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Martin Scorsese was at the Berlinale this week for the first time in a decade. His presence to collect an honorary Golden Bear was a reminder of the festival’s glories of yesteryear.

In decades past, Scorsese touched down in Berlin with major works such as Raging Bull (1981), Cape Fear (1992); Gangs of New York (2003 ), Shine a Light (2008) and Shutter Island (2010). It feels a long time since the event — traditionally one of the world’s great cinema showcases — has attracted such movies. In recent years the studio splashes have dried up.

So have memorable movies from A-list arthouse filmmakers. Scorsese this week sang the praises of the event for the encouragement it had given him as an emerging filmmaker. Citing Brian de Palma’s Silver Bear win for his second film Greetings in 1969, Scorsese said the prize had marked a turning point for unknown, independent American directors such as himself, de Palma,...

Martin Scorsese was lauded with the Berlin Film Festival’s honorary Golden Bear on Tuesday night, celebrating a lifetime of achievement in cinema. As he accepted the award, Scorsese — whose most recent film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is currently up for 10 Oscars — reflected on his career thus far and even teased a return to the festival “in a couple years.”

Scorsese was introduced by German director Wim Wenders, who is also Oscar-nominated for his latest feature, “Perfect Days.” Wenders told a hilarious story, complete with a photo slideshow, about one of his earliest interactions with Scorsese at the Telluride Film Festival in 1978, where he came upon the director and his then-girlfriend Isabella Rossellini on the side of the road with a flat tire.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Martin Scorsese did manage to take off the flat tire,” Wenders said to roaring applause. “But much to his dismay, we all realized...

Martin Scorsese was presented with the Berlin Film Festival’s Honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement on Tuesday evening, with old friend German director Wim Wenders paying a warm personal tribute.

Martin Scorsese received Berlin’s Honorary Golden Bear on stage alongside German filmmaker Wim Wenders pic.twitter.com/PgQyYZK8IP

— Deadline Hollywood (@Deadline) February 20, 2024

In his tribute speech, Wenders described his old friend as “the reigning king of cinema” and said that over half a century of directing, Scorsese had become a trademark, almost brand.

“You could safely go into a movie theatre, sit down and know that with this next Martin Scorsese Picture, that was your your credit formula Marty, you were going to see a masterful film that would markedly define its time, not more not less,” he said.

He recalled how he and Scorsese had first hooked up while attending the Telluride Film Festival in 1978.

Wenders...

November 1st is a tough day for horror hounds. The decorations are still up, the air remains crisp, but the spirit has seemingly moved on, perhaps vanquished by the sun. Alamo Drafthouse says to hell with all of that and has announced two month’s worth of genre joy that’ll take you from Dia de los Muertos to Christmas Eve with minimal whiplash.

Terror Tuesday is a weekly slash-and-thrash through the world of horror, and they’ve booked a number of holiday-tinged forever classics mixed in with new canon-busting entries, many of which are screening from new, sparkling scans. Highlights include Lake Mungo, Tales from the Hood, The Changeling, and a pre-Thanksgiving feast with the Sawyers.

Weird Wednesday is similarly a weekly exploration of exploitation, pop oddities, and underloved gems. (Think of it as channel-surfing a transmission from a better dimension). And like Terror Tuesday, they’ve loaded it...

I honestly never expected Steven Spielberg in a Criterion Channel series––certainly not one that pairs him with Kogonada, anime, and Johnny Mnemonic––but so’s the power of artificial intelligence. Perhaps his greatest film (at this point I don’t need to tell you the title) plays with After Yang, Ghost in the Shell, and pre-Matrix Keanu in July’s aptly titled “AI” boasting also Spike Jonze’s Her, Carpenter’s Dark Star, and Computer Chess. Much more analog is a British Noir collection obviously carrying the likes of Odd Man Out, Night and the City, and The Small Back Room, further filled by Joseph Losey’s Time Without Pity and Basil Dearden’s It Always Rains on Sunday. (No two ways about it: these movies have great titles.) An Elvis retrospective brings six features, and the consensus best (Don Siegel’s Flaming Star) comes September 1.

While Isabella Rossellini...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our weekly email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSShadow of the Vampire.Willem Dafoe will join Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu film, news that comes 23 years after he played a fictitious version of Murnau's lead actor, Max Schreck, in Shadow of the Vampire. Dafoe’s supporting role is currently “unknown,” according to Deadline, though Eggers's vampire will be Bill Skarsgard.Sight & Sound continues their rollout of the Greatest Films of All Time, now unveiling the critics’ top 250.The great cinematographer Caroline Champetier will be honored with the Berlinale Camera award at this year’s festival, marking a career of beautifully lensed films for Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, Margarethe von Trotta, Claude Lanzmann, and Leos Carax, among many others.Following Sundance’s closing awards ceremony, we’ve compiled the full list of winners here on Notebook.

