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With at least 10 sequels awaiting our imminent attention, here’s the challenge for filmgoers: Viewing each sequel means mastering a new code. Dune: Part Two becomes more accessible once you’ve learned why the Chakobsa-speaking characters are frustrated by their stalled kirzibs. For that matter, the fifth Ghostbusters makes more sense if you understand why an old Ectomobile is crucial to harpooning geriatric ghosts.

Each sequel, prequel or miquel is built around its own backstory and idiosyncratic characters. Even the succession of Donald Trump trials and litigations, ongoing or “paused,” are unfolding like sequels, with each scheduled “performance” boasting a familiar plot turn (more on that below).

The present slate of entertainment thus essentially belongs to the past. Audiences won’t be in culture shock this year because of a new Barbenheimer; they’ll more likely be revisiting older, semi-forgotten brands.

Full disclosure: I’m comfy sitting through the new Jokers,...

Le chinoise.Most serious writing about Jean-Luc Godard tends to be both high-flown and forbidding, rather like the films it’s discussing. Translations from French to English or vice versa can make things even dicier. But according to the literary scholar Fredric Jameson, who contributes an enthusiastic preface and afterword, Reading with Jean-Luc Godard—a compendium of 109 three-page essays by 50 writers from a dozen countries, announced as the first in a series—launches “a new form” and “a new genre.”The brevity of each entry tends to confirm Jameson’s claim. The book can be described as an audience-friendly volume designed to occupy the same space between academia and journalism staked out by Notebook while proposing routes into Godard’s work provided by his eclectic reading—a batch of writers ranged alphabetically and intellectually from Louis Aragon, Robert Ardrey, Hannah Arendt, and Honoré de Balzac to François Truffaut, Paul Valéry,...

“We have beautiful landscapes and cities, but more and more shoots are happening in studios and our studios are small and not modernised enough.”

French cultural minister Rima Abdul Malak underlined France’s commitment to international investment and addressed the current political upheaval that has spilled over into the Cannes Film Festival during a first-ever conversation with international press in Cannes.

Abdul Malak, who was appointed in 2022, discussed how the French filmmaking community can better connect with the wider global film industry.

“André Malraux, my predecessor, used to say that cinema was an art and also an industry and it...

It was signed by auteurs including Claire Denis, Jacques Audiard, the Dardenne brothers and Katell Quillévéré.

In an echo of the issues forcing US writers to strike, French film organisations the Arp (the guild for writers-directors-producers) and directors’ guild the Srf, behind Directors’ Fortnight, have written an open letter lashing out at copyright infringements and contemporary commercial cinema practices that they say pose a threat to auteur film.

The letter began: “We, filmmakers, work at the crossroads of ’an art and also an industry’”, in a reference to André Malraux.

They went on to condemn practices that “contravene the core...

Bernard-Henri Lévy with Sergiy Kyslytsya (Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine and Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the United Nations) and Nicolas de Rivière (Ambassador Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations) with Ukrainian soldiers at the Slava Ukraini première Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

In the second instalment with Bernard-Henri Lévy we discuss war films, including Rémy Ourdan’s The Siege, André Malraux’s Espoir: Sierra de Teruel, and Terre d’Espagne by Joris Ivens; Chernobyl, quoting a line by Emmanuelle Riva in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, screenplay by Marguerite Duras, and chapters five, nine, and twelve of Slava Ukraini, co-directed with Marc Roussel (produced by François Margolin with associate producer Emily Hamilton and advisor Gilles Hertzog).

Bernard-Henri Lévy with Nicolas de Rivière and Sergiy Kyslytsya at the United Nations Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

At the United Nations in New York inside the Eocsoc Chamber on the evening of May 4, Nicolas de Rivière,...

Jean-Luc Godard, the French-Swiss director who was one of the most revolutionary filmmakers of the 20th century, died in Rolle, Switzerland at the age of 91. His family said that he died peacefully in an assisted suicide procedure surrounded by his loved ones.

In Memoriam 2022: 100 Great Celebrities Who Died This Year!

The family did not specify what conditions Godard had been suffering from, and he has indicated his interest in assisted suicide in previous interviews. He was an influential film critic for the Cahiers du Cinéma through the 1950s while also shooting short films, and established himself as an exciting new film director with the 1960 film Breathless.

