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La BêteCOMPETITIONComandante (Edoardo De Angelis)The Promised Land (Nikolaj Arcel)Dogman (Luc Besson) La Bête (Bertrand Bonello) Hors-Saison (Stéphane Brizé) Enea (Pietro Castellitto) Maestro (Bradley Cooper)Priscilla (Sofia Coppola)Finalmente L’Alba (Saverio Costanzo)Lubo (Giorgio Diritti) Origin (Ava DuVernay) The Killer (David Fincher)Memory (Michel Franco)Io capitano (Matteo Garrone)Evil Does Not Exist (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)The Green Border (Agnieszka Holland)The Theory of Everything (Timm Kröger)Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos)El conde (Pablo Larrain)Ferrari (Michael Mann)Adagio (Stefano Sollima)Woman OfHolly (Fien Troch)Out Of COMPETITIONFictionSociety of the Snow (J.A. Bayona)Coup de Chance (Woody Allen)The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Wes Anderson)The Penitent (Luca Barbareschi)L’Ordine Del Tempo (Liliana Cavani)Vivants (Alix Delaporte)Welcome to Paradise (Leonardo di Constanzo)Daaaaaali! (Quentin Dupieux)The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (William Friedkin)Making of (Cedric Kahn)Aggro Dr1ft (Harmony Korine)Hitman (Richard Linklater)The Palace (Roman Polanski...

With the full Venice Immersive slate announced yesterday, the Venice Classics lineup has now been revealed ahead of the 80th edition of the Venice International Film Festival. Curated by Alberto Barbera in collaboration with Federico Gironi, this year’s Venice Classics slate features newly restored versions of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Agnès Varda’s The Creatures and much more. Alongside recent restorations, several films in the lineup boast new “Director’s Cut” labels, including Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Andrei Rublev, which, according to the curators, “will be presented in the reconstruction of the complete original version, which was censored […]

The post 2023 Venice Classics Lineup Includes The Exorcist, Andrei Rublev, Days of Heaven and More first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

With the full Venice Immersive slate announced yesterday, the Venice Classics lineup has now been revealed ahead of the 80th edition of the Venice International Film Festival. Curated by Alberto Barbera in collaboration with Federico Gironi, this year’s Venice Classics slate features newly restored versions of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Agnès Varda’s The Creatures and much more. Alongside recent restorations, several films in the lineup boast new “Director’s Cut” labels, including Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Andrei Rublev, which, according to the curators, “will be presented in the reconstruction of the complete original version, which was censored […]

The post 2023 Venice Classics Lineup Includes The Exorcist, Andrei Rublev, Days of Heaven and More first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Recently restored versions of William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist,” Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “One From the Heart” feature in the Venice Classics section of the 80th Venice Film Festival.

The lineup of recently restored films in Venice Classics, which is curated by the festival’s artistic director Alberto Barbera in collaboration with Federico Gironi, was unveiled on Friday.

“The Exorcist” is screened, 50 years after it was produced by Warner Bros., alongside Disney’s “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” starring Shirley Temple and directed by “the prolific and sometimes brilliant” Allan Dwan, to mark the Hollywood studios’ 100th anniversaries.

“One From the Heart” and Arturo Ripstein’s “Deep Crimson” are “not just restored, but also revised by the filmmakers themselves in what are genuine Director’s Cuts,” Barbera and Gironi said, while Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece “Andrei Rublev” will be presented in the reconstruction of the original version,...

The following contains spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, now in theaters.

As the main baddie in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the High Evolutionary is expected to be evil, but his deeds as a scientist place him as one of the most sinister villains in the Marvel Cinematic Universe yet. His lack of morality and empathy is demonstrated throughout the film. While moviegoers witness Rocket Raccoon's gut-wrenching past unfold, the High Evolutionary is shown to be an unremorseful creator as he genetically modifies and mechanically augments lower lifeforms in his quest for perfection. In short, what Rocket and his animal companions endure is tantamount to torture. However, the High Evolutionary isn't the first "mad" scientist in cinema to utilize eugenics and animal mutation to achieve his goals. His exploits arguably present him as the McU's answer to one specific infamous character: Dr. Moreau.

Moreau is the...

Announcing the sequel everyone has been waiting for! The Creatures from Patrick James Ryan’s bestselling novel from Black Bed Sheet Books, The Night It Got Out are back and more horrifying than ever! Don’t miss the terror and suspense of The Night They Got Out!