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film Forum

One of the most exciting series of 2022 is a study of the Taiwanese New Wave that goes beyond Hou, Yang, and Tsai—included though they are—while a print of Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? plays Sunday.

Museum of the Moving Image

Documentary filmmaker Noriaki Tsuchimoto is given his first-ever U.S. retrospective, while the director’s cut of Donnie Darko screens on Friday and Home for the Holidays shows this Saturday.

Anthology Film Archives

Films by Jim McBride are highlighted, while “Trans Film” returns.

Roxy Cinema

The Rapture and Eve’s Bayou play on 35mm this weekend; “City Dudes” returns on Saturday; Jack Smith’s Normal Love has a 16mm screening this Sunday

Museum of Modern Art

A series on Filipino filmmaker Mike De Leon continues.

IFC Center

Cronenberg’s Rabid, Night of the Living Dead,...

Nostalgia fuels Quentin Tarantino’s career, as his movies bear the DNA of his obsessions, be it blaxploitation (“Jackie Brown”), Shaw Brothers classics (“Kill Bill”) or the Los Angeles of his youth (“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”).

Yet the last few years have marked a turning point for the auteur. Instead of letting his movies do the talking, Tarantino has embraced more of a professorial role. In July, he launched the podcast “Video Archives” with former video store co-worker and “Pulp Fiction” co-writer Roger Avary, in which the pair pick random selections from their former rental place (the inventory of which Tarantino bought once they shuttered) and analyze them. It’s a joy to hear motormouthed Tarantino shoot the shit with an old friend who can break him out of filibuster.

On Nov. 1, Tarantino released a more formal analysis of film with his first non-fiction book, “Cinema Speculation.” Structured as essays mixed with memoir,...

Jerry Lee Lewis, the world-famous rock and roll and country musician died at 87. On Friday, Lewis’ publicist, Zach Farnum, confirmed the Hall of Famer’s passing. Lee leaves behind a rocky legacy some musicians can only dream of achieving.

As a singer, songwriter, and pianist, Lewis dazzled crowds with infectious energy and theatrical piano playing technique. On stage, Lewis appeared to merge with his instrument, becoming one with the music he loved to share with the world. Watching Lewis on stage, you’d think he was performing an exorcism on stage, as each note caused his bones to gyrate with rhythm. Famously known for his hit song “Great Balls of Fire,” Lewis dabbled in rockabilly, gospel, country, blues, and jazz. There was scarcely a genre Lewis wouldn’t explore, and he shined while creating unique soundscapes in all categories.

Lewis came onto the music scene in 1956 with a hit called “Crazy Arms.

When Owen Kline was 14 years old, he wrote cartoonist Johnny Ryan a fan letter. “I didn’t know who he was,” Ryan told IndieWire. “I just thought it was amusing that a child was sending me fan mail.” Featuring characters like Loady McGee and stories like “The Whorehouse of Dr. Moreau,” Ryan’s “Angry Youth Comix” were not exactly age-appropriate for Kline. But the introduction proved fruitful. Years later, the now 30-year-old Kline went to Ryan when he was working on his first feature, the A24-distributed “Funny Pages.”

“Funny Pages” centers on a New Jersey teen obsessed, like Kline was and clearly still is, with underground comics. After his art teacher and mentor dies in a shockingly horrific accident, Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) decides to quit school with the idea of devoting himself to his craft.

Kline was in need of drawings to represent his protagonist’s body of work,...

As the new documentary “Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies” points out, 2020 is a risky time to make movies that feature female nudity, particularly if it’s of the gratuitous kind. But, as “Skin” doesn’t say but does demonstrate, it’s also a risky time to make movies about onscreen nudity, even if you try to emphasize that it’s a work of scholarship not titillation.

To be sure, the film from writer-director Danny Wolf and writer Paul Fishbein (the “Time Warp” series of docs about cult films) takes a historical approach to the subject of on-screen flesh. It’s a chronological account that makes copious use of authors, critics, academics and even an art historian to talk about the place of the nude in art.

But it also illustrates the points they make with plenty of breasts, bums and penises. And its attempts to deal with...

