News

European Film Promotion, which gives a boost to films and talent from Europe, has revealed the jury for the 28th edition of European Shooting Stars, which showcases actors from the continent.

The jury is comprised of five film professionals who will select 10 actors. They will then take part in a program at the Berlin Film Festival, which runs Feb. 13 – 23. The jury will select the actors from candidates who have been nominated by their national film promotion institutes and film centers.

The jury includes former European Shooting Star Ludivine Sagnier, an actor best known for her roles in films by François Ozon. She starred in, among others, “Water Drops on Burning Rocks” (2000), “8 Women” (2002) and “Swimming Pool” (2003), and she will also appear in Ozon’s latest film, “Quand vient l’automne” (2024). Sagnier has also worked with directors such as P.J. Hogan, Lee Tamahori, Paolo Sorrentino, Hirokazu Koreeda and Ridley Scott.

Also on...

The Criterion Collection has always put acclaimed filmmakers first. so let's talk about Mai Zetterling and Michael Haneke first. In December 2022, Criterion will be releasing three films from each filmmaker. Michael Haneke: Trilogy collects the first three he directed: The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. Criterion calls it "a trilogy depicting a coldly bureaucratic society in which genuine human relationships have been supplanted by a deep-seated collective malaise," which probably won't surprise you if you're a fan of the Austrian auteur. Three Films By Mai Zetterling gathers "three provocative, taboo-shattering works from the 1960s featuring some of Swedish cinema's most iconic stars," per Criterion. "With...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

And like that, Criterion’s 2022 is in the bag. Their December titles, announced today, wind down a year perhaps best-defined by the company’s ventures into 4K—none of which is represented here, sadly, but there’s always the next twelve months.

And I won’t complain about a well-stocked disc for Todd Haynes’ bewilderingly beautiful The Velvet Underground (read my interview here), which I think marks the first time an Apple TV+ feature has entered the collection. I’m also glad to see two trilogy boxsets: one for the little-discussed Swedish figure Mai Zetterling, another for the very-much-discussed Michael Haneke—here represented by The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. (Not a great laughs-to-runtime ratio here.) Bonus: while I’ve never seen Cooley High, the cover basically sells me.

See artwork below and further details on all titles here:

The post The...

The 2020 special edition of the Locarno Film Festival, deemed For the Future of Films, gathers audiences in both virtual and physical space. At the center of this year's festival are 20 suspended projects, each halted in some way by the Covid-19 pandemic, that will compete in the The Films After Tomorrow section. From Lisandro Alonso and Miguel Gomes to Lav Diaz and Lucrecia Martel, these 22 filmmakers have also joined together to handpick twenty films from previous editions of the festival. The program, A Journey in the Festival's History, is an anthology of timeless films from Locarno's past (from 1948 to 2019) that reflect the festival's spirit of discovery and celebration of stylistic breakthrough. Mubi is immensely proud to be partnering with the festival to make these selections available for streaming outside Switzerland. Below, the directors have shared some words about their inspired choices. Wang Bing on Horse MoneyPedro Costa’s films explore...

Like most film festivals this year, Locarno Film Festival will not be moving ahead as usual. However, they’ve found inventive ways to both celebrate filmmakers they’ve long admired and present films physically and digitally. After announcing a new initiative to support new films by Lucrecia Martel, Lisandro Alonso, Lav Diaz, Wang Bing, Miguel Gomes, and more, they’ve asked this class of talented directors to select their favorite films in Locarno history.

A Journey in the Festival’s History is devoted to Locarno’s 73-year history of showing the best in international cinema. Made up of twenty films, a selection will screen online for those in Switzerland as well as Mubi internationally. On August 5-15, they will also screen in person at Locarno’s theaters.

Lili Hinstin, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival, said, “It would be an impossible task to present a review of the history...

Films by Roberto Rossellini, Chantel Akerman and Marguerite Duras feature in selection.

The Locarno Film Festival has unveiled the selection of 20 classic film titles that will be showcased in its A Journey In The Festival’s History sidebar as part of its special hybrid edition running August 5 to 15.

The line-up is part of the festival’s ’Locarno 2020 – For the Future of Films’ edition which was created after it was forced to cancel its 73rd edition due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The titles have been selected by the directors taking part in its festival’s exceptional The Films After Tomorrow initiative...

High-profile filmmakers including Lucrecia Martel and Lav Diaz have contributed to a retrospective program for the Locarno Film Festival (August 5-15), selecting 20 titles from the event’s 74-year history that will have online and physical screenings next month.

Due to ongoing pandemic disruption Locarno shifted the majority of its festival online this year, though ten of the below list of titles will still have physical screenings in Switzerland. The entire program will be shown online for free in Switzerland by the fest, while it is partnering with streamer Mubi to stream the films outside of the country.

Ranging from 1948 (Locarno’s third edition) to 2018 (its 71st), the titles offer a broad insight into the fest’s history and are directed by filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke, and Whit Stillman. The selectees are all participating in Locarno’s ‘The Films After Tomorrow’ initiative this year,...