Don Girard has spent five years in captivity since the terrifying day a monstrous creature unleashed hell, butchering hundreds, and turning his life upside down. Consumed with grief, bitterness, and hatred he will experience a gauntlet of new emotions, as the people behind the beast are far from finished with their nefarious plans. Deep in a military complex, experiments continue with eight of the powerful creatures, but not all goes according to plan. Don discovers that not all humanity is wicked. As the body count explodes, Don and some new friends face horrifying danger around every corner. His life will be forever changed the night they got out.

A Cinema Shack: The Tent of Vagabond (2022). Photo credit: Bernd Brundert.While most can hope to live authentically in the one life allotted them, some are able to expand beyond such limitations. One way is through art, which not only arouses an inner life that may stand apart from one's corporeal being, but also extends past any sort of physical life into the realm of the sublime, where it survives so long as there are people willing to appreciate it. The French photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist Agnès Varda is often referred to as having lived three lives, testifying to a career divided into three parts of artistic exploration but which are nevertheless interconnected, ultimately comprising a distinguished whole. Accordingly, Varda favored the triptych across much of her oeuvre and specifically in her installations; the division into three was as consequential to her in application as in theory.In considering...

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Fever (Maya Da-Rin)

The Fever, director-cum-visual artist Da-Rin’s first full-length feature project, puts a human face to a statistic that hardly captures the genocide Brazil is suffering. This is not just a wonderfully crafted, superb exercise in filmmaking, a multilayered tale that seesaws between social realism and magic. It is a call to action, an unassuming manifesto hashed in the present tense but reverberating as a plea from a world already past us, a memoir of sorts. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

French New Wave

Dive into one of the most fertile eras of moving pictures with a new massive 45-film series on The Criterion Channel dedicated to the French New Wave. Highlights include Le...

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No matter how convenient our digital lives are, there’s still something special about physical media — especially when it’s so beautifully and thoughtfully curated by the Criterion Collection.

Each of Criterion’s releases takes an exemplary film, from auteur classic to Hollywood blockbuster and everything in between, and includes a slew of special features — commentary tracks, restored film transfers, essays about its importance in the cinematic pantheon — that help “deepen the viewer’s understanding and appreciation of the art of cinema.”

While there are literally hundreds of important classic and contemporary...

As the coronavirus pandemic still rages on, precious few remain skeptical about going to the movies. But while your AMCs and others claim some godlike safety from Covid, there remains a chunk of people still uncomfortable hitting up theaters. To them, we bring you the September 2020 Criterion Channel lineup.

It starts off with quite the swath of content too. Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó hits the service on September 1, and its seven-plus hours should take up a large chunk of your day. Coming soon after is a collection of more than a dozen Joan Blondell starrers from the pre-Code era, including Howard Hawks’ The Crowd Roars, three collaborations with Mervyn LeRoy, and Ray Enright & Busby Berkeley’s Dames.

For some stuff released almost a century later, the service also sees the addition of documentary bender Robert Greene. His Actress, Kate Plays Christine, and Bisbee ’17 join soon after. Janicza Bravo, director of Lemon,...

It's almost time for fans of a galaxy far, far away to gather together in solidarity in order to celebrate all things Star Wars. Indeed, Star Wars Celebration 2019 is about to take over Chicago and, since Disney and Lucasfilm skipped out on doing the event last year, it's been two years since the event was held last. And fans are eager for some real news. There will be plenty of that coming our way over the next few days and we're going to preview everything to expect, as well as what maybe not to expect.

Part of the reason Lucasfilm decided not to hold the event last year is that they really didn't have all that much to showcase. That is far from the case this year, as they not only have Star Wars 9 coming down the pipeline, but they've also got their live-action shows for Disney+, the animated shows...

Agnes Varda is deservedly eulogized in newspapers and on social media all over America today, but critics, programmers and audiences in the U.S. took time in recognizing her accomplishments. It took several decades for her work gain appreciation in the U.S., and during that time, I witnessed Varda’s ability to continue evolving as an artist every step of the way.

While Varda’s debut feature, “La Pointe Courte” (1955) has yet to have a theatrical release in America, her early short, “L’Opera Mouffe” (1958), was distributed by Cinema 16, an important film club run by Amos and Marcia Vogel in the 50’s and early 60’s dedicated to the showing and release of experimental and avant-garde cinema. The film won some notoriety because of its casual nudity — then still rare on American screens — and it was booked in film societies around the country seeding the bed for later Varda appreciation.