” The body is meant to be seen. Not all covered up ” – Marilyn Monroe

Skin: A History Of Nudity In The Movies , available On Demand August 18th, explores the history of nudity in film, beginning with the silent movie era through present day. The documentary delves into the gender bias concerning nudity in motion pictures and will follow the revolution that has pushed for gender equality in feature films today. A deep discussion of pre-code Hollywood and its amoral roots, the censorship that “cleaned up” Hollywood and how the MPAA was formed leads into a discussion of how nudity changed cinematic culture through the decades. It culminates in a discussion of “what are nude scenes like in the age of the #Metoo movement?”

Danny Wolf, director of Skin: A History Of Nudity In The Movies , took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about the film.

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman August 11th,...

Skin: A History Of Nudity In The Movies , Available On Demand August 18th, explores the history of nudity in film, beginning with the silent movie era through present day. The film features revealing interviews with actors including Pam Grier and Malcolm McDowellas well as directors Peter Bogdanovich, Kevin Smithand Amy Heckerling. Check out this trailer:

A definitive documentary on the history of nudity in the movies, beginning with the silent movie era through present day, examining the changes in morality that led to the use of nudity in films while emphasizing the political, sociological and artistic changes that shaped this rich history.

Skin: A History Of Nudity In The Movies delves into the gender bias concerning nudity in motion pictures and will follow the revolution that has pushed for gender equality in feature films today. A deep discussion of pre-code Hollywood and its amoral roots, the censorship that...

Today sees the DVD release of The Intruder, a new film in which Dennis Quaid plays the ex-owner of a house who doesn’t take too kindly to the new owners when he is forced to sell it. The psychological thriller was directed by Deon Taylor and written by David Loughery and gives Quaid the opportunity to terrify audiences with an intensity which marked out much of his best work. To that end Cai Ross looks back at some of his greatest roles.

For about 20 years, Dennis Quaid was Hollywood’s nearly-man. Following a break-out performance in Peter Yates’s wonderful cycling drama Breaking Away in 1979, it seemed that the world might just have found its new James Dean. Impressive performances in Walter Hill’s familial Western The Long Riders (alongside elder sibling Randy and a host of Keach and Carradine brothers) and Philip Kaufman’s epic space drama The Right Stuff,...

Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday.

This week’s question: What is the worst movie remake ever made?

“Beauty and the Beast” (2017)

Mike McGranaghan (@AisleSeat), The Aisle Seat, Ranker

It was a massive hit and got mostly good reviews from other critics, so maybe this is just a personal thing, but I’d have to choose Disney’s live-action “Beauty and the Beast” remake. They took a beautiful, meaningful story and turned it into a big, dumb, overblown, soulless, CGI-heavy bore. Actually, I hate all the Disney live-action remakes. They’re just inferior versions of movies that were virtually perfect. Disney has always been way too willing to cannibalize itself. These films take that unappealing tendency to a new low. The “Beauty and the Beast” remake is the worst of a bad lot.

“Breathless” (1983)

Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow), The...

Entry to Daisyland isn't open until next year on BlackBoxTV, but you can still enjoy a ride or two while watching the teaser trailer that dropped online. Also in today's Horror Highlights: Blood Paradise acquisition news, production details for Nefarious, and The House That Never Dies: Reawakening digital and DVD release details.

Welcome to Daisyland Release Details: "The teaser trailer for the highly anticipated horror anthology series Welcome To Daisyland premiered today on BlackBoxTV, a YouTube channel dedicated to short horror films and series.

The brand new anthology horror anthology series will be launched on 1.1.19. and Directed by award-winning filmmaker Tony E. Valenzuela and soundtrack will feature music from hard rock band The Dead Daisies.

---------

Artsploitation Films Acquires North American Rights to Blood Paradise: Press Release: "Aspect Ratio today announces the sale of Blood Paradise, the Swedish horror-comedy from producer-director provocateurs Andréa Winter and Patrick von Barkenberg, to Artsploitation Films.

Every Friday, we’re recommending an older movie that’s available to stream or download and worth seeing again through the lens of our current moment. We’re calling the series “Revisiting Hours” — consider this Rolling Stone’s unofficial film club. This week: Craig Lindsey on the Chuck Barris “biopic” Confessions of a Dangerous Man.

So, there’s this guy, and he spends most of his youth knocking back drinks, getting into barfights and, of course, trying to get laid. As he gets older and more established, this guy, still...

