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Widely considered one of the most important and prolific film critics in America, Jonathan Rosenbaum began his career in the 1970s writing film criticism for Sight and Sound, Film Comment, and the Village Voice before becoming chief critic of the Chicago Reader from 1987 to 2008. At the Reader, he published over 5,000 reviews and columns; now, Jonathan runs his own website where he publishes old and new capsules. He is known, among other things, for being a champion of independent and international auteurs and for writing about them in a highly accessible yet personal, erudite style. Jean-Luc Godard once likened him to André Bazin and James Agee.

He has written multiple books on film. The latest, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader, was published by Hat & Beard Press in June of last year, and can be considered the definitive culmination of Jonathan’s writing (to date!). An autobiographical and chronological journey,...

“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” is the title of a new Jonathan Rosenbaum reader, culminating nearly six decades of never-before-compiled writing on film, jazz, and literature. The legendary Chicago-based film critic known for iconoclastic takes on the canon has been published everywhere from Cahiers du Cinéma to Film Comment, Sight and Sound, and, of course, the Chicago Reader, where he succeeded Dave Kehr as head critic starting in 1987. He retired from that post in 2008.

Rosenbaum, turning 82 this February, is in conversation this weekend at New York’s Metrograph with filmmaker (and friend) Michael Almereyda. They’ll discuss Serbian director Dušan Makavejev’s cult classic, erotically charged political comedy “W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism” (1971), controversial for its montage throughline between sexual liberation and communist revolution, as well as the wild corporate satire “Giants and Toys” (1958) from Yasuzō Masumura. Rosenbaum has long championed the sociopolitically charged works of the Japanese director, who trained under Visconti,...

A Yugoslavian pulp classic from 1967, this tale of a young woman’s erotic misadventures more than matches the French new wave for black humour

Dušan Makavejev was the Serbian creator of the incendiary 1971 movie Wr: Mysteries of the Organism, the final word in that title destined forever to be misread as “orgasm”. He was a satirist, political subversive and eroto-evangelist, a performance artist of ex-Yugoslavia’s cinematic Black Wave. Love Affair, or The Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator is an early work from 1967, a brilliant pulp classic which showed that the 1960s could swing behind the iron curtain. I wonder: did anything in the French new wave measure up to this level of nihilist black humour? Godard gave us Breathless; Makavejev gave us an actual breathless corpse.

It’s about a bored young woman working for a telephone exchange: she wears an audio headset, pushing plugs into sockets and putting people through.

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film Forum

A Jeanne Moreau retrospective brings films by Antonioni, Malle, Becker and more; Lou Ye’s Suzhou River and Una Vita Difficile continue showing in a 4K restorations while King Kong plays this Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

A series on snubs brings films by the Coens, Wes Anderson, Spike Lee, David Lynch, and Todd Haynes.

Film at Lincoln Center

Claire Denis’ masterful first feature Chocolat has been restored in 4K and begins a run.

Roxy Cinema

Minnie and Moskowitz has 35mm showings Saturday and Sunday, the latter day also bringing Polanski’s Frantic; “City Dudes” returns on Saturday.

Anthology Film Archives

Barbarella, Wr: Mysteries of the Organism, and more play in Wilhelm Reich series; Brakhage screens in Essential Cinema.

IFC Center

Fight Club, Cruel Intentions, and Akira have screenings, while Showgirls plays on 35mm.

The post NYC Weekend Watch: Jeanne Moreau,...

Above: Poster by Frank Stella for the 9th New York Film Festival.Compared to the 32 films in the main slate of this year’s New York Film Festival, not to mention the seemingly hundreds of others playing in sidebars, the 1971 edition of the NYFF, half a century ago, was a lean affair. With only 18 films, down from 78 just four years earlier, the ninth edition of the NYFF was, according to its director Richard Roud, a “belt-tightening festival, a year of consolidation.” In fact, the financially strapped festival almost didn’t take place that year. A New York Times article published midway through the event mentions that “outside the 984-seat Vivian Beaumont Theater, there is only one poster announcing the festival [one assumes it was the beautiful Frank Stella poster above] that is quietly and modestly taking place inside.” A far cry from the glorious phalanx of digital billboards currently beaming outside Alice Tully Hall and the Elinor Bunin Center.The...

