3Sep10
The annual Telluride Film Festival is now under way, and, as usual, Criterion is there. Like every year, the festival programmers kept the official selections hush-hush in the weeks leading up to the event. But the twenty-four-feature lineup has announced yesterday, and we were particularly excited to see new films from a handful of Criterion favorites, including Olivier Assayas (Carlos), Stephen Frears (Tamara Drewe), Mike Leigh (Another Year), Bertrand Tavernier (The Princess of Montpensier), and Peter Weir (The Way Back), not to mention the Elia Kazan documentary A Letter to Elia, the latest collaboration between Martin Scorsese and one of our favorite writers, Kent Jones. Also, Stig Björkman’s long-anticipated documentaries on Ingmar Bergman, . . . But Film Is My Mistress and Images from the Playground, will be shown in the Backlot sidebar.
Additionally, author Michael Ondaatje has picked a half dozen personal favorite movies to screen, including Larisa Shepitko’s devastating 1977 World War II drama The Ascent, which is available in our eleventh Eclipse set. Other events of note: this year, the festival is scheduled to give Silver Medallions (which honor an artist’s contributions to cinema) to Weir and actress Claudia Cardinale (8½).
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News
2Sep10
This year’s ATP New York—the stateside iteration of the British independent music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties—at the Catskills resort hotel Kutsher’s Country Club, is just a day away. Starting September 3, ATP will begin its annual weekend blowout (this year cocurated by Jim Jarmusch), featuring a wildly impressive roster, including Iggy and the Stooges, Sonic Youth, the Breeders, Mudhoney, Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions, Vivian Girls, GZA, Kurt Vile, Thurston Moore, and many others. And Criterion, which has been programming a companion screening series at the festival since it came to the States in 2008, is presenting more films than ever before, including some new-to-our-shelves titles (Head, The Night of the Hunter, The Thin Red Line) and some noirish collection classics (Brute Force, Le doulos—both part of a Jarmusch-programmed full day of crime pictures), plus some selections that we haven’t released on DVD or Blu-ray. Considering venturing to Kutsher’s? Click here for ticket info. Also, check out Steve Dollar’s article in the Wall Street Journal about Criterion’s collaboration with ATP, featuring quotes from our own Lee Kline, who discusses some of the selections and shares an anecdote from the 2008 festival about a run-in with Patti Smith.
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News,
Clippings,
On Five
1Sep10
Starting today at London’s BFI Southbank, the legendary Italian composer Nino Rota will be honored with a monthlong retrospective of films that feature his magisterial music. Rota is probably best known for his collaborations with Federico Fellini on such films as Amarcord, 8½, and La dolce vita and for his iconic melodies for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, but his sensational scores have also buoyed the work of Franco Rosi, Franco Zefferelli, Edward Dmytryk, and Luchino Visconti. It’s the latter’s The Leopard that this short video piece from the BBC waxes most lyrical over, and it’s worth a look—and a listen.
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News
25Aug10
Long before Stanley Kubrick was Stanley Kubrick!, he was a young photographer for Look magazine, snapping for the publication starting at age seventeen. A collection of two hundred pictures that Kubrick took between 1945 and 1950 will be on view in Venice as part of the exhibition Stanley Kubrick Fotografo. Curated by Rainer Crone, the show, opening at the Instituto Veneto on August 28 and running through November 14, is the first of its kind, spotlighting a previously largely unstudied aspect of Kubrick’s life and career. Click here for more info—and to see a few beautiful black-and-white shots.
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News
20Aug10
As we’ve mentioned, Jim Jarmusch will be a guest curator at this year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, the independent music festival that takes place in Monticello, New York, over Labor Day weekend, September 3 through 5. It’s a festival that is close to our hearts, as it features a venue for screenings of movies selected in part by the staff of the Criterion Collection. Jarmusch has just given an interview at Pitchfork about ATP—discussing how he got involved, the decisions behind some of the bands he selected, and the fact that he invited Bill Murray to come “just to hang out.” (We hope he shows!) Also revealed in the interview: Jarmusch’s cast for his next movie, including a couple of our favorites, Tilda Swinton and Michael Fassbender.