Exclusive: Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion who recently was pardoned by President Donald Trump from his conviction for violating the Mann Act in 1910 at the height of the Jim Crow era, has suddenly become a prized film property. Reinaldo Marcus Green, who wrote and directed the Sundance film Monsters and Men, will helm The Big Blow, which Oren Moverman adapted from a Joe Landsdale novella that is inspired by Johnson’s own story. Giannina Scott and Ridley Scott are producing at Scott Free.

This comes just after Sylvester Stallone launched Balboa Productions with plans to start the shingle off partnered with MGM on a biopic of Johnson, whose story was told on screen in a slightly fictionalized form in the 1970 film The Great White Hope.

The Big Blow is set against the backdrop of a giant hurricane that flattened Galveston, Texas in 1900. Local black champion Little Arthur...

Current Berlin director Dieter Kosslick will step down next year.

Torsten Neumann, co-founder and director of the Oldenburg International Film Festival since 1994, has become the latest name to be connected with the ongoing quest for a successor to Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick from May 2019.

Neumann, who is currently planning the 25th anniversary edition of his festival for this September, has hosted such international guests as Nicolas Cage, Mira Sorvino, Jim McBride, Matthew Modine, Alexandre Rockwell and Lou Diamond Phillips as well as leading lights from the local German industry – from Nicolette Krebitz through Jürgen Vogel and Oskar Roehler to Corinna Harfouch...

John Goodman shockingly never won an Emmy for his role as working-class father Dan Conner in “Roseanne” despite competing seven consecutive times as Best Comedy Actor for the ABC sitcom (1989-1995). He did eventually win as Best Drama Guest Actor in 2007 for “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” but now he could finally cash in that “Roseanne” Emmy I.O.U. with the upcoming series revival, premiering on Tuesday, March 27. But Goodman hasn’t only made a name for himself on TV. In honor of his return to the small screen, let’s take a look back at some of his best big-screen performances. Tour through our photo gallery above of Goodman’s 20 greatest films, ranked from worst to best.

Surprisingly (and criminally), not one of these roles brought Goodman an Oscar nomination. He did compete at the Golden Globes as Best Supporting Actor for “Barton Fink” (1991), but the academy...

Director Jim McBride puts retro magic into a rock ‘n’ roll bio about a big talent who was probably more fun on stage than in person. Dennis Quaid hits the right note of insanity for his portrayal of Jerry Lee Lewis’s rise to fame and fortune. Winona Ryder’s hilarious, almost scary bobby-sox Lolita becomes Jerry’s girl bride. Everything’s ducky until the real-life story goes sour, leaving the comic characterizations high and dry.

Great Balls of Fire!

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1989 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 108 min. / Street Date February 27, 2018 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98

Starring: Dennis Quaid, Winona Ryder, John Doe, Stephen Tobolowsky, Trey Wilson, Alec Baldwin, Steve Allen, Jimmie Vaughan, Lisa Blount, Lisa Jane Persky, Peter Cook, Joe Bob Briggs.

Cinematography: Affonso Beato

Film Editor: Lisa Day, Pembroke Herring, Bert Lovitt

Production Design: David Nichols

Written by Jim McBride & Jack Baran, from a book by Myra Lewis...

Above: French poster for Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin, France, 1961). Design by Raymond Gid.There is an essential and vital film series opening today at Film Forum in New York: a survey of 1960s Cinema Verité productions which brings vividly to life a decade of instability and protest as well as a new era of introspection. While this survey of posters doesn’t give a complete look at the series—“more than 50 modern classics which not only changed the recording of social history, but revolutionized filmmaking itself”—since many of the films are not feature-length (some of the shows pair an hour long film with a 30 minute short) and thus were not theatrically released. But those that I’ve gathered do convey the urgency of the movement as well as its seat-of-the-pants guerrilla style of film marketing as much as film making.I’ve not included the...

Daniel Talbot, a distributor and exhibitor of enormous influence over specialized exhibition and distribution as well as the international film world, died Friday in Manhattan. He was 91. A memorial was held Sunday, December 31 at the Riverside Memorial Chapel with a capacity audience including many leading New York specialized players. Talbot’s wife and business partner, Toby Talbot, as well as daughters Nina, Emily and Sara attended the memorial, where the family spoke fondly about Talbot’s love for the comedian W.C. Fields.

Another more public post-holiday event marking the closing of the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas is scheduled on January 28 in New York. The last few weeks have seen Talbot’s legacy celebrated with reaction to the unexpected announcement that the six-screen Upper West Side theater would close at the end of January, at the expiration of its lease. Milstein Properties, who have been the Talbots’ co-partners in the theater since...