When Dau. Natasha premiered at the Berlinale less than a moon cycle ago it was unprecedented and an entirely unique film. We now have precedent for the Dau movies and they are the Dau movies themselves. Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s constructed totalitarian nightmare is justifiably taking fire at the moment (over allegations regarding consent and the mistreatment of actors) but if Degeneration is to be the last Dau feature to see the light of day it will be a fitting coda. Yes, Natasha was a startling introduction–as provocative as it was fascinating–but Degeneration is something else: the first Dau epic novel and, perhaps, the first masterpiece of the series.

All in all, the two are scarcely comparable. Natasha had a running time of 146 minutes and took place over the course of a few days in the early ‘50s, with only a spattering of events and characters seen on screen.

Mubi's retrospective "Empowering the Spectator: The Films of Michael Haneke" runs October 17 – December 16, 2019 in the United Kingdom.Alexander (Udo Samel) has his eyes glued to a TV screen when he recounts, halfway through Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent, his mother’s last words: “How would it be if we had a monitor instead of a head, where we could see our thoughts?” Released in 1989, The Seventh Continent marked Haneke’s feature film debut, but not the end of a career the Austrian had amassed during the previous fifteen years he’d spent writing and directing TV productions. Take his two-part 1979 television movie Lemmings as a single project, and the twenty-three films Haneke has directed since 1974 are somewhat evenly split: twelve features and eleven TV movies—the last of which, an adaptation of his theatrical staging of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, only came out in 2013. But the relationship...

France.tv, the newly revamped streaming service of French broadcasting group France Televisions, has ordered “Parlement,” a half-hour satirical comedy series about the European Parliament created by Noé Debré.

Debré’s credits include Jacques Audiard’s Palme d’Or winning “Dheepan.”

The series, which is being produced by Fabienne Servan-Schreiber and Thomas Saignes at Paris-based production banner Cineteve, centers around five young assistants of different nationalities and backgrounds who work at the European Parliament in the midst of a post-Brexit chaos.

“Parlement” marks the first original series commissioned by France.tv, which aims to feed its digital pipeline with premium original series from France and Europe aimed at younger viewers.

Studio Hamburg’s CineCentrum is co-producing the series; a yet-to-be-named German TV network will soon come on board. The series is also backed by Artemis in Belgium and All3 Media’s 7Stories in the U.K.

Debré is writing the series...

This last half-decade, few French screenwriters have run up such an illustrious list of co-write credits as Noé Debré. Thomas Bedigain’s writing partner on Jacques Audiard’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Deephan,” Debra co-penned Bedigain’s own debut, “The Cowboys,” “Racer and the Jailbird,” by Michael Roskam, and “Le Brio,” directed by Yvan Attal. He has now made his directorial debut, “The Seventh Continent.” Few films in MyFrenchFilmFestival, which launched yesterday.

In it, Emile, a rotund-girthed private investigator is asked by Thybaud to find his girlfriend Claire Soares, who has been abducted by billionaire John Rapoport, or so Thybaud says. The first person Emile down his local club says she knows Rapport very well – he comes to cry on her shoulder every night; the second announces he’s going to a party at Claire’s place, just nearby. But Emile really shouldn’t take Mdma, when he’s on the job.

If you, as I, are the type to presume that a “dramaturgical assistant” is some form of midlevel job in a hospital’s oncology department you might be startled to see that none other than the great Michael Haneke is credited on the promotional material of To The Night–an unrelenting new work from filmmaker Peter Brunner–as being that very thing.

We are, naturally, being rather facetious here. The film in question, which follows an artist/arsonist’s (artsonist’s?) creative attempts to get over the horrific loss of his family–who perished in a fire from which he himself was the lone survivor–is in fact the third feature film from Brunner, a 35-year-old Austrian director who was, as it turns out, a student of Haneke’s at the Vienna Film Academy. If one’s old professor happens to have two Palme d’Ors and an Oscar lying around,...

Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke has made many a masterpiece – and his latest, Happy End, isn't one of them. Yet this cinematic poke in the eye about an upper class family imploding still exerts a perverse fascination. From early provocations like The Seventh Continent (1989) through later boundary-pushing works like The Piano Teacher, Cache, The White Ribbon, Funny Games (both the original and it's English-language remake) and Amour, the fillmaker specializes in the toxic indifference that can kill a family or society as a whole. He offers no easy answers. As the...

Michael Haneke’s most intimate film in nearly a quarter-century, “Amour” relates the tragic final months in a relationship with at least six decades’ worth of history, as a concerned French husband cares for his increasingly irritable wife in the wake of two debilitating strokes. Considering Haneke’s confrontational past, this poignantly acted, uncommonly tender two-hander makes a doubly powerful statement about man’s capacity for dignity and sensitivity when confronted with the inevitable cruelty of nature. Acquired by Sony Pictures Classics before Cannes, this autumnal heart-breaker should serve arthouse-goers well — not for first dates, but for those who’ve long since lost count.

With the exception of a single early scene in which retired music teachers Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) attend the concert of a former pupil, “Amour” takes place entirely within the protective cocoon of their Parisian apartment, where the couple lives comfortably surrounded by books,...