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News
16Aug10
We got the lineup for the 2010 New York Film Festival (September 24 to October 10) in our in-boxes this morning from the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and we’re jazzed to see so many Criterion names included in this most selective of major fests—from legends to contemporary masters. Here’s something to make you click that little blue “Like” tag: David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) will be opening the festival with his reportedly Rashomon-inspired take on the lawsuit-laden fallout from the creation of Facebook, The Social Network. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Another festival, another Mike Leigh movie, Another Year: this time, the Naked director surveys four seasons in the life of one family and their friends. Abdellatif Kechiche follows up The Secret of the Grain with Black Venus, a dramatization of a devastating true story. Summer Hours’ Olivier Assayas returns with the historical action epic Carlos. Abbas Kiarostami (Close-up) goes to Tuscany with Cannes Best Actress winner Juliette Binoche for the meta–movie romance Certified Copy. And finally, Jean-Luc Godard offers what sounds like another hefty late-period political opus, Film Socialisme; there will be a postfilm discussion with the New Yorker’s Richard Brody (also a Criterion contributor), former Cahiers du cinéma editor Jean-Michel Frodon, and film scholar Annette Michelson. All this plus a sidebar retrospective of the work of Japanese director Masahiro Shinoda (Samurai Spy, Double Suicide)—we may have to temporarily relocate to the Upper West Side.
Categories:
News
11Aug10
As if there weren’t already enough to anticipate about the upcoming 2010 Toronto International Film Festival (we posted about the new headquarters yesterday), it was announced today that A Married Couple, Allan King’s devastatingly entertaining 1969 documentary (or “actuality drama,” to use King’s more precise term) will show in a special restored version as part of the September event’s Canadian Open Vault section. The film—called by the TIFF website “one of the most influential and celebrated Canadian films ever made”—is being shown in conjunction with the publication of a new University of Toronto Press monograph by communications professor Zoë Druick. A Married Couple, which plunges the viewer into the middle of the daily routines and shouting matches of the unforgettable Billy and Antoinette Edwards, will be available as part of the Eclipse series The Actuality Dramas of Allan King in September—truly a Kingly month.
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News
3Aug10
Director Francesco Rosi, whose intense, ripped-from-the-headlines films like Salvatore Giuliano and Hands over the City are benchmarks of Italian political cinema, will receive a lifetime achievement award at this month’s Locarno Film Festival. In a press release, Locarno’s artistic director, Olivier Père, is quoted as saying, “We are honored and delighted to pay tribute to Maestro Rosi . . . His civic engagement, forceful denunciation, and unconventional creativity will remain a shining example for generations to come.” The sixty-third edition of the festival begins tomorrow, and the ceremony for Rosi is scheduled for August 13, accompanied by a screening of his 1970 film Many Wars Ago. Rosi will also participate in a public conversation that day, moderated by film historian Sergio Toffetti.
Categories:
News
29Jul10
Whenever a major international film festival announces its lineup, we keep our eyes peeled for fresh projects from our favorite filmmakers. New titles by two Criterion-embraced guys will be in competition at the sixty-seventh annual Venice Film Festival, it was revealed today: the first feature by Two-Lane Blacktop’s Monte Hellman in more than two decades, which bears the very Hellman-esque title Road to Nowhere and is reportedly a noirish tale of murder and moviemaking; and Abdellatif Kechiche’s much-anticipated follow-up to The Secret of the Grain, Black Venus, a biography of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman, a South African woman who became a freak-show attraction in nineteenth-century Europe.
Of course, as with any festival, selections outside of the main competition are just as promising: Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl) introduces her latest fairy-tale interpretation, Sleeping Beauty; Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket) returns with Sorelle Mai; Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones present their documentary on Elia Kazan, A Letter to Elia; and Hard Boiled’s John Woo blasts back with Reign of Assassins, an action epic set in ancient China and codirected by Chao-bin Su. Coming soon: New York and Toronto!
Categories:
News
29Jul10
Arthur Agee, the basketball hopeful whose rise to NBA prominence was chronicled in the thrilling 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, is beginning a “Hoop Dreams tour” across the United States. Along with the basketball marketing company Hoop Connection, the thirty-seven-year-old Agee will visit cities from Sacramento to Orlando to find young people eighteen or older who aspire to play basketball and help them realize their own dreams. In a USA Today story, Agee is quoted as saying “This platform will speak for those people. It’ll give them a voice.” The Hoop Dreams tour will be filmed, and the organizers hope it will make its way onto television in one form or another.
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News
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