In 1983, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, along with Media Study/Buffalo, created a touring retrospective of avant-garde films, primarily feature-length ones and a few shorts, which they called “The American New Wave 1958-1967.” To accompany the tour, a hefty catalog was produced that included notes on the films, essays by film historians and critics, writings by major underground film figures and more.

The retrospective was created at a time when financially viable independent filmmaking was on the rise, such as films made by John Sayles, Wayne Wang and Susan Seidelman. According to the co-curators of the retrospective, Melinda Ward and Bruce Jenkins, the objective of the tour was to:

provide a more adequate picture than conventional history affords us of a rare period of American cinematic invention and thereby prepare a coherent critical and historical context for the reception of the new work by the current generation of independent filmmakers.

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There may be more squinting these days on the streets of Hollywood. To mark its 18th birthday, MrSkin.com, the web's top repository of mainstream screen nudity, erected a billboard July 30 at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue featuring screenshots from all 43,412 female nude scenes on its servers.

"We launched on Aug. 10, 1999 — we're joking that we're finally legal," says Mr. Skin himself, CEO Jim McBride, a 54-year-old father of three from Chicago. The site, which sees 9 million uniques per month and costs $72 a year for full access, hit the big...

Twenty years ago, Cheryl Dunye made history as the first African-American lesbian to direct a feature-length film. Now that film, The Watermelon Woman, has finally been given a proper DVD release, courtesy of First Run Features. To mark the occasion, we spoke on the phone with Dunye about the film, history, performance, and authenticity.

The Film Stage: Both The Watermelon Woman and the short that’s included on the new DVD, Black Is Blue, express a high level of commitment and detail in the recreation of documentary form. What documentaries and / or mockumentaries influenced you?

Cheryl Dunye: I’ve been working in this practice since the late ‘80s. I went to Rutgers and had a studio practice there, got my Mfa, and that’s where I discovered what was becoming the queer film world. There was a lack of identity, representation — in the work that was being seen — by,...

Quentin Tarantino loved Jim McBride’s remake of Godard’s seminal new wave film, even though it recalls the glossy facades of star Richard Gere’s American Gigolo more than the gritty black and white of that French director’s kinetic masterpiece. The plot is more Tarantianian than Godard as well, with Gere as a casual thief obsessed with comic books and rock ’n roll. Valerie Kaprisky is his scrumptious partner in crime and Richard Kline (The Fury) provided the sumptuous photography.

Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Film Forum

Cinema’s holy trinity — Ed Wood (technically Burton-Wood), Malick, and Chaplin — have two-for-one double-billings this weekend.

Howards End continues its run.

Museum of the Moving Image

“See It Big! The 70mm Show” concludes with Kenneth Branagh‘s Hamlet and Inherent Vice.

If you missed it in theaters, see the great Kaili Blues when...

Since any New York cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.

Metrograph

“Welcome to Metrograph: A to Z” has a packed weekend with a slate that includes Alain Resnais‘ Je t’aime, je t’aime, Nicholas Ray‘s The Lusty Men, Jackie Brown, and, yes, Jackass 3D.

Baumbach & Paltrow‘s De Palma plays with a Jim McBride feature on Saturday and two De Palma shorts on Sunday.

Today the estimable Shout Factory releases the 1983 Jim McBride film "Breathless" on Blu Ray. It stars Richard Gere and Valerie Kaprisky in a loose-limbed lovers-on-the-run story, features a pretty groovy soundtrack comprising Jerry Lee Lewis, Mink De Ville and Sam Cooke songs along with a rather insistently overused Philip Glass track, and you can even catch a glimpse of Richard Gere's peen if that's your thing. But none of that is the reason that "Breathless" is the curio that it is —it's because the film has the sheer gall to be a Hollywood remake of the groundbreaking 1960 Nouvelle Vague film by Jean-Luc Godard that we talk about it at all. Of course, remakes are mounted all the time. But a relatively unknown director (as McBride was) taking on the work of a monolithically accepted "auteur" is a little more unusual. And sometimes the reverse occurs, when a widely acclaimed...

Breathless is not playing at this year’s Classic French Film Festival, but St. Louis classic French film fans get to see it on the big screen anyway! It’s part of the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum’s series A Critical Eye: Avant-Garde Cinema of the 1960s and is screening this Tuesday night (March 24th) at the Tivoli (6350 Delmar Blvd. University City, Mo). The show starts at 7pm. Admission is Free!