Jean-Luc Godard was born on December 3, 1930, in Paris, France to a wealthy family and quickly moved to Switzerland at the age of four after the outbreak of the Second World War. He was educated at a young age in Nyon, Switzerland and returned...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Steve McQueen and his installation "Year 3" at Tate Britain. Steve McQueen will be unveiling a new installation, “Sunshine State,” at the International film festival Rotterdam as part of its Art Directions section, which is dedicated to "daring films, installations, exhibitions and live performance." This is McQueen's first major commission since "Year 3," which was exhibited at Tate Britain in 2019. Martin Scorsese has set his eyes on his next project with Apple: a biopic about the Grateful Dead, starring Jonah Hill as frontman Jerry Garcia. As Variety points out, Scorsese did executive produce a 2017 documentary series about the band entitled Long Strange Trip. For that series, he described the Grateful Dead as "more than just a band." Hill and Scorsese previously worked together on Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and a Coca-Cola ad for last year's Super Bowl.

by Swapnil Dhruv Bose

One of the most striking films to have come out of the Japanese New Wave, “Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets” is avant-garde writer turned filmmaker Shūji Terayama’s debut feature and is based on his eponymous book. Although he went on to make other masterpieces like “Pastoral: To Die in the Country” (1974) and “Glass Labyrinth” (1979), this brilliant work of experimental anarchy remains the apotheosis of Terayama’s unapologetically original artistic vision.

Following in the footsteps of Jean-Luc Godard and anticipating the non-linear surrealness of directors like David Lynch, Terayama constructs unforgettable vignettes which blind the viewer with their pathos. It is almost pointless to talk about the film’s plot because time and causality are rendered insignificant when confronted with the underlying spiritual anguish. The protagonist introduces himself to us in a spectacular opening monologue where he stares straight into...

A Straub-Huillet Companion is a series of short essays on the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, subject of a Mubi retrospective. Jean-Marie Straub's Communists (2014) is showing on Mubi from October 8 – November 6, 2019.The souls of all my dears have flown to the stars.Thank God there’s no one left for me to lose–so I am free to cry. This air is madefor the echoing of songs.—Excerpt from Anna Akhmatova's The Return (1944)In the final shot of Jean-Marie Straub's Communists (2014), Danièle Huillet sits alone on in the dirt, high up on Mount Etna in Sicily and all but static, as Beethoven's String Quartet No. 16—his last major work before his death from alcohol cirrhosis—swells around her. She is strikingly still, staring off ahead as if stupefied by the living world. After a long pause, she says two words: "neue Welt"—new world.This reanimation of Huillet,...

As a director, Ralph Fiennes shows the same alertness for telling details and rich characterization that he does as an actor. And that’s saying something. His talent shines in The White Crow, a look at the early life of ballet great Rudolf Nureyev, up to and including his defection from Russia and the Kirov Ballet at the Paris-Le Bourget airport in 1961. He was 23. The White Crow is not a biopic. It’s an impressionistic glimpse at the forces driving Nureyev — something of a diva even then — to accept no...

Why did world-famous Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev defect? That’s the question I found myself Googling immediately after seeing Ralph Fiennes’ lovely, elegant, and curiously opaque “The White Crow,” an impressive, dance-heavy biopic which focuses on Nureyev’s childhood, training, and life-changing visit to Paris as part of the Kirov Ballet, culminating in his decision to seek asylum in France. For all its pleasures — among them generous helpings of dance and a true-life East-meets-West intrigue to rival fictive Cannes favorite “Cold War” — the film remains maddeningly ambiguous about his motives for cutting ties with the Soviet Union.

Of course, some things we can never know, although in this case, it feels like more of a creative choice than a historical one, leaving culture-savvy art-house audiences something to ponder after a classy — and respectfully sexy — night at the movies. Such crowds are presumably familiar with the reputation Nureyev made for himself over the subsequent decades,...

Conceived amid the French social unrest of 1968, and born in 1969, Directors’ Fortnight celebrates its 50th edition this year.

Martin Scorsese is a filmmaker more associated with Cannes Official Selection than the sidebars running alongside but this year he hit Directors’ Fortnight to receive its honorary Carrosse d’Or and participate in the opening of its 50th edition in a programme of events billed as “an exceptional day with Mr Scorsese”.

