Notizie

Signed, sealed and delivered, Book Club: The Next Chapter is an unabashed love letter to four great movie stars. As a vehicle for their talents, it’s less of a sure thing. If you can see past the clunky plot contrivances, strained hijinks and one-liners that don’t land, and focus on the Italy-set comedy’s Mediterranean glow and the dazzling quartet of go-getters at its center, the movie might fit the bill as a celebratory pairing with Mother’s Day brunch.

The tagline on the key art encapsulates the sequel’s problems: “Slightly Scandalous. Totally Fabulous.” That qualifying “slightly” signals the softer cadence of this reunion. In the 2018 hit, Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen transcended the often tepid humor with their rat-a-tat delivery; here, returning director Bill Holderman, again working from a screenplay he wrote with Erin Simms, struggles to find a rhythm, and flat...

Above: 1976 Us one sheet for Let’s Talk About Men (Lina Wertmüller, Italy, 1965).In the 1970s, when there were no shortage of things to be excited about in world cinema, Italian director Lina Wertmüller was a bona fide sensation. A small measure of her success can be seen in the poster above (for an early film of hers which was belatedly released in the U.S. after her two major smash hits) in which her name is the most prominent feature of the design. She was impersonated on Saturday Night Live (can even Pedro Almodóvar or Michael Haneke boast that?) and in 1975 she became the first woman to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Director. (There have been only two others in the 40 years since.)She was a polarizing figure back then, but today she is a neglected one. Young cinephiles have probably barely even heard of her, let...

Next month will mark the return of New York City’s Quad Cinema, a theater reshaped and rebranded as a proper theater via the resources of Charles S. Cohen, head of the distribution outfit Cohen Media Group. While we got a few hints of the line-up during the initial announcement, they’ve now unveiled their first full repertory calendar, running from April 14th through May 4th, and it’s an embarassment of cinematic riches.

Including the previously revealed Lina Wertmüller retrospective, one inventive series that catches our eye is First Encounters, in which an artist will get to experience a film they’ve always wanted to see, but never have, and in which you’re invited to take part. The first match-ups in the series include Kenneth Lonergan‘s first viewing Edward Yang‘s Yi Yi, Noah Baumbach‘s first viewing of Withnail and I, John Turturro‘s first viewing of Pather Panchali,...