Breathless was remade in 1983 with Richard Gere and Valerie Kaprisky (remember her? Me neither). The remake, directed by Jim McBride, is excellent but has been hard to see in recent years. It will be available on Blu-ray on April 7th, which means this is a perfect time to take in the original to compare and contrast.

The part that Jean Luc-Godard played in The French New Wave was tremendous. Breathless (1960), with its innovative jump-cuts, catapulted Godard into international fame.

An iconoclast in the worlds of independent film and journalism who embodied — and celibrated — Texas individualism, Carson died October 20 in Dallas following a long battle with osteoporosis and other illnesses. He was 73.

A Dallas native whose career took him to Austin, Houston, New York, Los Angeles and many places far afield and in between, Lewis Minor Carson was best known as co-author with Sam Shepard of the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas (Carson’s official credit was for “adaptation”), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984. Known universally as Kit, after his Texas Ranger grandfather, he is credited with helping create the”mockumentary” genre for writing and playing the title role in David Holtzman’s Diary, the Jim McBride film about a navel-gazer who decides to film every moment of his unmomentous life. The 1967 film anticipated such disparate touchstones as the film This Is Spinal Tap and the...

L.M. Kit Carson, the eclectic, fiercely independent Texas filmmaker best known for starring in the ahead-of-its-time cinéma vérité satire David Holzman's Diary, shaping the narrative arc of Paris, Texas, and helping launch the career of Wes Anderson, died Monday after a lengthy illness, his son Hunter announced on Facebook. He was 73. Born in Irving, Texas in 1941, Carson had a scattered youth: He spent six months in a Jesuit monastery and flitted in and out of various colleges before settling in New York to pursue a freelance work in magazine writing. In 1967 he teamed up with Jim McBride to star in the experimental,...

I knew him well over the years, hanging with him in L.A. or at various film festivals from Sundance to Vail. Carson was an energetic, enthusiastic, generous, eager, curious man always in pursuit of the new. He embraced life, people, movies, and new technology--he was shooting films on smart phones before anyone else I knew. In these last few years he was enjoying accepting tribute kudos at various fests around the world, and was globe-trotting with his wife and producing partner Cynthia Hargrave to shoot Nokia flicks for his multi-platform 12-episode digital documentary series "Africa Diary" for The Sundance Channel. Carson made his name starring as a narcissistic filmmaker in the classic 1968 mockumentary "David Holzman’s Diary," which he co-wrote with his long-time collaborator, director Jim McBride ("Breathless"), which producer Ted Hope recently wrote about here. A recent Q & A with Carson is here. In recent...

Actor, producer, screenwriter and director L.M. Kit Carson has passed away at the age of 73. Carson co-wrote and starred in David Holzman's Diary (1967), a landmark critique of cinema vérité. He'd team up with director Jim McBride again on a remake of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless in 1983 that starred Richard Gere and Valérie Kaprisky. He also helped complete the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), which starred his son, Hunter Carson, whose mother is the late Karen Black. Carson's 1971 documentary The American Dreamer chronicled the making of Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie. And Carson was instrumental in the making of Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket (1996). » - David Hudson...

Actor, producer, screenwriter and director L.M. Kit Carson has passed away at the age of 73. Carson co-wrote and starred in David Holzman's Diary (1967), a landmark critique of cinema vérité. He'd team up with director Jim McBride again on a remake of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless in 1983 that starred Richard Gere and Valérie Kaprisky. He also helped complete the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), which starred his son, Hunter Carson, whose mother is the late Karen Black. Carson's 1971 documentary The American Dreamer chronicled the making of Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie. And Carson was instrumental in the making of Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket (1996). » - David Hudson...

Film-makers have tried sex, murder and intrigue, and yet that most intellectual of spectator sports remains remarkably difficult to depict on screen

• Peter Bradshaw's review of Computer Chess

• Computer Chess: watch the trailer

Throw a rock at the sports genre and you'll hit a film about baseball or football, or hockey, or racing. Odds are, you won't strike a film about chess. Chess isn't generally considered a stadium filler (although it can be). It's perceived as a game for eccentric intellectuals and elderly historians. It doesn't have the glamour or sex appeal of more sedentary sports, such as pool, as demonstrated by Paul Newman in The Hustler. Chess won't even fit snugly in to other genre films, where the banality of cards, for example, naturally lends itself to a seedy, gambling gangster underworld (Rounders), the exotic highlife of a casino (Casino Royale), or even more piquant, a combo...