The Palme d’Or and Oscar-winning director also assisted in a screening of his breakthrough picture Mean Streets, which premiered internationally in the then renegade section in 1974, and took part...

The Spiritual Prudence Sitting on a bench in the garden of my house I stared at the infinite blue sky over my head. Hawks flew over me so high that sometimes I barely could see them—discounting the fact that I need to change my glasses prescription. Sometimes I could see their wings; sometimes I could see nothing but a small black point in the blue sky. Massive white clouds appeared. They had no shadow for the sun hit them with its light frontally; because of that, they appeared infinite cotton balls, immaculately white, like they were drawn by a child.This prosaic and innocent sight remind me of the feelings that I experienced when I watched Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella. Many filmmakers have shot the sky and the clouds. Many filmmakers have shot birds such as hawks and eagles flying rapidly over the earth (and one of them was...

[...] and also, indeed more, perhaps in those who were in no way exceptional and have left no trace, there was something that went beyond the struggle against Nazism, something – be it only for a moment, the last one – that contributed, whether they knew it or not, to the “dream of a thing” which men have had “for so long,” to the enormous dream of men.These words of Franco Fortini, spoken in Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Fortini/Cani (1978), are a kind of summation of one of the major themes of their work. From one film to the next, they return to this “dream of a thing”: the day Camille dreams of in Eyes Do Not Want to Close At all Times (1969) when “Rome will allow herself to choose in her turn,” human’s desire to commune with the gods in From the Cloud to the Resistance (1979), the “new duties,...

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In Dimitri Kirsanoff's Menilmontant a destitute waif, betrayed and abandoned by the man who seduced her, sits on a park bench with her newborn infant. Beside her is an old man eating a sandwich. This wordless exchange is one of the greatest moments ever committed to film. Nadia Sibirskaia’s face reveals all of life’s cruel mysteries as she gazes upon a crust of bread.

The persistence of hope is the dark angel that underlies despair, and here it taunts her mercilessly. A whole series of fluctuations of expression and movement in reaction to anguish, physical pain involving hesitation, dignity, ravenous hunger, survival, self-contempt, modesty, boundless gratitude. All articulated with absolute clarity without hitting notes (without touching the keys). Chaplin could have played either the old man on the bench (his mustache is a sensory device!) or Nadia. And it would have been masterful and deeply affecting,...

Exclusive: Jean-Luc Godard and Ursula Meier are among 14 directors set to participate in an omnibus film that will mark next year’s centenary of the First World War.

Speaking exclusively to ScreenDaily in Locarno, Meier - who has become known to international festival and cinema audiences through her last two features Home and Sister - confirmed that she and 83-year-old Godard will be making short films for the omnibus project Les Ponts de Sarajevo.

The omnibus will be coordinated by Paris-based production house Cinétévé.

The film will be part of a week-long event from June 21-28, 2014, titled “Sarajevo: Coeur de L’Europe”, organised in collaboration with the City of Sarajevo, the Sarajevo Film Festival, Jazzfest Sarajevo, Centre André Malraux, Goethe-Institut and the British Council.

“Most of the contributions will be documentary or essay-type films, but I am one of a couple of film-makers who will be making a fiction film,” Meier explained...

Experimental French director acclaimed for his post-apocalyptic film La Jetée

The essay film, a form pitched between documentary and personal reflection, exploring the subjectivity of the cinematic perspective, has now become an accepted genre. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, Errol Morris and Michael Moore are among its main recent exponents, but Chris Marker, who has died aged 91, was credited with inventing the form.

Marker's creative use of sound, images and text in his poetic, political and philosophical documentaries made him one of the most inventive of film-makers. They looked forward to what is called "the new documentary", but also looked back to the literary essay in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne. Marker's interests lay in transitional societies – "life in the process of becoming history," as he put it. How do various cultures perceive and sustain themselves and each other in the increasingly intermingled modern world?

He was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve,...

Capa and Taro lived, loved and died on the frontline, becoming the most famous war photographers of their time. As a new novel about them is published, we explore their real relationship

It begins with a photograph. In 1934 a struggling Hungarian photographer, André Friedmann, living in exile in Paris, is commissioned to take publicity pictures for a Swiss life insurance company's advertising brochure. On the lookout for potential models, he approaches a young Swiss refugee, Ruth Cerf, in a café on the Left Bank and convinces her to pose for him in a Montparnasse park.