Above: Italian 2-foglio for Loves of a Blonde (Miloš Forman, Czechoslovakia, 1965).As the 54th New York Film Festival winds to a close this weekend I thought it would be instructive to look back at its counterpart of 50 years ago. Sadly, for the sake of symmetry, there are no filmmakers straddling both the 1966 and the 2016 editions, though Agnès Varda (88 years old), Jean-Luc Godard (85), Carlos Saura (84) and Jirí Menzel (78)—all of whom had films in the 1966 Nyff—are all still making films, and Milos Forman (84), Ivan Passer (83) and Peter Watkins (80) are all still with us. There are only two filmmakers in the current Nyff who could potentially have been in the 1966 edition and they are Ken Loach (80) and Paul Verhoeven (78). The current Nyff is remarkably youthful—half the filmmakers weren’t even born in 1966 and, with the exception of Loach and Verhoeven, the old guard is now represented by Jim Jarmusch, Pedro Almodóvar,...

Above: Franciszek Starowieyski’s 1970 poster for Mademoiselle (Tony Richardson, UK/France, 1966).In Christopher Nolan’s new short film about the Quay Brothers (titled—with Nolan’s predilection for mono-nomenclature—simply Quay) he gives us a clue to some of the twin animators’ influences in the film’s opening shots. After drawing back the curtains in their curiosity shop of a studio, Timothy Quay opens a glass cupboard to remove a book. Blink and you’ll miss it, but on the shelves are books on Marcel Duchamp, Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz, Czech artists Jan Zrzavy, Vlastislav Hofman and Jindrich Heisler, and—most prominently—a book on Polish artist Franciszek Starowieyski.I wrote a few years ago about the Quays’ love of Polish film posters and Franciszek Starowieyski (1930-2009) is one of the indisputable later masters of the Polish school. From the mid 50s until the late 80s he produced some 100 film...

Stefano Knuchel, Head of the Locarno Film Summer Academy, invited me to sit in on his master class with the 2014 Locarno International Film Festival’s Pardo d’onore Swisscom winner French film director Agnès Varda.

Known as the Grandmother of the French New Wave (a term with which she takes issue, as I cite in my Conversation with Varda).Varda’s film credits include "La Pointe Courte" (1955), "Cleo from 5 to 7" (Cléo de 5 à 7, 1962), "The Creatures" (Les Créatures 1966), "Lions Love (…and Lies)" (1969), "Documenteur" (1981),"Vagabond"(Sans toit ni loi, 1985), "The Gleaners and I" (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000) and " The Beaches of Agnès" (Les Plages d’Agnès, 2008).

Speaking to the group of international students, Varda shared her passion for cinema, photography, and installation work, with humor and honesty. Here are some highlights from Varda’s talk.

I asked Varda about finding inspiration and her writing process

I don’t search for ideas; I find them. They come to me or I have none. I would not sit at a table and think now I have to find ideas. I wait until something disturbs me enough, like a relationship I heard about, and then it becomes so important I have to write the screenplay.

I never wrote with someone else or directed together. I wouldn’t like that. I never worked with (her late husband, director Jacques) Demy. We would show screenplays to each other when we were finished.

When you are a filmmaker, you are a filmmaker all the time. Your mind is recording impressions, moods. You are fed with that. Inspiration is getting connections with the surprises that you see in life. Suddenly it enters in your world and it remains; you have to let it go and work on it. It’s contradictory.

Question from Student: How did you manage to navigate a male-dominated film world?

First, stop saying it’s a male world. It’s true, but it helps not to repeat it. When I started in film, I did a new language of cinema, not as a woman, but as a filmmaker. It is still a male world, as long women are not making the same salary as men.

Put yourself in a situation where you want to make films; whether you are woman or not a woman, give yourself the tools: maybe you intern, maybe you go to school, or read books. Get the tools.

On Filmmaking

We have to capture in film what we don’t know about.

If you don’t have a point-of-view it’s not worth starting to make a film.

Whatever we do in film is searching. If you meet somebody, you establish yourself, who you want to meet, what kind of relationship it is. Our whole life is made up of back and forth, decisions, options -- and then they don’t fit.

