. The results are expansive — and intriguing. To get to the consensus favorite, critics reached all the way back to 2001 and David Lynch’s sexy/creepy surrealist noir Mulholland Drive. That film was also on Sight & Sound‘s venerable once-a-decade ranking of the Top 100 Films of All Time which last was conducted in 2012. The three other movies on that list to hail from the new millennium also made the cut (see rundown below).

The British media today is roundly praising the choice of Mulholland, and the list itself whose aim, BBC Culture says,...

On this day in history as it relates to the movies...

Corey Stoll as Hemingway

1892 Maria Falconetti is born. Delivers one of the best performances ever captured on film thirty-six years later in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

1899 Famous author and real 'character' Ernest Hemingway is born. In addition to his work being made into films and TV miniseries he frequently pops up as a character in cinema played by everyone from Chris O'Donnell (In Love and War) to Corey Stoll (Midnight in Paris - robbed of an Oscar nod though we honored him here) and now Dominic West (Genius) ...and that's not even the half of it.

1922 Don Knotts is born. Mugs it up in 70+ film and TV projects including Three's Company, The Apple Dumpling Gang, and The Andy Griffith Show - 5 Emmy wins for Supporting Actor thereafter until his death in 2006

1948 Steven Demetre Georgiu is born in London.

Toronto -- Asian films, led by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Syndromes and a Century," dominated the Toronto International Film Festival's best-of-the-decade poll results released Monday.

Weerasethakul's 2006 two-part drama captured the top spot with 53 votes in a poll of 60 film curators, historians and programmers conducted by the festival.

In second place with 49 votes was Jia Zhangke's "Platform," who also grabbed third place for his Venice award winner "Still Life" and its 48 votes.

French filmmaker Claire Denis earned fourth place for "Beau Travail" with 46 votes, followed by Wong Kar-wai's "In the Mood For Love" with 43 votes.

Weerasethakul also earned sixth place for "Tropical Malady," which garnered 38 votes in the TIFF poll.

Romanian director Cristi Puiu was next with "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" and its 35 votes, the same tally for "Werckmeister Harmonies" from Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr.

Rounding out the best-of-the-decade competition was Jean-Luc Godard's "Eloge de l'amour" in...

BUDAPEST, Hungary -- Organizers of a coalition of Hungarian filmmakers spanning three generations and led by iconoclastic director Bela Tarr said Monday that they have joined forces to find ways to overcome barriers to independent production here. TT Film Workshop, founded by Tarr (The Werckmeister Harmonies) and Gabor Teni, unites directors with reputations from very different kinds of films in a common endeavor. The group aims to find script-development and production funding for their projects at a time of increasing competition. Tarr, who introduced members of the workshop at a presentation during the Hungarian Film Week that closes Tuesday, said: "This is about trust, understanding the quality of each other's work and networking to overcome common problems of finance and support."...