Because she does not entirely trust the scruffy young charmer, Ruth brings along her friend Gerta Pohorylle, a petite redhead with a winning smile and a confident manner. So begins the most iconic relationship in the history of photography, and an intertwined and complex story of radical politics, bohemianism and bravery that, in the intervening years,...

Fifty years ago, Thorold Dickinson kickstarted the first British film studies course at Ucl. It didn't last long – but its influence did

It's 50 years since film first became a university subject in Britain. Earlier dates are arguable, but on 16 January 1961 Thorold Dickinson gave his inaugural lecture in the physics theatre at University College London, accompanied by a programme evoking the dawn of cinema. Later dates have also been argued, and the general perception of film studies and its origins still involves a very 1970s blend of structuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalytic theory. Dickinson's department was a more free-spirited affair and has paid the price in obscurity and misrepresentation.

The idea had come from the BFI, the money from Wardour Street, and the Slade was in the frame largely because its director, William Coldstream, had in his 1930s youth dabbled in documentary under the tutelage of John Grierson. Coldstream's old colleagues were...

 

Watching Jean-Luc Godard's new picture, Film Socialisme, at the press screening at the New York Film Festival, I made a rather exciting discovery. As you may already know from reading various accounts of the film (I shall link here to my own piece about it, because why the heck not?), Godard kitted the thing out with what he called "Navajo" English subtitles, which, as I noted, seemed to function not so much as subtitles per se as "a sort of running discrete text of its own." This was quite interesting and diverting, for sure, but what of all that spoken dialogue and narration, which was largely in French? Well, I was happily surprised as I...got it all. Yes. I discovered I could understand unsubtitled spoken French, if I applied myself just a little bit. This was rather different from being able to instantaneously translate it, I should clarify.

Mike Rollo has just started a new series on old theaters in Saskatchewan. I’m very excited about this, especially based on his first profile of the Majestic Theatre in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Also starting a new blogging series is animator Patrick Smith of Scribble Junkies. He’s teaching “Animation 101″ online and, again, has an excellent first post about sacks of flour. (Sounds like I’m joking, but I’m not.) Plus, one excellent and one horrendous Bakshi movie poster. Smith’s blogging partner Bill Plympton has a horrifying story of when self-distribution goes awry. (At least it all worked out in the end.) P.S. Words of advice: When starting a filmmaking competition, be sure to remember that your email is working. Dolphins, space whales and Stan Vanderbeek, oh my! Andrea Grover on the collision of science, sea creatures, space and the universe. Film Studies for Free has compiled a...

Abbas Kiarostami's new movie is a stylish and mysterious study of relationships, with powerful central performances

A certain obliquity is necessary for anyone working within a repressive regime like the Iran of the ayatollahs, and the circumspection of movie-makers there has contributed to the creation of a subtle, allusive, allegorical cinema. The 70-year-old Abbas Kiarostami, who initially studied painting and design at Tehran University before entering the film business, eventually attracted an international following after making an impact on the festival circuit with the so-called Koker trilogy made between 1987 and 1994, about life in a remote Iranian village and the impact of an earthquake that occurred there in 1990.

He is perhaps the most distinctive of a remarkable generation of Iranian film-makers. The influences on his work range from the Italian neorealists to Pirandello, and he has developed a highly individual style that involves long takes, working with non-professional casts, and...

The "Paradise" of Michael Almereyda's new film is an earthly one, a collection of fragments from the filmmaker's own experiences, shot over years and in different countries and with no more explicit explanation than the patterns that emerge as one segment glides into the next. A sales pitch in a Tehran rug store, a eulogy, a boozy party monologue on Napoleon, a roadside stop to photograph bison, a firework display over Los Angeles, a pause on the set of "The New World" -- these moments reverberate off each other, teasing a profound sense of wonder out of the small-scale and the mundane. It's perhaps the most personal and certainly the least traditional film from Almereyda, whose career has encompassed work as varied as a documentary about photographer William Eggleston, a postmodern New York City vampire tale and a contemporary take on "Hamlet," with Ethan Hawke playing the brooding prince-as-corporate heir.