In collaboration with the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Melika Bass' Creature Companion (2018) is showing exclusively on Mubi from July 2 - August 1, 2018 as part of the series Competing at Oberhausen.Humans inhabit containers. Most intimately, our bodies are containers. Our daily jobs, and our mornings and nights are mostly spent inside boxes. When we leave those spots, we travel inside and into different containers—other houses, rooms, offices, cars, trains. My new experimental fiction film, Creature Companion, is a container too—a cinematic snow globe, bubbling on simmer. Like a lot of movies, it shows the exteriors of bodies and rooms and objects. It is also asking: what do these images and surfaces contain inside, what remains unknown, concealed underneath? How can cinema get at the interior of humans, when the whole apparatus is about capturing surfaces?The two women featured in Creature Companion navigate their bodies, domestic spaces, and the world outside through maintenance,...

Producers and directors of saucier than average films often fear that they will get tarnished by the Nc-17 rating which is usually bad for business so they submit to the MPAA’s demands and snip away at their film for a milder ‘R’ rating. Apparently, Nc-17 is bad news at the box office but for thrill seekers like me, the Nc-17 rating is a total come on to watch films that have been labelled perverted, too sexy, too violent for a mainstream audience.

Just as the X certificate used to act as a pervert’s guide to cinema, so does Nc-17 which attract those who like the forbidden. Channel 4 used to show scandalous foreign films in the 1980s like Themroc and Wr: Mysteries of the Organism. After the Daily Mail squealed blue murder that Channel 4 was corrupting the nation, the station decided to put little triangles of the...

With the promise of an Ipo lurking just over the eternal horizon, Facebook is gearing up for some big announcements during its presentation at its developers conference in San Francisco this Thursday. According to Variety, the all-encompassing social network will use the conference — known in Valley lingo as “f8,” as in “fate,” nudge nudge — to announce partnerships with various other services and content providers. Variety notes that Rhapsody and Spotify are likely partners. It’s also a good bet that Facebook will build off this year’s slow-but-steady initiatives into movie and television — including the option to “rent” movies like...

Like many, I've been anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new film journal that Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu have been working on for months now. Today's the day. The theme of the inaugural issue of Lola is "Histories."

Girish has already drawn up a guide, pulling quotes from each of the essays, so briefly, "Histories" features Joe McElhaney on his "passion for aging filmmakers, the older the better"; William D Routt's expansive consideration of Lubitsch; Andrew Klevan on "films which put the in-between at their centre"; Luc Moullet, with his irresistible title: "Ah Yes! Griffith was a Marxist!"; Richard Porton on Dušan Makavejev's Wr: Mysteries of the Organism (1971); Shigehiko Hasumi: "Stated briefly, my hypothesis is that the medium of film has not yet truly incorporated sound as an essential component of its composition."; Sylvia Lawson on Australian cinema's relationship with the nation's history; Stephen Goddard on the ways...

There are Tons of new releases this past week, and as my co-host and friend Travis George said, it was going to be a hell of a time to write these up for all of you people out there who want to know about Criterion’s blossoming Hulu Plus page. And as usual, I’m elated to tell you all about these films, especially if you want to join up to the service, which helps us keep this weekly article series going. I mean, come on, there’s an Ingmar Bergman film that’s not in the collection yet! More on that at the end of the article. So let’s get right to it then.

The epic film The Human Condition (1959) has been put up, separated into three videos. Parts 1 & 2, Parts 3 & 4 and Parts 5 & 6 are there for your ease of watching, so if you have 574 minutes to kill watching the...

Now this is what I always want to see more of: Filmmaker Chris Hansen started chronicling the shoot for his latest feature film, An Affair. He has several posts up, so I recommend going to his June blog archives to read up on how it’s going. (The shoot’s still in it’s very early stages.) I know blogging after a day of shooting probably sucks, but I love reading production diaries.In case you missed the fascinating recent dust up between the media advocacy group Reel Grrls and Comcast, Flip the Media has a great article on it, including the positive outcome of the whole thing.Usama Alshaibi’s Profane screened at the Chicago Underground Film Festival the other day and Ben Sachs has a capsule review of it in the Chicago Reader, which focuses on the film’s more lurid aspects.Speaking of Cuff, the Chicago Sun-Times...

For the second consecutive year, my hometown of Grand Rapids Mi is hosting ArtPrize, a citywide art festival that will end this coming weekend with the award of $449,000 in cash prizes, including a cool quarter-million to the overall winner. ArtPrize has come up with a hybrid of Facebook-style “liking” and American Idol’s popularity contest to determine the winners, and with votes cast by a wide cross-section of the general public, it’s not surprising that some of the artists who are serious about becoming finalists base their appeal to the masses more on kitsch and cleverness than on refined artistic techniques or challenging thematic statements. Last year, one of the big money winners was a guy who made large portraits of attractive women using red, yellow, blue, black and white push-pins as his pixels. Anyone who’s ever worked with the most rudimentary digital paint program could see what he was up to,...