Your weekly one-stop-shop for film news, interviews, articles, and videos from the week that was.
The 50th edition of New Directors/New Films kicked off on Wednesday in, of all places, New York City’s newly reopened movie theatres. While acknowledging that the festival does showcase the occasional burgeoning talent who goes on to pack out the multiplexes (*cough* Christopher Nolan *cough*), The New York Times’ Beatrice Loayza suggests that this year’s crop of filmmakers give commercialism a wide birth in favour of exploring parts unknown.
Hot Docs is also underway and, unsurprisingly, Point of View Magazine has stepped to the fore with their coverage. There are already more than 50 reviews and features filed. So, if you want to know which documentaries you should have on your radar this year, this is the ideal place to start. (BTW: Octopi are conspicuous by their absence.)
If you’re looking for another sign that life is returning to abnormal in the film industry, we offer you this: Screen Daily reports that The Artist’s Michel Hazanavicius has begun production on his remake of Shinichiro Ueda’s cult hit One Cut of the Dead. The retitled Final Cut will star Romain Duris and Bérénice Bejo.
Meanwhile, The Guardian’s Rowan Righelato would like a few minutes of your time in hopes of convincing you that Johnny Mnemonic, Robert Longo’s shot-in-1995/set-in-2021 adaptation of the William Gibson short story, doesn’t warrant its dreadful reputation. Righelato argues, “Longo’s film is at its heart a comic-book comedy, and belongs to a tradition of cinematic eccentricity of which Terry Gilliam’s best work might be exemplary…”
We’ll leave you with a little something to look forward to: News broke this week that David Cronenberg is set helm his first feature film in nearly a decade. As Little White Lies’ Charles Bramesco points out, the new film shares a title with Cronenberg’s 1970 effort: Crimes of the Future. This seems only fitting given that Viggo Mortensen, who will headline the film, told GQ: “I would say, without giving the story away, he’s going maybe a little bit back to his origins.”
VIFF Blog 