How many filmmakers can you think of that have their own verb? “Lynchian” is a part of even the most casual cinephile, though it’s often used erroneously. All too often, anything a little out of the ordinary, with a vague sense of the uncanny, earns the term. Looking back at the man’s filmography, however, it’s clear that there’s much more to Lynch’s work than mere eccentricity, especially given that he’s made films that don’t easily fit into common ideas about what it is for a film or a work of art to even be “Lynchian.” Beyond that, Lynch himself is such a singular presence beyond his films – as a thinker, a writer, and even as a musician – that attempts to Xerox his work are doubly pointless. As it’s David Lynch month here at the site, we decided to poll our writers on their favorite Lynch movies,...

I always felt an icky attraction-repulsion, more slanted towards repulsion, for Liliana Cavani's most celebrated film, The Night Porter. But thinking about it now, I have to give her credit for boldly delving into the psychology of the persecutor-victim relationship in a way that no previous filmmaker quite had.

If that movie still makes me uncomfortable, I was nevertheless instantly psyched to see I cannibali (The Cannibals, 1970), a sci-fi hippy version of Antigone starring Britt Ekland. Maybe I'm shallow.

(Hippy science fiction movies go all the way from the super-respectable and respect-worthy 2001 at one extreme, past Silent Running somewhere in the middle, all the way to Jim McBride's 1971 post-atomic Adam and Eve story Glen and Randa. It's a sub-genre that can get a bit embarrassing, what with Bruce Dern lecturing us about "the simple beauty of a leaf" and all, but having been entered the world in 1967 maybe...

Looking back at 2012 on what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2012—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2012 to create a unique double feature.

All the contributors were asked to write a paragraph explaining their 2012 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch in that perfect world we know doesn't exist but can keep dreaming of every time we go to the movies.

How would you program some...

During these past days in the hallowed palaces of culture on the Upper West Side the 50th New York Film Festival has barreled forward with many a sold-out screening, transmedia panel and glitzy gala gathering. Meanwhile in Brooklyn... workers and shoppers stream in and out of the Atlantic Terminal, oblivious to their neighbors at the Brooklyn Academy of Music who have seen the signs, heard the warnings and are taking precautions for the coming Apocalypse... ...And what better way to prepare then throw an Apocalypse themed film series? Running from October 4th - 7th, Apocalypse Soon hopes to save your life with 5 how-to-survive scenarios played out on film. "Post Apocalypse Road Tripping 101" is the first lesson, and your instructors are Jim McBride's own...

Cheery film has great music but treatment of rock'n'roll singer's union with his young cousin makes for queasy viewing

Director: Jim McBride

Entertainment grade: D–

History grade: C+

Jerry Lee Lewis broke through as a rock'n'roll musician in the late 1950s. His career foundered after he bigamously married Myra Gale Brown, his first cousin once removed, when she was just 13 years old.

Romance

In 1956, the 21-year-old Lewis moves in with his cousin Jw Brown in Memphis, Tennessee. Immediately, he clocks Brown's 12-year-old daughter, Myra Gale. It's not great for a 21-year-old to be macking on a 12-year-old, but the fact that the film casts Dennis Quaid, then 35 but looking raddled thanks to a bad peroxide job, opposite Winona Ryder, then 18 but looking much younger, makes it seem even worse. Quaid's performance is fine – the real Jerry Lee Lewis and the real Myra Gale Brown both found it convincing – but he...

As a teenager in the U.K., I grew up reading the reviews of film critic Mark Kermode, whose smart and opinionated engagement with contemporary cinema rapidly won him a following and led to him becoming a familiar presence on TV and radio arts programs. Kermode is now one of the most passionate and prominent voices in (populist) film criticism — his slot on Simon Mayo’s BBC Five Live radio show has been a very successful podcast on iTunes for some years — and he has used his position as a figure of influence to champion films and directors that his listeners/viewers/readers might not otherwise be aware of. Recently, Gareth Evans’ The Raid: Redemption was a movie he gave special attention; those long familiar with Kermode will know all about his obsession with The Exorcist, a film he used to (and still may) claim was unquestionably the greatest film of all time.

Renowned British film critic Mark Kermode today launches an intriguing new online film club concept on his blog over at the BBC's website. Inspired by questions about the relevance of film festivals for the general public and the dying art of film introductions, Kermode endeavours to re-introduce a little bit of community into the film-watching experience in these days of home cinema. He will choose a film and then record a video introduction for participants to watch before they enjoy their own private screening. He then invites his audience to share their thoughts on his blog to feed a future discussion.For the inaugural film, Kermode's choice is predictably off-kilter: Jim McBride's 1983 re-make of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, starring Richard Gere and Valerie Kaprisky. It is...

