Your handy one-stop-shop for cinephile news, articles, and videos from the week that was.
By Josh Cabrita
News Roundup
• Julie Dash will begin production on a biopic about Dr. Angela Davis in June of next year, Shadow and Act reports. Dash is best known for her 1991 classic Daughters of the Dust, which was the first film by a Black female director to receive a wide release in the United States. (You may remember the film from our Black History Month series in 2017.) This will mark Dash’s return to feature filmmaking since the premiere of that landmark.
• Paul Thomas Anderson has announced his next project: a Sen Fernando-set, 1970s high school movie about a child actor. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Anderson will write, direct and produce. The film will begin production in February, 2020.
Reading Roundup
• In case you missed it: Martin Scorsese penned this Op-Ed for the New York Times in which he clarified his dismissal of Marvel movies as “not cinema.” One of myriad highlights: “They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.”
• Adèle Haenel, the star of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, recently opened up about her experience with on-set abuse in the French film industry. Another Gaze has done the valuable work of collecting and translating Haenel’s comments.
• “I was surprised at the muted (which is to say, nonexistent) response in the cinephile world to the publication of On Cinema (2019), the first-ever compendium of [Glauber] Rocha’s film writing published in English.” For the Brooklyn Rail, Steve Macfarlane reviews the recently translated collection of film writing by the radical Brazilian filmmaker. This is an “essential volume” that “bombards the reader with breathtaking manifestos from one page to the next.” You may recognize Rocha from the double bill we co-presented with the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival back in 2016.
• One of the highlights of this year’s DOXA Film Festival, Brett Story’s The Hottest August will be released theatrically in the United States on Friday, and Erika Balsom has penned this eloquent, erudite analysis of the film for Artforum.
• Over on MUBI Notebook, Adrian Curry counts down the best film posters of the decade. You’ll find his number one choice, “a dazzling cartoon mandala whose symmetries and symbolism radiate from its pink heart,” pictured above.
Viewing Roundup
• Kimstim posted the trailer for Oliver Laxe’s follow-up to 2016’s Mimosas. Fire Will Come, which premiered at Cannes 2019, will receive its theatrical release sometime next year.
• Reviews for Todd Haynes’ new prestige pic Dark Waters are pouring in. You can catch the film when it opens in Vancouver theatres on November 29.
Miscellaneous
• Not just the firecracking wiseguy from Goodfellas and Casino, Joe Pesci has also pursued a career as a musician. And with the release of The Irishman, Pesci is using his time in the spotlight to announce his first album in 21 years. The first single, which you can find here, might just surprise you.
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