Your handy one-stop-shop for cinephile news, articles, and videos from the week that was.
News Roundup
• The Golden Globes ceremony happened this past Sunday. The full list of winners (including VIFF 2019 standout, Parasite) can be found here.
• Over at Criterion, David Hudson has listed the most anticipated films of 2020. Some of the highlights include Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of West Side Story, as well as new works by Spike Lee, Paul Verhoeven, Mia Hansen-Løve, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Ann Hui.
• Welcome to hell: Warner Bros. has signed a deal with Cinelytic to “leverage [their] system’s comprehensive data and predictive analytics to guide decision-making at the greenlight stage.” This online platform can supposedly “assess the value of a star in any territory and how much a film is expected to make in theaters and on other ancillary streams.”
Reading Roundup
• For the VIFF Blog, Lawrence Garcia examines the various levels of reality in Abel Ferrara’s Tommaso, which plays the Vancity Theatre tonight in the closing night spot of the Italian Film Festival.
• “The defining qualities of the moment are fragmentation and heterogeneity, a messy, amorphous, contradictory too-muchness that has made our waking life an overstimulating hellscape and yet proved remarkably conducive to artistic experimentation.” For the new issue of Film Comment, NYFF programmer Dennis Lim looks back at the aesthetic tendencies and preoccupations of the defining works of the 2010s, many of which will be recognizable to regular VIFF-goers.
• New Yorker film editor Richard Brody has written this lovely tribute to the animations of the early silent period, finding in these seemingly primitive works a tenacious tendency towards invention. Since all of these films are available through the public domain, Brody has also done the work of cobbling their links together into one extremely convenient document.
Viewing/Listening Roundup
• Set for a release in the spring, Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow now has a trailer courtesy of A24. One suspects this a fairly different film from the director who gave us Old Joy, Meek’s Cutoff, and Certain Women.
• Speaking of A24: Josh and Benny Safdie, whose Uncut Gems plays Vancity Theatre from January 17-23, discuss their artistic process with Paul Thomas Anderson on the distributor’s most recent podcast.
Miscellaneous
VIFF Blog 