(The purpose of Milestone Films’ ‘Project Shirley’ is to re-introduce the best available prints of Shirley Clarke’s work to audiences across the world. The Connection opens in NYC at the IFC Center on Friday, May 4, 2012. Visit the Milestone website to learn more.)

Usually when you watch a once-banned film decades after the fact, it leads to a deflated feeling that the film wasn’t ban-worthy at all, that it wasn’t ever close to being “dangerous.” But when one of those films is also widely deemed a classic by trusted sources? Well, that just about guarantees it’s going to land with a big, whopping letdown of a thud. So here comes a restoration of Shirley Clarke’s 1962 feature, The Connection, a film that 1) was banned upon its initial release, and 2) is considered to be a landmark achievement in American independent cinema. With a double-expectation like that, there’s no way it can deliver,...

James Franco's ongoing experimentation with the limits of his own celebrity are like little else popular culture has produced of late. While his hijinks within academia and beyond are well documented (he's working on a Film Mfa at Nyu and an English PhD from Yale, while being a movie star, reediting "My Own Private Idaho," writing essays for N+1 and occasionally doing some performance art with Laurel Nakadate), they come to a startling head in his "Francophrenia (Or: Don't Kill Me, I Know Where The Baby Is)," a daringly oddball collaboration with lauded documentarian Ian Olds, whose "The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi" was a hit in Rotterdam in 2009.

Lensed over the course of a seemingly one night shoot, the film essentially follows Franco around the set of ABC's "General Hospital" as he leers at people, engages in mind numbing conversations, watches as mediocrity begets more mediocrity (what...

[1] Hello. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jordan Hoffman and I'm an old man. Well, not That old, but, let's just say that for me the phrase “VHS or Beta?” was more than just an indie band, it was an actual decision. After film school I worked in the development offices of a New York-based production company for a few years, then did some solid Web 1.0 work at About.com. Then I made two independent films, both of which are good, neither of which made me any money. Eventually I got back into the writing game, working at Hearst's Ugo.com for over four years and now I'm having a blast reviewing and writing about film for a number of different publications. The fine folk here at /Film have allowed me this weekly column to put on my bifocals, peer into the rich history of cinema and make...

Too bad the critical symposium in the new, Winter 2012 issue of Cineaste isn't online. Participants evidently include Gianni Amelio, Olivier Assayas, Costa-Gavras, Robert Greenwald, and Sally Potter, "among others," but until we get our hands on the print edition, we'll have to make do with what is online, which, after all, is plenty: Patrick Z McGavin on Dave Kehr's When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade, Richard James Havis on Kyung Hyun Kim's Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era, Andrew Horton on New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History and Henry K Miller on Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema and The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. And that's just the book reviews.

Besides the interviews with Mona Achache and Charlotte Rampling and festival reports (Locarno, Toronto and Montreal), the 15 reviews include David Sterritt on Kubrick's The Killing (1956), Joseph Luzzi on Raffaello Matarazzo,...

“Okay. This is, um… This is the story… This is very important. This is a fairy tale. This is, uh… Please pay attention.” So begins David Holzman’s Diary, a 1967 “documentary” about a young New Yorker who wants to turn his life into a film but hasn’t really thought about what shape the film should take or considered the cost of living on camera. Directed by Jim McBride and starring L.M. Kit Carson (who helped shape the film), Diary plays it straight until the closing credits, no doubt fooling viewers used to ’60s student and experimental films ...

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV

Rating (out of five): ***1/2

Until I watched Kino’s new DVD special edition of David Holzman's Diary, I was only familiar with its significance as a hatch-mark on a film history timeline. Diary is often cited as one of the earliest mockumentaries, prefiguring (among others) Christopher Guest’s skewering of self-serious musicians, dog show denizens, community theater actors, etc.

In this case, director Jim McBride aims his satirical guns at a particular type of pseudo-intellectual, the eponymous Holzman (L.M. Kit Carson, who co-wrote the film with McBride). Holzman is a recently unemployed cinema obsessive who decides to film himself over the course of a week in July 1967. He cites Godard’s oft-repeated axiom that “film is truth 24 frames per second” as his mantra. As the film unfolds, it becomes abundantly clear that Holzman is a budding sociopath, documenting his own devolution. Holzman makes for insufferable company,...