When one is filming we should be fragile; listen to that something in ourselves. The act of filming for me is so vivid, it includes what you had in mind, and includes what is happening around you at that moment -- how you felt, if you have headache, and so on. A film builds itself with what you don’t know.

Life interferes. You have friends. Kids. No kids. Then there is a leak on the wall. Everything interferes. It’s how you build the life with others.

Sometimes I go by myself to do location scouting. When I go by myself, something speaks to me in a place I’ve chosen and I know maybe we should take advantage of that. We have to be working with chance. ‘Chance’ is my assistant director.

About Cleo de 5-7

I had to be able calculate the time of speaking, taking a taxi, and so on -- it was very interesting to write what was happening and try the mechanical thing of time, to let emotion and surprise come in.

About Vagabond

I knew people who were on the road. I knew the kind of people she (Mona, the protagonist) would meet. I would write the dialogue the night before. The people I met gave me their attitude and state of mind.

About "The Beaches of Agnès"

It was supposed to be autobiographical. Like a gesture of a painter, when they do a self-portrait and look at themselves and paint. In "The Beaches of Agnès" I am turning the mirror to the people who surround me; it’s not so much about what I did in my past. It is about how you build the life with others. I am turning the mirror to the people who surround me.

Varda on Varda

In the last ten years, I’ve done installations in museums and galleries. I enjoy that other expression of things. I got out of the flat film screen -- to invade the space, using three- dimensional objects. It helps to express other things. You put yourself at risk. I’ve been experimenting in motion, and surprises.I’m naturally curious.

Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, Susan Kouguell teaches screenwriting at Purchase College and presents international workshops and seminars on screenwriting and film. Author of Savvy Characters Sell Screenplays! and The Savvy Screenwriter, she is chairperson of Su-City Pictures East, LLC, a consulting company founded in 1990 where she works with over 1,000 writers, filmmakers, and executives worldwide. www.su-city-pictures.com, http://su-city-pictures.com/wpblog...

Above: Pedro Costa's Horse Money

The Locarno Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 67th edition, taking place this August between the 6th and 16th. It speaks for itself, but, um, wow...

"Every film festival, be it small or large, claims to offer, if not an account of the state of things, then an updated map of the art form and the world it seeks to represent. This cartography should show both the major routes and the byways, along with essential places to visit and those that are more unusual. The Festival del film Locarno is no exception to the rule, and I think that looking through the program you will be able to distinguish the route map for this edition." — Carlo Chatrian, Artistic Director

Above: Matías Piñeiro's The Princess of France

Concorso Internazionale (Official Competition)

A Blast (Syllas Tzoumerkas, Greece/Germany/Netherlands)

Alive (Jungbum Park, South Korea)

Horse Money (Pedro Costa,...

French director to receive the Pardo d’onore at the Locarno Film Festival next month - only the second woman to receive the honour.

French director Agnès Varda is to receive the Pardo d’onore (honorary Leopard) at the 67th edition of the Locarno Film Festival (Aug 6-16).

The festival’s tribute to her will be accompanied by screenings of a selection of her films: the features Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962), The Creatures (1966), Lions Love (…and Lies) (1969), Documenteur (1981), Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi, 1985), The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000) and The Beaches of Agnes (Les Plages d’Agnès, 2008), and the short film Oncle Yanco (1967), as well as the five episodes of the TV series Agnès de ci de là Varda (2011).

Varda will also take part in an on-stage coversation at the festival.

After working as a theatre photographer, Varda began directing in 1954 with the feature-length film La Pointe Courte, starring [link=nm...

A little lightness this week to offset last week's doom and gloom in theaters; love is in the air, as we enjoy imported romance alongside some family friendly animation and docs on the film industry and its players.

Download this in audio form (MP3: 7:28 minutes, 10.3 Mb) Subscribe to the In Theaters podcast: [Xml] [iTunes]

"The Beaches of Agnès"

While most people commit their memoirs to the page, Belgian octogenarian auteur Agnès Varda has constructed a nostalgic visual document of her life, times and work. Flitting between past and present, Varda assembles a collage of memory and experience channeled to us through whimsical reconstruction, archival photographs, home movies and abstract compositions (including a room where the walls are entirely comprised of 35mm prints from her failed stab at fantasy, "Les Créatures") that frame the rich tapestry of her life in her own inimitable style.

Opens in New York.

"The Girl From...