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When J. Hoberman placed game 6 of the 1986 World Series on his Village Voice year-end list, we had one of the first, most convincing attempts to enshrine live sports as cinema. And while a game can carry the compressed rise and fall, and dramatis personae, of a great narrative, you can further hone in on visual grammar: a televised match is also a spectacle of live editing––close-ups and masters seamlessly stitched together, rules of offscreen space and eyeline-matching also respected.

To make a UK-centric reference: Albert Serra’s new film Afternoons of Solitude is more akin to two hours of Sky Sports than you’d expect from the guy who once made Story of My Death. Following the rules, if not the spirit, of ever-festival-fashionable observational and direct cinema, we spend most of its runtime in long takes observing Spanish bullfighting rings, our eyes focused on Andrés Roca Rey, a...

Vampires are eternal, and so are movies about them. The genre shows no signs of going bloodless anytime soon, even if the oldest texts continue to inspire some of its most compelling entries. Consider writer-director Adrien Beau’s “The Vourdalak,” an adaptation of Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s 1839 “The Family of the Vourdalak,” a foundational novella that predates Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” by more than half a century. After premiering in Venice last year, the film arrives in theaters less than a week after the trailer for “The Witch” helmer Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” remake dropped — a coincidence, surely, but one that’s nevertheless emblematic of the ur-texts’ enduring influence.

“The Vourdalak” doesn’t exactly announce its blood-sucking bonafides, though the signs are all there. A stranger introducing himself as an emissary of the King of France (Kacey Mottet Klein) loses his way while traveling through a remote village and is refused...

Having achieved the unprecedented feat of having a film in our top 20 of last year and the same film in our top five of this year with his astounding Pacifiction, expectations are certainly high for the next feature from Albert Serra.

It’s now been announced Serra will begin production this summer on his next film Out of This World, with a 2025 premiere in store. The project will find him tackling modern international relations head-on, as the synopsis reveals: “An American delegation travels to Russia in the midst of the Ukrainian war to try to find a solution to an economic dispute linked to sanctions. Out Of This World explores the eternal rivalry between Russia and the USA.”

“As is often the case, one of the year’s most compelling films comes in the form of one of its most unrelatable stories: the lonesome, lingering descent of a seasoned French...

Cutting through roaring laughter, Spanish director Albert Serra said: “Why are you laughing?! I am serious!” The reaction of the audience was the natural byproduct of Serra’s staple candidness, which he brought to the International Film Festival Rotterdam during an in-depth talk about his career and methodology delivered earlier this week.

The director measured no words when speaking about the difficulties of working with actors (“They all have bad taste!”), the vulgarity of films such as “Triangle of Sadness” (“Is the most aggressive thing you can do is have people throwing up? Maybe I like it because it’s the best thing in the film”) and Steven Spielberg’s accomplished reconstruction of war in “Saving Private Ryan”

Serra is in Rotterdam with “Pacifiction,” playing as part of the Harbour strand at IFFR, a selection dedicated to offering a “safe haven to the full range of contemporary cinema that the festival champions.

This interview was originally published online by Sight & Sound. It is being re-published on the Notebook in conjunction with Albert Serra's Story of My Death playing on Mubi in most countries in the world through December 14, 2015.If new movie masterpieces are proclaimed at each and every major film festival each and every year, the notable absence of adventurous, exciting and otherwise transgressive cinema amongst those lauded should inspire us to question not only the terms we use to describe films but also the standards to which we hold them.Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra, a transcendental minimalist who wields his camera like only a handful of fellow feature-film digital adventurers – among them Pedro Costa, David Lynch and Michael Mann – is one of the few who produces work that truly creates a new encounter with the audience. His radically stripped-down, voluptuously shaggy adaptations of canonical writing – Cervantes in Honour of the Knights...

The Film Society Of Lincoln Center and The Museum Of Modern Art have announced seven official selections for the 2014 New Directors/New Films Festival, set to run from March 19–30.

The 2014 edition marks the 43rd year of the festival dedicated to the discovery of new works by emerging and dynamic filmmaking talent.

The initial seven selections represent 11 countries and are:

Richard Ayoade’s The Double (UK):

Benedikt Erlingsson’s Of Horses And Men (pictured, Iceland);

Abdellah Taïa’s Salvation Army (L’Armée du Salut) (France-Morocco-Switzerland);

Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness (Estonia-France);

Roberto Minervini’s Stop The Pounding Heart (Belgium-Italy-us);

Albert Serra’s Story Of My Death (Història De La Meva Mort) (Spain-France); and

Vivian Qu’s Trap Street (Shuiyin Jie) (China).

The 66th Locarno International Film Festival has announced its annual awards, or Palmares. The Pardo d'Oro went to Albert Serra's "La Historia de la Meva Mort." Best Actress went to Brie Larson for "Short Term 12," which also won a special mention, while Balthasar Kormakur picked up the Variety Piazza Grand Award for '2 Guns,' starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, Fernando Bacilio took home Best Actor for the Vega brothers' "El Mudo." Concorso internazionale Pardo d’oro Historia De La Meva Mort by Albert Serra, Spain/France Premio speciale della giuria E Agora? Lembra-me by Joaquim Pinto, Portugal Pardo per la migliore regia (Best Director) Hong Sangsoo for U Ri Sunhi (Our Suhni), South Korea Pardo per la miglior interpretazione femminile (Best Actress) Brie Larson for film Short Term 12 by Destin Cretton, United States Pardo per la miglior interpretazione maschile (Best Actor) Fernando Bacilio for El Mudo...